- Front crawl stroke, when done well, is a smooth and continuous movement that looks effortless. It's actually made up, though, of several components and to get to this stage, you gotta have them all working together and dialled in. - Well, we're going to be continuing to break down the stroke so that you can perfect and develop your front crawl and in today's video, we're gonna be addressing rotation. (soft pop music) - Don't rely purely on your arm strength to pull you through the water. You need to add in full body rotation. As much as having super flexible shoulders might allow you to have that range of movement that you need for swimming, you are gonna be losing out on some potential power as well as making yourself more vulnerable to injury. - So the rotation in front crawl should all happen around your longitudinal axis. Now what I mean by this is imagine a line going from the top of your head, through your nose, and straight down between your feet. So everything from your shoulders, your torso, your hips should all rotate around that axis. There's no movement from side to side. And what this does is it enables far more muscle groups to be engaged, particularly your back muscles. And this is gonna make your stroke far more powerful. (soft music) - The front crawl stroke can be broken into four phases. The catch, the pull, the exit, and the recovery. Now, rotation actually happens throughout all four of these and it's essential in order to have a smooth and efficient stroke. And actually you only spend a very small moment completely flat on your front cause when you're pulling with your right arm, for example, your left side will be up and vice versa. - Yeah, your hips, your torso, and your shoulders should all move and rotate around that central axis that I've already mentioned. But your head does not necessarily need to. If you're not taking a breath, then you should keep your head looking forwards and down within the water. But on the topic of taking a breath, the rotation actually really helps this. So when you rotate your hips and your shoulders, you should also move your head in sync with that so you rotate around to take your breath, which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to take a breath when you're lying flat on your stomach without rotation. To be honest, I can't really do that. You have to crane your neck quite a lot. Once you've taken your breath to the side, just rotate back around in sync with your shoulders and your hips and then just try and keep it nice and still and that's gonna minimise any drag and any potential snaking down the pool. - Okay, it's time to look at some drills that are gonna help with your rotation. And for these, it's such a good idea to pop some fins on so you can then focus purely on your body position without having to worry about anything else. - We're gonna start by stroking it back and we're gonna take away the arms, we're gonna go no arms for this first drill and its a drill that I like to call kick rotation and for this, I suggest using some fins. We're gonna start horizontally, flat on our stomach. We're gonna do six kicks or around two to three seconds and then we're gonna rotate onto our right hand side and we're gonna rotate moving everything in sync, our hips and our shoulders all together and then we're gonna do another six kicks and this is a good opportunity also to take a breath. And then rotate again back, flat to our stomach, another six kicks, and then to our left hand side. Just keep repeating that over and over to complete a whole length. (soft music) - Okay, for this one, you need to keep your fins on and you can just start with one arm extended, one arm by your side. So basically, superman position. Now that arm that's extended needs to be the lower side and your arm by your side is gonna be on the top and you're gonna try and make yourself feel parallel to the side wall. Once you've got that position, then try and breathe on that side once you're relaxed enough and practise putting your face down to face the bottom of the pool as though you were swimming front crawl and then just rotate your head back when you need to breathe. Stay in that position for the whole length and then swap to the other side when you're coming back. And you'll probably notice that one sides harder than the other, especially if you're used to only breathing in one direction. (soft music) - Alright, so now for single arm drill. We're gonna start by using fins for this and then when you progress, you can chuck those away and start improving since your main sets are in your everyday sessions. Now, one option with this is to do the drill with one arm fully extended out in front of you and do the single arm drill with the other arm. Now, you need to focus on the rotation with this so making sure your shoulders, your torso and hips all rotating together but with the breathing, you're gonna struggle to breathe to this side where the arm is out extended in front of you. You're gonna wanna breathe to the moving arm side and still just really concentrate on that rotation. The other option is to put the arm down by your side. Now this is a slight progression and really the more preferred option because you're actually getting slightly more rotation. So again, same movement, doing single arm with the other arm, okay, and the rotation is exactly the same but this time with the breathing, we're gonna breathe the other way, away from our moving arm and then where you've got pressure on the water with that moving arm to allow us to breathe. Now, the rotation and the breathing all in this is really gonna emphasise and reinforce that rotation for our stroke so it is a hard drill and I'd recommend doing maybe half a length and then swimming off the other half length during your sessions. - Alright, we're progressing it further now but actually using doggy paddle. But by that I mean the full extension doggy paddle so arm out in front and arm out to the side and your going to use this for six kicks on either side so take one stroke, when you're at the full extension, rotate fully to the side, hold that for six kicks, and then pull underneath, with an underneath recovery, back to the other side, hold for another six kicks. And then you can incorporate breathing with this. Once you've taken your breath, put your head back to the centre line and try and keep minimal movement of your head. Do this for a length and then progress it to full strokes still pausing for six kicks. So instead of doing the underwater recovery, your arm will recover over the top, but you're gonna rotate fully so you'll be facing the wall for six kicks each side. - Right now, finishing off with something a little bit fun and light hearted, the corkscrew drill. Now this one does come with a slight warning cause it can leave you feeling a little bit dizzy. So do it somewhere near a wall or a lane rope in case you need to grab hold and perhaps with not too many people around because it does leave you a tendency to drift from one side of a lane rope to another. Now, you just wanna push off from the wall to one front crawl stroke on your front and then rotate straight over onto your back and do one backstroke, and then rotate back onto your front, do one front crawl stroke, and just keep repeating that. See, you're going around in this corkscrew motion. But do remember to unwind, so go back the other way, otherwise you could end up feeling a little bit ill. That does seem a little bit silly and yes, light hearted but actually there's a lot of value to this drill because it does really help with our body awareness and really to nail that rotation. (soft pop music) - Right, it's time to put it all back together and it is worth noting that in these drills, most of them will actually over exaggerating the amount of rotation you need when it comes to normal stroke. But, when you're trying to change something that you've practised hundreds of hundreds of times that you would've done in a freestyle stroke, even something minute is gonna feel quite dramatic. And it is worth noting that most of rotation needs to come from your hips so when you do go back to doing full stroke, it's a good idea to keep your fins on. It just makes it a little bit easier. - Now, also adding to that, most of this has been focusing on the hip and shoulder rotation but with any changes within your rotation, it can also change other aspects of the stroke like your hand entry. So just make sure that you maintain a good hand entry in line with your shoulder. You're not crossing over the centre line too much or even going to wide. - See rotation as the foundation cause it does affect all the phases of the stroke and once you've mastered it, it's amazing how all the other components just suddenly feel more efficient and more smooth without extra effort. - Yeah, I couldn't agree more and we are right in the middle of our GTN swim week so if you want to make sure you don't miss anymore swimming videos from us, you can click on the globe and subscribe and if you like the look of our GTN swim caps, you can get them both in this white colour and GTN blue colour, you know, as we call that now. If you head on over to our GTN shop and if you like to see a how to breathe while swimming video just click down here. Or here. - Or here, just click. - I don't know where it is. - on the video.