Always distinguish working on your technique from training for fitness. You learn new techniques best when fresh and rested. Never nail technique work onto the end of a fitness-based session: you’ll be too tired to do the work properly.
Aim for a smooth stroke, your body rolling from side to side with each arm stroke, but always straight and level in the water. Breathing should be a seamless part of the side-to-side roll that comes with each arm stroke. Your legs kick in a rhythm that matches your arms.
The underwater part of each stroke begins slow and gets faster. Your hand accelerates, moving faster as you reach the end of the pull.
Stage 1: Entry
Your arm enters the water fingertips first, with the thumb side angled slightly downward. It goes in level with your shoulder (rather than your nose). Your hand then stretches forward, still off center, and turns so that it’s flat to the bottom of the pool.
Stage 2: Catch
Your arm begins to bend and your hand sweeps downward, with your elbow bent and staying high. At this point your body has rolled, so that the pulling side is slightly down and the other side slightly up. This stage of your stroke feels like a powered glide, maintaining your speed but not increasing it.
Stage 3: Pull
The pull is the stage that adds speed. Most swimmers pull in a slightly curved path. Their hand sweeps in from the line of their shoulder to just inside the outer line of their body, then out again to leave the water with their thumb brushing their hip or thigh. Other swimmers find that a feeling of pulling straight back works best (though the roll or their body means they don’t actually pull straight backward).
Stage 4: Recovery
Your elbow leaves the water before your hand, and leads the recovery. Leading with your hand rather than your elbow is a common mistake. It often causes the body to twist and kink, rather than keeping in a straight line. I’d important to relax your arm during the recovery, as this helps you swim smoothly.
Aim to kick from your hips. Keep your knees stiff (but not rigid) and your ankles relaxed.
Try to work flexibility exercises into your daily routine: always do them when a particular TV program starts or finishes, for example.
Always include stretching in your swimming sessions, both at the start and the finish.
Try to make sure your head stays as still as possible while you swim. One tip that will help you do this is: keep the top of your head in one spot.
As you swim along, look down at the bottom of the pool. Imagine that the top of your head has a dot on top of it, pointing straight at the end of the lane. To someone watching, the dot shouldn’t move much, or at all.
Most people naturally hold their body a little bit bent forward, so to be dead flat you have to slightly extend your chest, stomach and hips.
Imagine your chest (not your head) pressing down into the water.
Be careful not to confuse body roll (good) with twist (very bad). Your body should keep a straight-line shape as much as possible, but your torso spins around the imaginary straight line running from your head to your feet.
Don’t forget, though — you roll with every stroke, not only the ones when you take a breath.
You should see the world on its side: if it looks like normal, you have tilted your head up to breathe and compromised your streamlined position.
Twist to both sides has 2 common causes: trying too hard, and lack of flexibility.
To eliminate twist from your stroke, try to imagine your spine is part of an inflexible steel rod running down your body from head to toe. The rod can roll, but it can’t be bent.
You need to relax your hands and let your fingers drift slightly apart, while keeping in a natural, curved-forward position. This sets up turbulence between your fingers and improves your hold on the water.
Your pull is most powerful when your fingers are pointing straight down, and your hand is at 90 degrees to the bottom of the pool. Get your hand into this position as soon as possible, and stay in it for as long as possible.
Try a variation known as the zipper drill. As your arm recovers, pretend you’re undoing a zipper that runs from your hips to your armpit. Your thumb should never lose contact with your side.
Lots of people have difficulty with breathing while swimming freestyle. The root cause is usually problems elsewhere in their stroke: if you get your body position, arm stroke and leg kick right, breathing fits naturally into the rhythm of your swimming.
Aim for a smooth turn of the head; really no more than a slight addition to the roll of your body as you take a stroke.
Keep your neck at the same angle as usual: you’re aiming to turn your head to the side slightly, not to lift it from the water.
Make sure you have breathed out underwater before lifting your mouth clear of the surface. This gives you the opportunity to take on the maximum possible amount of oxygen.
Taking oxygen on board is what allows your muscles to keep working over time. Without it, they quickly build up lactic acid, which causes a burning sensation and forces you to stop within a couple of minutes.
Take all in-breaths smoothly: don’t gasp or snatch at your breath, just take a smooth, deep lungful of air.
Breathe out when your face is underwater, a steady release of bubbles that starts as soon as your face goes underwater. That way when you have a chance to take oxygen on board, you get the maximum possible amount.
Untrained swimmers almost always have a poor leg kick. This isn’t all that surprising. We tend to think that it’s just using the same muscles as we use for walking around. In fact, a freestyle leg kick requires a very specific technique, strength and fitness. Get this right, and many of the other pieces of your stroke quickly fall into place.
2-beat kick: This provides little or no propulsion, but uses very little energy. The 2-beat kick is used mainly by distance swimmers, who place a premium on endurance.
It can be tempting to make a big splash with your kick: it feels like you must be generating lots of speed. But you’re swimming in water, not air.
The terrible truth is that we rarely look as we imagine. As a result, most people’s swimming improves when they get a chance to watch themselves swim.
Make sure you’re forever blowing bubbles. Keep blowing a trickle of air from your nose all the way through the tumble turn, to stop water going up your nose.
In open-water events, your kick’s key job is to maintain your body position and balance your arm stroke, not to provide forward movement.
Aim not make small, neat kicks. If your feet sometimes cross, pointing your toes will help prevent this.
Bear in mind that triathlons are never won on the swim leg. To get a good overall performance you’ll need to balance 2 key elements: finishing position versus energy expended.