Hey YouTubers, welcome back to our channel. This is the latest video on breathing. I’ve had a lot of requests from people asking about how to breathe in freestyle so they don’t tire too quickly. Now, there’s a lot of different aspects and nuances to breathing, but in this video, I wanna talk specifically about how you should inhale and exhale. Now, we had a member recently who was struggling to swim one kilometer straight. He was just, it gets to 50 meters, 100 meters and need to stop. He’d need to get his breath back and then start again because he didn’t have the, he had the fitness, the physical fitness was there but in terms of fatiguing after 50, 100 meters he was just so exhausted that he couldn’t keep going on. And the only thing that was stopping him from getting to that one-kilometer mark non-stop or further, was just that he wasn’t breathing in the correct way.
So, let’s have a look at how you should breathe in freestyle. Now, the first step after you turn your face back in the water once you’ve got your breath is to make sure that you gradually exhale through your nose. If you gradually exhale through your nose, then you are just going to be very comfortable and relaxed as you’re swimming and going through your stroke. Now, I don’t want you to exhale much. But just a little bit and have a look at that in these videos here. You can see how both swimmers, there are a few examples here, both swimmers are actually exhaling just a little bit through their nose. That’s step one. Then what you’ll see that the best swimmers in the world do just before they turn their head to breathe is they have quite an assertive or an aggressive exhale. They blow out through their nose, through their mouth, they get rid of all the air in their lungs so that by the time their mouth actually exits the water they’ve got empty lungs. And it’s like a vacuum. It just naturally fills up once they go to breathe.
Now, the mistake that a lot of swimmers make that cause them to run out of breath, is that they actually hold onto that air for too long and they don’t empty their lungs just before they turn to breathe. Or, the other mistake that they’ll often make is they breathe everything out too soon so that they end up taking one or two strokes with nothing in their lungs, with no air, and they end up getting tired that way. So, they either do it one of two ways.
So, the solution there is a gradual exhale through the nose and then breathe everything out quite assertively just before your mouth exits the water. Now, that’s if you’re doing more long-distance swimming or anything sort of around 200 meters or more. If you’re sprinting a 50 or a 100 you’re going to need to do that fast exhale or that assertive exhale almost straightaway. You can see in this video here of Caeleb Dressel, how he’s actually pretty much breathing out straightaway once his head turns back in the water because he’s getting a breath every almost second or two seconds. So there’s just not enough time for that gradual exhale. So, it obviously depends on what events you’re doing but for the most part, for most of you, that aren’t doing 50 or 100-meter sprints, you’re probably just going to need to do the gradual exhale and then a full exhale.
In the next video, in the coming week, I’m gonna show you a couple of tips that might help you just to be able to breathe comfortably and also how to breathe on both sides ’cause I know that’s an issue for a lot of you. So, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed. Make sure you subscribe below. And tick that notification bell so that you get notified when we have new videos on the channel. Hope this helps you and leave a comment below. Let me know if this is something that you’re currently doing in your stroke. And let me know what other videos you’d like me to do too. So, just put a comment below. Make sure and subscribe and I’ll see you next week.
