Focus on proper form for the following parts of your stroke:. Improving your body alignment is the best way to decrease drag. Refining your body position leads to a more effective swimming stroke—improving power, endurance, and speed. Proper body position includes making your body as long as possible and floating parallel to the ground, as well as a fixed head positioning. Practice keeping your gaze downward with a long, relaxed neck.
Proper contact with the water helps you get a good catch of the water and minimizes shoulder strain and unnecessary movement. Your hand should draw a line from your side around and into the water, in line with your shoulder. It is crucial to ensure your hand entry is not too wide or too narrow and fully extend your arm when entering the water.
The timing of your torso, arm, and leg movements are important to cut down on unnecessary drag. When swimming, be sure to focus on your rhythm. Good timing leads to better balance, less energy spent, and ultimately, a faster swim.
In addition to hand entry, your swim catch is a crucial element of the freestyle. When your hand enters the water, your fingers should be outstretched, pointing forward.
Then when you initiate your pull, hinge at the elbow, not the wrist. This increases the surface area available to 'catch' the water and pull it behind you. Proper breathing while swimming is imperative to improving your swimming technique and form. Bad breathing not only fatigues your body faster but adds resistance, slowing you down.
Your swimming breath technique will depend on a few factors, including which stroke you are swimming and whether you are in a sprint or long-distance race. For example, strokes like butterfly and breaststroke require a breath between each stroke, while with freestyle, you can breathe every few strokes. Focusing on your stroke count while swimming is a great way to improve. By aiming to swim the same pace at a lower stroke count, you will become more efficient over time.
You can also practice increasing and decreasing both stroke rate and distance per stroke until you find your sweet spot for both. Many athletes struggle to count strokes and pay attention to their form at the same time. FORM Smart Swim Goggles are the only wearable swimming technology that gives you real-time data through augmented reality. I also found that a nose clip helped in the pool to build the confidence to really blow and clear the old air when face down.
It was only then that I realised I'd been holding my breath and trying to blow out the old and take in the new in the small window of opportunity which just isn't going to happen. One day you'll suddenly find it all clicks and then big changes to your time will follow soon after. Stick with it and when it all starts to fall into place you'll have fresher legs for the bike and run. Best of luck. Post 12 of 38 views. Post 13 of 38 views. Post 14 of 38 views.
Aaron Bales Lansing Triathlon Team. Reservoir Cat. Post 15 of 38 views. You can put someone else in the hospital by swimming breastroke in a tri. Don't do it. Post 16 of 38 views. Michael J. Post 17 of 38 views. Yeah, do breast stroke until you can get the hang of crawl. Take a look at the Swim Smooth web site. I just started exploring the site and there are a lot of good videos there. Neither had done any training whatsoever in any event.
Not sure if her many years of flamenco dancing counts as athletics. Anyway, "S" did breast stroke all 2. Both completed 56 miles of the bike before succumbing to the the sag wagon crew's pleas to give up.
Post 18 of 38 views. Has someone told you to bilateral breathe? If so, don't. Breathe to one side every time. There's your air. Post 19 of 38 views. SC, I'm with you.
People need to learn how to swim safely and responsibly before you get into open water. To the OP, as someone else mentioned earlier, you have plenty of time to learn freestyle and get comfortable for a sprint race. Just do it. Post 20 of 38 views. Post 21 of 38 views.
Reservoir Cat wrote:. Post 22 of 38 views. Post 23 of 38 views. No - - not nonsense. How to improve your breaststroke. If you do choose to do breaststroke — or switch between doing breaststroke and freestyle — then there are a few things that you can focus on. With your arms, aim to keep them in front of you, where you can see them as opposed to trying to pull your hands back to your sides every stroke. With your legs, think about bringing your heels up towards your bum, with your knees fairly close together; then turn your feet so they point outwards and push your feet back, out and round until they come back together fully stretched behind you.
The rhythm should be something like arms pull while the heels come up towards your backside, then arms push forwards as your legs kick back, then glide for a moment. Pull your wetsuit up as high as you can around your shoulders. The more room you can make there the less restrictive you will find it. If you're nervous start towards the back of your wave, you'll have the chance to move past people as there'll be plenty of room and you'll avoid being kicked in the face or having some one swim across you.
If you start near the front this will absolutely happen but be forgiving, you'll likely be able to see very little underwater and no one is actively trying to bump into you. If you want some free water just move to the side and you'll be back on your own. If you get tired, get in someone's slipstream. It's amazing how much easier it is to swim behind someone else, where the water is already moving towards you. If you're starting to fatigue this can be a great way to take a moment to relax your muscles and stretch out in long easy strokes whilst still gliding forward easily.
Often it can actually be detrimental to move ahead of someone into clear water so bear this in mind. It's quite a hard balance to find though. Enjoy it. Take a moment to remember that X months ago you couldn't swim further than 50m without a break and now you're 1km into your first triathlon.
That's a big step up and something to be proud of. If you're interested in doing the same, here's the advice I can give you: Forget everything about swimming they taught you at school. Brockwell Lido. Chase the lengends at the Olympic Park. Great Manchester Swim - Salford Quays. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
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