Ten Freestyle Swimming Tips that can change it all.
Tip 1: Ensure that your head is aligned with your spine. Keep your back straight and aligned with your head. This is accomplished by making sure that you are looking at the bottom of the pool, not ahead of you! By looking anywhere but down you are making your hips drop and you will have to kick all that much harder to keep them up and you don’t need to use all of that energy which is too tiring.
Tip 2: You need to get over your fear of swim goggles! If you do not have them on it is harder for you to relax. The reason for this is that it is very hard to relax when you have all of that water washing past your eyeballs. Keep relaxed, keep your head down, keep your goggles on!
Tip 3: Takes a few things into consideration: Your lungs are full of air and are fairly buoyant. Your legs and hips are very dense and they aren’t buoyant! Keeping your head down causes your body to ‘swivel’ on the buoyant lungs and keeps your legs and hips up so you are not getting tired trying to keep them up. Freestyle Swimming requires you to keep a few things in mind as you work to improve your technique.
Tip 4: A good tip to know is that in order to swim faster, you need to get at least one of your shoulders out of the water! Swim on your side more and change the side at each stroke! This helps you to reduce the drag that your shoulders will cause.
Tip 5: When you need to take a breath, rotate your head to do it, don’t lift your head! This makes your hips and legs go down and you have to work all that much more to get them up!
Tip 6: As you breathe you will exhale into the water and inhale as you rotate your head. The timing is pretty critical as there is not a lot of time or much in either position.
Tip 7: Wearing a nose clip will help in the above situation. A difficult thing to recover from, easily, is to get water in your nose. A clip will assist in keeping the water out of your nose while you concentrate on the timing of your breathing. The ability to do this while you are Freestyle swimming is very important.
Tip 8: As you are following through on your stroke, do not pull with your straightened arm. Your elbow needs to flex with your forearm staying parallel to your body and about 10″ away. Don’t overreach to the other side of your body or to the outside and follow your body’s median line.
Tip 9: When recovering from the stroke, do not allow them to extend into the air above the water and then all the way down in front of you. Instead, cause your hand to enter the water and extend it out into the water thus making your hand stay under water longer which is another of the secrets for swimming faster!
Tip 10: For the long distance freestyle swimming, use the very relaxed two beat kick. This is an energy saving technique caused by alternating the kicking foot and the stroking arm.
The summary of the tips listed above are: Body Position, Body Rotation, Reach Forward, the Hour-Glass Pull and finish the stroke.
Take one of the above listed tips and work on it, carefully adding each of the tips as you can and before long you will be improving your techniques and becoming the freestyle swimming expert you want to be! http://www.articlesbase.com/water-sports-articles/freestyle-swimming-techniques-for-perfect-strokes-and-speed-5218087.html
