Learning Freestyle Swimming: 3 tips

Freestyle swimming has many challenges during the learning process but it is well worth sticking with it.

Swimming effortlessly does take effort in the form of persistence, commitment, and patience to learn. Most of your pool time is learning to do less!

First step in learning is to feel your “float,” or as I like to say finding your ballast in the water. Where does your body “sit” in the water? Where do you feel the water supporting you?

When you feel your float your job then becomes how to keep that feeling of floating as you change the shape of your body to move through the water.

This first step of floating is often missing or not considered when learning to swim.

But, I make this the first thing, the foundation of learning to move through the water with ease using what I call the “front float.” I refer to it as float but the legs are gently kicking as a means to keep the legs and hips from sinking. Some people can float without the kick, while the rest of us, including me, need to kick. The kick is not about moving forward, just about keeping those legs in the horizontal line with the body.

The second key to swimming is how to keep the body streamlined to move through the water.

So, taking the floating body into a streamlined shape to move effortlessly through the water. To do this at a slight tilt or to use maritime language “list” to one side-while keeping the float of the body. I call this “swordfish” to identify this drill.

Swimmers may be familiar with a similar drill, “kicking on your side”. My swordfish drill has the swimmer tilt the torso about 45*. It is not all the way onto the side, as the above is done, less tilt.

Kicking on your side, you may argue, is more streamlined than a 45* tilt. Yes it is more streamlined producing less drag but the downside is that it is less of a stable position. A smaller tilt is more effective for balance and stability and just the right amount of tilt to reduce drag.

We have the front float, the streamlined swordfish position, and now adding in balance and stability within these positions.

The list of skills and sensations are growing!

This is working on these skills before adding in the arms to take a stroke. Not to mention taking a breathe!

I am not sharing all the steps in swimming freestyle, but the 3 foundational skills with you and the mental shifts needed in your current belief or understanding of how to swim freestyle.

To move through the water to cross the pool is to change your thinking: not from kicking and pulling but to move your body by shifting your weight from left side to right side-all while maintaining the float, streamline, balance and stability.

Start with the front float to feel what happens!

Ready to learn with me in the pool? Contact me for a one on one session to put this all into practice.