swimming perfect freestyle comes down to three things perfect body position catch and breathing if you struggle with any of these then this video is just for you first it's important to remember there's only two ways to get faster in swimming the first is by decreasing drag and the second is by increasing propulsion decreasing drag just comes down to having an improved body position when it comes to propulsion this is simply how much water you're able to pull most of this comes from your catch but you can also improve that with your kick as well so if you look at my beautiful illustration right here I have two different swimmers one of them has a higher body position in the water than the other swimmer now if you look at this swimmer right here and I were to draw a line of their body position it's going to look something like that and you look at that relative to the surface of the water you notice the bigger this angle the larger the displacement is going to be and the bigger this displacement the slower you're going to move CU remember the water is 800 times more dense than air so your goal if you want to swi efficiently through the water is to actually reduce the amount of resistance that you have so that way you move through the water more smoothly with more efficiency now the next logical question is well how do you do that well it starts with your head position if back to my illustration if you notice the two swimmers that I have here this swimmer their head is completely out of the water if you were to draw their eyes out their eyes are basically looking in front of them so instead you need to focus on looking almost straight down and if you can just improve your head position by making this small correction you're going to dramatically improve your overall body position because your body is following your head and you also remember that your legs are dragging down your body now this is difficult more difficult for swim swimmers compared to others because your legs might be more muscular or more fat so your body composition can actually make this more difficult for some than others it doesn't mean you can't have a good body position it just means you have to have the right core strength to to be able to stabilize what's happening on the front of your body and what's happening in your legs this is all core stability so here's a pro tip for improving your body position grab a snorkel and if you don't have a snorkel that's fine too but if you do have one what you're going to do is you're actually going to form almost a streamlined position and you're simply going to kick on the surface of the water but while you're in this neutral Superman position on the surface you're going to take turns grabbing the water you're just going to balance and try and keep your legs as as high as possible in the water and if you want to make this even easier grab a pair of fins and you'll float right on top of the water now the second most important thing to swimming perfect freestyle is your catch this is our propulsion this is the dominant way that we're going to pull ourselves forward through the water so before we even talk about the catch and how we pull water we need to instill this concept that every time we take a stroke we're trying to maximize the distance that it allows us to travel through the water so it's not about spinning your arms faster if you want to swim faster rather you want to have the maximum amount of efficiency per stroke cycle and the way this starts is as your fingertips enter the water directly in front of your shoulder about half a meter in front you're going to enter with that middle finger first at about a 45° angle and then you're going to reach and extend to that line so wherever your shoulder is it's entering the water directly in that line and then only then can we start to talk about the catch and when it comes to the catch it's all about this evf early vertical forearm now if you notice this swimmer is doing a great job because as soon as the fingertips enter the water you're dropping your fingertips to the bottom and you're creating a full crumb so you can increase the surface area of which you can pull all of this forearm is able to pull the water not just the hand a lot of swimmers make the mistake and thinking okay I'm just going to pull with my hands as fast as I can the best swimmers are able to really reach an extend and drop their fingertips to the bottom create a full crumb and actually leverage their body and pull their body all the way through and really maximize not only their distance per stroke but maximize the amount of surface area on every single pull and it's going to feel awkward the first few times you try this if this is a New Concept to you it's going to feel weird you're going to think wait a second I'm either pulling way more water or this feels really inefficient because you don't have the muscles and the muscle memory built in this spefic specific way now we already talked about the hand placement but let's talk about our fingers for a second when you swim freestyle or any of The Strokes there's three options you have you can swim with a cued hand you can swim with a more relaxed hand with a little bit of space between your fingers or you can swim with your fingers completely spread out the fastest and most powerful pull is not when your hands are CED together it's not when your hands are your fingers are completely spread out it's actually somewhere in the middle closer to a neutral natural feeli and that might mean a a few millimet of space between each of your fingers not a big space but a few millimet of space and what that allows you to do is it increases the surface area because you have momentum in that little space between your fingers you also have the most power so if you want to improve your catch it starts with the way your fingertips enter the water but don't press your fingertips together don't space them apart have it somewhere in the middle where you have the most natural power here's a pro tip to improve your catch you're going to grabb some tennis balls you can do this drill with golf balls or even just your fist and you're actually going to swim with the tennis ball in your hand what this is going to do it's going to reduce the amount of surface area that you have to pull the water so you're actually going to have to pull the water using your forearm and if you don't use your entire arm you're not going to go anywhere after you do this for a few 25s you're going to remove the tennis balls and you're going to feel amazing as you pull through the water and the third most important thing about swimming perfect freestyle is breathing when we're thinking about improving our breathing it comes back to our body position if you look at our illustration this image right here the entire head is out of the water so if you swim with your head out of the water your legs are going to sink you're going to use a lot more energy and therefore you're going to feel like you need way more air than you actually do if you swim more efficiently then you're going to be able to swim needing less oxygen which is ideal we still want to have the proper technique so if we look at this body position we can see that most of the head is completely underwater now if you look at the water line I'm going to draw it in right here the top part of the head is over the water and the bottom part is under the water now you want to make sure that you're using your body rotation rather than a head rotation in order to breathe now this comes with when your fingertips enter the water so back to our fingertips right here entering the water at shoulder width at a 45° angle you start to enter the water and your body is extending and as you extend you actually start to rotate and as you rotate your head is naturally going to rotate with your body and you want to keep your head in line with your spine now I know because I'm standing it doesn't really look like my head is in line with my spine but if you look at our illustration this is the spine and this is where the head needs to remain 50% under the water and 50% over the water here's a pro tip to improve your breathing you're going to grab a paddle take the strap off and you're going to swim freestyle with the paddle right in front of your head and the resistance of the water is actually going to push the paddle into your head so even as you rotate to the side you're going to be able to maintain the position of the paddle on your head and you're going to be able to get your breath now it's really important that you rotate to the side and try and keep one eye and one ear in the water while the paddle is on your head believe it or not the faster you swim the easier this drill will become so if you go really slow it's going to be really difficult to keep the paddle on your head because you don't have enough resistance pushing against the paddle breathing is one of the most difficult things about swimming and if you can Master this drill you're going to be breathing and swimming with ease so remember one eye and one ear in the water try and keep that 50% ratio and if you're wondering how do I swim with my face halfway underwater how am I going to breathe I'm going to get water what happens is as you're moving you're creating a wave and an air pocket and this happens even when you're not moving very fast so you can be on your side and you're able to actually get quite a bit of oxygen on your side and you don't have to rush it so when you're on your side getting your breath you're going to breathe in the oxygen and then you're going to put your face back in the water as you rotate back naturally part of the stroke and then finally the next question is how often do you breathe this really depends on how far you're swimming what your swimming level is but if I were to give you a rule of thumb I recommend breathing every two arm Strokes what that means is every time you take a stroke you're going to take one more stroke and then you're going to breathe so that means you're going to breathe on the same side over the course of a pool length now you might want want to get a little bit more sophisticated in what's called bilateral breathing this is where you actually breathe to both sides and you'll do that every three or five Strokes you can use this as a drill to focus on balancing your stroke you don't want to get too strong on one side compared to the other but that won't happen if you have the proper freestyle swimming mechanics you can confidently swim breathing only on one side and still have a relatively balanced stroke it's actually going to be a little bit easier because you're going to develop Rhythm and rhythm is how you can swim longer with more efficiency and that's the goal of what we're trying to do here all right so here's the thing even if you have the perfect body position you have a great catch and you can breathe when you swim with ease it's still not enough because if you swim with improper structure if you just swim back and forth you're not going to improve and you're going to Plateau so much faster and that's why I developed the my swim Pro app so that you can have a personalized swimming plan any where you go anytime every workout every set every interval is personalized to you based on how fast you swim with different technique drills along the way so if you're looking to improve your swimming if you want to swim faster if you don't want to be tired at the end of a workout then you have to check out the my swim Pro app so check it out for iPhone and Android and happy swimming