Swim Smooth

Kids are not as physically strong as adults and don’t have the option of muscling their way through the water; instead they must use a good stroke technique — and high levels of aerobic fitness — to propel themselves quickly forwards. The fact that someone so small with very little strength can swim so quickly shows you what amazing potential each of us has in the water if we too can develop these areas of our swimming.

This might be a key advantage that our 11-year-old swimmer has over you: she swims without inhibition or self-imposed limitation. She doesn’t over-analyze, she’s not self-conscious and she doesn’t doubt herself. She looks forward to getting out of school, jumping in the water and having fun.

Fitness from other sports rarely carries over very well to swimming, and developing your aerobic fitness in the water will make a huge difference to your comfort and speed in the water.

Freestyle is unique in that the swimmer has their face in the water for most of the stroke before rotating to the side to breathe very low to the surface. Breathing is a challenge when learning freestyle and the struggle to get enough air, without taking on water, is a dominant feature of many beginners’ experience.

A “torpedo push-off” or “streamline” is a position adopted by swimmers as they push off from the wall. This position has a very low level of drag, lower than when swimming normally. The quickest way to swim is to push off the wall and hold this streamlined position until the speed drops to normal swimming speed and then “break-out” into full stroke. The length of this push-off is normally around 5m but some elite swimmers can hold the position up to 15m and accompany it with a powerful kick.

Working on your stroke technique is not just something for swimmers new to freestyle; every swimmer of any ability level should regularly work on their stroke — it’s a never-ending pursuit. Nearly all swimmers have areas of their technique they could improve on significantly which would make their stroke more efficient, relaxed, faster or offer better endurance. Even an Olympic champion with a fantastic stroke will still spend a significant portion of their weekly training maintaining and reinforcing their technique; without doing so their performances could easily drop off.

A scissor kick where the legs part excessively creating a lot of drag is triggered by a loss of balance from crossing the center line with the lead hand in front of the head (the cause). By removing the crossover you will fix the scissor kick, without ever thinking about the kick itself.

Good breathing technique is much more challenging in freestyle than the other strokes because the head is in the water at all times and the swimmer must keep their head low and breathe out to the side very near the surface.

Holding your breath underwater will cause a build-up of CO2 in your lungs and blood stream and make your swimming feel tense.

For all swimmers it’s important to constantly exhale whenever you are face down in the water. This rids your lungs and bloodstream of CO2 and means that when you do rotate to breathe you have more time to inhale as you don’t have to exhale first. It also helps to improve your body position as too much buoyancy in the chest lifts your front end up and puts downward pressure on the legs.

If you’ve done any yoga you’ll intuitively understand the relationship between breathing technique and relaxation. If you hold your breath you automatically become tense — please never do this when swimming. Instead focus on exhaling into the water with a long constant stream of bubbles.

For those who normally only breathe to one side, don’t be surprised if you notice that you are suddenly able to go from breathing every 2 strokes to breathing every 4 strokes and feel more comfortable doing so. Sometimes breathing every 2 strokes does not physically give you enough time to exhale properly especially if you have a naturally high stroke rate.

Traditionally swimmers were taught to hold their breath as it increases the level of buoyancy in the chest. This is certainly true but most swimmers already have plenty of buoyancy in the upper body, it is in the legs where it is lacking, especially if you are a triathlete with muscular legs. By smoothly exhaling into the water and removing excess buoyancy in the chest, we can counteract this and get your legs higher in the water.

Keep one google under the water as you breathe and you will see the split screen view.

Have you ever wondered why elite sprinters breathe so infrequently during a 50m or 100m freestyle race? Even at the pointy end of the field a swimmer’s balance and alignment in the water can be thrown off by turning to take a breath, which can make the difference between first and last place in close race.

Breathing just to one side is the leading cause of a lopsided stroke, creating issues such as snaking and scissor kicks.

Perhaps you’re thinking: “this is all very well but I just can’t hold my breath for 3 strokes.” But right there lies the problem — you should never hold your breath when you swim. If you hold your breath the CO2 builds up in your lungs and bloodstream and you start to feel very desperate for air. Rid yourself of that CO2 and bilateral breathing becomes a whole lot more achievable.

With good breathing timing, the head slightly leads body rotation.

A swimmer with low-lying legs in the water creates a huge amount of drag, slowing them down dramatically.

The most common causes of a poor body position:

Holding your breath underwater.
A high-lifting head when breathing.
Looking too far forward in the water.
Kicking from the knee.
Scissor kick: normally caused by a crossover of the lead arm in front of the head. This causes a loss of balance and with it an involuntary scissoring of the legs to avoid toppling onto your back.
Dorsi flexed ankles: poor ankle flexibility harms the simmer’s ability to point their toes. The resultant drag causes the legs to drop down.
Under kicking: swimmers who are focusing on making their strokes very long often try a 2-beat kick to reduce effort. For many swimmers with poor natural buoyancy or poor ankle flexibility this does not produce enough lift and their legs sink downward.
Poor core stabilization: if you flex through your midsection and aren’t sure how to engage your core muscles to hold your backside and legs high then your legs will likely sink.
Pressing down on the water during the catch.
Poor hip flexibility.

Many coaches encourages all swimmers to push their heads down low into the water to help bring their legs upwards, this can be effective for a proportion of swimmers but very bad advice for others. At Swim Smooth we suggest you treat a low head position as a last resort, only using it to improve your body position if all else fails. This is because a very low head position has several disadvantages:

It reduces your “body awareness”, in front of the head, making the development of a good hand entry and catch harder.
It makes it hard to see forwards in open water.
It bends your spine forward and thus harm your swimming posture, making crossovers in front of the head more likely.

You can choose from a range of head positions as you swim depending upon your individual stroke correction needs.

Head technique is a very individual area of stroke technique, something that works for one swimmer will not necessarily work for another.

The easiest way to check your body position is to ask a coach or friend to check if your heels are lightly breaking the surface as your swim.

Some swimmers will kick their feet completely out of the water. While this may appear to be very propulsive the reverse is actually true and this action can create a huge amount additional drag and wasted effort.

For most swimmers, Swim Smooth recommends using a light flutter kick to keep your legs high in the water. This is called a 6-beat kick by swim coaches. If you kick with a nice continuous flutter then you will naturally fall into a 6-beat pattern without too much conscious thought on your behalf.

For most swimmers, the main purpose of the kick is to balance and bring up the legs as high as possible, with minimum effort on your behalf, it is not to generate propulsion as such.

Elite swimmers with a powerful 6-beat kick generate only around 10-15% of their propulsion with their legs, the other 85-90% being generated with their arm stroke.

Kicking from the hip with a relaxed straight leg is a much better swimming technique. It takes less energy and keeps the body high in the water resulting in much lower levels of drag.

An important part of a good kicking technique is to turn your feet inwards slightly so that the big toes brush against each other as they pass. Many who struggle with their kicking do the opposite and turn their toes outwards. This creates drag and reduces the lift created by the kick.

A scissor kick adds a huge amount of drag, it’s like opening up a parachute behind you.

70% of swimmers who attend a Swim Smooth Clinic have a scissor kick in their stroke.

Great 2-beat leg kick is poetry in motion and while it looks simple is deceptively difficult to master.

The good news here is that you do not need to be physically strong to swim well, this is one reason why that 11-year-old girl can go zooming past you with very little upper-body strength.

The key to developing your lower core control is to feel a stretch between your pelvis and rib cage as you swim. In a sense you are trying to separate out the 2 as much as possible, raising the chest away from the hips.

Body rotation (body roll) is the rotation of the swimmer along the axis of the spine as they swim. A good freestyle stroke has between 45-60 degrees of rotation to each side on every stroke, not just when they breathe. This helps the swimmer use the large muscle groups of the core, back and chest to help drive the stroke. A swimmer with poor rotation tends to overuse the small weak shoulder muscles, which soon fatigue.

It should be stressed that when the body rotates with each stroke the head should stay stationary and not move with the rotation of the shoulders (with the exception of rotating to breathe). It is very common to see people move their head around on every stroke when they’re trying to develop their rotation but this adds drag and may cause dizziness or even nausea.

All swimmers rotate a little more on a breathing stroke than a normal stroke. You do this subconsciously to ensure that you get your head in a good position to breathe. However, over time if you only ever breathe to one side then we’ll see your rotation become good to that side but poor to the other.

In full-stroke freestyle swimming you should avoid rotating to 90 degrees at all cost as it will cause you to lose balance and want to topple onto your back.

Good rotation also serves several other purposes:

It allows the recovering arms to travel freely over the surface of the water.
It reduces the load on the shoulders, lowering the chances of shoulder injury.
A rotated body cuts through the water more cleanly, producing less drag than a flat profile.
It helps the large muscles of the core, chest and back drive the arm stroke, increasing propulsive power.

If you struggle with an awkward recovery over the water, work on improving your body roll and your recovery will also improve and take some load off your shoulders.

Avoid a thumb-first entry, it is very bad for your shoulders and after entering the water your hand will tend to slice down in the water instead of engaging with it for the catch to follow.

As your hands enter the water and extends forwards it should be perfectly in line with your shoulder. This keeps you tracking straight and sets you up for a good catch as you start the following stroke. This sounds simple but in reality very few beginner and intermediate level swimmers have a good alignment in the water; most cross over the center line to a greater or lesser extent as their hands enter and extend.

Don’t underestimate the damage a crossover does to your swimming. Ask a friend to check if you are crossing over the center line, even momentarily. If you do you should make fixing it an immediate priority.

Problems that occur during the catch normally involve the swimmer pushing downward on the water, or sometimes to the side or even forward. Pushing downward on the water during the catch does not create any propulsion, instead it simply lifts the front end of the body upwards and sinks the legs.

The reason a high elbow technique is important is that it helps you press the water in the right direction — backwards — so that you are propelled forwards. It allows you to do this not only with the hand but your forearm too. This use of the forearm is important as it increases the surface area that you are using as a paddle in the water.

The key point with this exercise is to show you how a good catching position on the water allows you to use larger more powerful muscle groups. This makes it easy to generate the forces required during the catch. So easy in fact when they start to get this right swimmers either pull too hard and overpower the catch or it feels too easy and they think it cannot be correct — surely a good catch should feel solid and hard? Actually a good catch is a relatively light connection with the water and should not feel overly forceful or hurried.

A poor catch and pull-through presses down on the water or shows the palm forwards to push against the flow. Since water is so dense you will feel a significant pressure on the palm of your hand as you do this and it is quite possible you are misinterpreting that pressure as a good catch.

A good catch should allow you to feel a firm but not forced connection with the water.

The overall timing between an Overglider and an elite swimmer is similar but the elite swimmer does not actually pause as they extend forwards — they are constantly in motion either entering the water, extending forwards or catching the water. But introducing a dead spot to their stroke the Overglider is then forced to hurry their catch to restart their stroke again. This hurried catch makes it very hard to engage with the water without slipping through it. This is the main difference between an Overglider’s stroke and a Smooth’s stroke — other than the fact that the Smooth swims at twice the speed.

If you are an Overglider the path to improving your swimming is to remove the dead spot from your stroke by developing an improved catch technique. This will give you a more fluid stroke and will also lift your stroke rate slightly, giving your swimming a renewed sense of rhythm.

Fundamentally, the speed you move through the water is a combination of the length of your stroke and your stroke rate:

Swimming speed = stroke length x stroke rate.

At either extreme a swimmer becomes inefficient: with a low stroke rate you overglide and lose too much speed; increase stroke rate too high and you start to fight the water.

He paused for over a second at the front of the stroke and said he enjoyed this pause to glide as it was giving him a “rest.” Unfortunately this “rest” was causing him to decelerate to a near stop between strokes and so causing him to start to sink in the water. He was shocked when he saw just how badly this was affecting his body position — something he thought must have been OK from all the balance drills he had been working on.

As you fatigue you cannot sustain a good stroke technique, the stroke becomes shorter as you tire because you cannot finish the back of the stroke properly. This shorter stroke reduces your body roll and so the arms start to carry lower over the surface giving you that feeling of fighting the water or that your stroke is “falling apart.” For swimmers with poor fitness this deterioration in efficiency can happen very quickly after only 100-200m. To be an efficient swimmer you need to have good swim-specific fitness to sustain good stroke technique.

Over efficiently = drag profile x propulsive efficiency.

Low drag is very important because water is so dense, 800 times denser than air. We are looking to be as streamlined as possible. This means keeping all elements of your stroke as straight and aligned as possible and also keeping your body position (chest-hips-ankes) as horizontal and high in the water as possible.

Kicking from the knee rather than the hip is a key Arnie trait. This adds significant drag, lowering the legs in the water and burns large amounts of oxygen from overly utilizing the large quadriceps and hamstring muscle groups.

Arnie swim flat in the water and miss out on using their body rotation to help lengthen the stroke and help drive it. This style of swimming overuses the shoulder muscles, which partly explains why many Arnies have poor swimming endurance.

The lack of body rotation causes the arms to swing around the side of the Arnie with the momentum carrying the hand across the center line.

Bambinos normally hold their breath completely underwater, making things feel much more tense and anxious than they need to be. This is a contributing factor to a Bambino’s anxiety in the water.

A poor “feel for the water” where the arms slip through with very little purchase or propulsion.

One disadvantage of working so hard with the legs is that it uses a huge amount of oxygen in the body making many Kickstastics short of breath when they swim. Most are aware of this shortness of breath and assume that there’s something wrong with their fitness.

After the long glide phase, Overgliders literally have to kick-start their strokes with a large knee-driven kick.

Nearly all Smooths have a significant childhood swimming background, very few adults have been able to develop their strokes to this level without such a background.

The Smooth stroke style is certainly efficient but that does not make its “effortless” as many other swimmers might believe. A Smooth will tell you how hard they are actually working when they swim, it’s their huge control and technical ability that makes the stroke appear effortless from the outside. They have tremendous grace and poise but to do so they are using strength and control.

This is an important distinction to understand as many swimmers aspiring to the Smooth stroke style try and introduce the concept of “effortless swimming” into their own strokes, which results in a slow stroke with poor rhythm and timing — anything but efficient. Although Smooth can look as though they have a slow stroke rate this is an illusion brought about by the sheer speed at which they are moving relative their stroke rate.

Late breathing timing is a surprisingly common flaw seen in Smooths. This occurs where the rotation of the head to breathe is a little late, following after the rotation of the body when it should in fact be simultaneous. This reduces the time available to inhale and makes breathing feel quite hurried — work on fixing this and you’ll notice a major improvement in your level of relaxation.

In sport science this is a well proven fact and is known as the “specificity principle.” Training in other sports will have very little benefit for your swimming.

As soon as the phrase “race pace” is mentioned by a coach, swimmers act like a red rag to a bull, setting off way faster than they can sustain for the set.

Frequency will always trump volume, for example three 30-minute sessions per week will be more beneficial than one 90-minute session.

Getting used to accurately pacing yourself over progressively longer intervals is absolutely essential. In the heat of a squad session, pacing can go straight out of the window as swimmers try frantically to keep up with the person in front of them.

While it sounds simple to maintain a given swimming pace, in practice all sorts of things can affect how well you develop this skill, not least your competitive urge and the notion that a training session should feel hard from the first lap for you to maximize the benefit from it.

Over 90% of all endurance world records for running (track) and swimming (pool) have been achieved through perfectly even pacing or with a “negative split.” — i.e. finishing faster than you started. Pace judgment is an absolutely essential skill for great distance swimming.

In the pool you can easily monitor your swimming pace and your strokes per length to assess your consistency but in open water neither of these variables is easily measured. Elite open water swimmers do monitor one metric though to ensure some consistency and that his stroke rate — how many strokes they take per minute.

Probably the biggest single difference between an amateur and a professional endurance athlete is their ability to feel exactly what level of perceived exertion they are holding for a set distance. Every single session they do, elite swimmers are tuning themselves into what it feels like to hold a certain pace over a specific distance.

Dry-land training can be categorized into:

Flexibility and mobility.
Core stability and rehabilitation.
Strength training.

When it comes to swimming, a big limiting factor for many triathletes is a lack of flexibility. Poor flexibility can give rise to many stroke technique flaws including crossovers, dropped elbows and sinking legs.

Core stability became very popular in the mid to late 1990s together with an increasing interest in pilates, yoga and the combined “yogilates.” Core stability is the interaction of coordination and strength of the abdominal, back and glute muscles during activity to ensure that the spine is stabilized and provides a firm base to support both basic and powerful everyday movements of the arms and legs.

Shoulder pain and injury is very common amongst freestyle swimmers and is caused by repetitive stress placed on the shoulders during each arm stroke. At least 80% of adult swimmers will experience some form of shoulder pain in their swimming lives and such pain should be taken very seriously so that it does not lead to a full-blown injury and time out from swimming. In elite swimming circles shoulder injury was so common that it used to be considered a fact of swimming life, just something they had to live with.

Many swimmers who were taught to swim by the Red Cross in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were taught that body rotation along the long axis of the spine was a bad thing and a waste of effort. Conversely in the 90s there was a strong and concerted effort to encourage swimmers to rotate a full 90 degrees by “stacking their shoulders.”

To avoid shoulder injury, good body rotation between 45-60 degrees is essential on every stroke (not just when you are breathing) and aids the recovery phase of the freestyle stroke by allowing the arm to clear the surface of the water without excessive internal rotation of the shoulder.

Aim to do drill and technique work to the best of your ability, do not feel pressured to rush through this aspect of the session. A drill worth doing is a drill worth doing well.

When you exercise very lightly you use a larger portion of stored fat as your fuel source but as soon as intensity starts to lift above 70-75%, an ever greater share of your fuel source starts to come from carbohydrates.

Swimming well in the open water requires you to be proficient in:

Managing anxiety and the feelings of claustrophobia that can come from the “washing machine” effect at the start of a race.
Sighting and the ability to swim straight between marker buoys.
Drafting faster swimmers.
Turning and improving your speed around buoys.
Effective wetsuit swimming.
Strategies to adapt to a variety of open water conditions, both technically and psychologically.

The contrast is akin to road cycle on smooth flat asphalt, versus a technically challenging and hilly mountain bike trail.

Anxiety attacks in the open water are very common and can affect swimmers of any ability level, the only common denominator sometimes being the who have more vivid imagination.

During the anxiety of an open water swim start it is essential that you block out everything around you and focus just on yourself.

If you only remember one open water tip from this book, let it be to remember to exhale into water at the start of a race. Holding your breath is a sure-fire way to trigger a panic attack and potentially ruin your whole race.

In open water that crossover pulls you constantly off course. Crossovers are normally at their worst when breathing as your thoughts are simply about getting in air and you forget your stroke alignment, so it is no coincidence that most swimmers go off course when breathing.

Usually the reason swimmers start to feel starved of oxygen is due to the fact that they are not exhaling properly into the water between breaths.

The effect of swimming directly behind another swimmer is the reason why many swimmers prefer to swim in 2nd or 3rd place rather than lead the lane. It is significantly easier to swim behind another swimmer and the closer you can get to them the easier it will be.

Most swimmers are substantially faster in a wetsuit than without.

Getting into cold water is often more of a mental than a physical challenge.

When entering a lake do so slowly and pause when thigh deep to splash some cold water over your face 2 or 3 times.

Do not underestimate how potentially dangerous swimming in a very cold water can be.