Freestyle Breathing Technique: How to Breathe While Swimming

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If your freestyle falls apart the moment you take a breath, you’re in the biggest club in swimming.

I’ve coached thousands of swimmers, and breathing is the number one thing that breaks an otherwise decent stroke. The body position is fine, the arms are fine — then the breath comes, the head lifts, the hips drop, and suddenly it’s a battle.

Here’s the good news: breathing problems are mechanical, not mysterious. They come down to a handful of habits, and every one of them is fixable.

Why breathing breaks your freestyle

Get your body position right and freestyle feels smooth — until you add breathing.

The moment most swimmers rotate for air, three things go wrong at once: they hold their breath between strokes, they lift the head instead of rotating with the body, and the lead arm drops and sinks. Each one costs balance. Together they’re why you feel like you’re fighting the water every time you need air.

So let’s take them one at a time.

Rule 1: Exhale in the water

This is the most important rule in swim breathing, and the one most swimmers get wrong.

The reason you choke, gasp and run out of air is almost never the breath in. It’s the breath out.

If you hold your breath while your face is in the water, your lungs are still full when you rotate to breathe. There’s no room for fresh air, no time to exhale and inhale in the split second your mouth is clear — so you get half a breath, and the oxygen debt builds lap after lap.

Do this instead: as your face returns to the water after a breath, start releasing a steady trickle of bubbles from your nose and mouth. Keep it constant, then let the rest go more fully just before you turn for your next breath, so you inhale with empty lungs.

Think of it like breathing on land. You’d never hold your breath for five strides of a run and then try to do all your breathing in one instant. Swimming is no different: in through the mouth, out through the water, as natural as walking down the street.

Rule 2: One goggle in, one goggle out

Here’s the checkpoint I use with every swimmer I film: when you breathe, half your head should stay in the water.

One goggle in, one goggle out. Your mouth finds the pocket of air beside your bow wave, and your body line stays intact.

What slows swimmers down is breathing with both goggles out — lifting the forehead and eyes clear of the surface and turning to look at the sky. Lift that much and your hips get pushed out of position, your legs drop, and every breath becomes a brake.

If you’re getting water in your mouth with one goggle in the water, the fix isn’t lifting higher — it’s usually timing or exhale, which we’ll get to below.

Rule 3: Rotate, don’t lift

The breath is not a head movement. It’s the last few degrees of a body movement.

Good freestyle already rotates from side to side — it’s how you reduce drag and anchor each stroke (rotation is one of the four fundamentals in our swimming technique guide). Breathing simply rides that rotation: as your body rolls to the side, the head goes with it just enough for the mouth to clear the water.

Imagine a skewer running through the top of your head, down your neck and spine. Turn around the skewer — never bend it.

When you breathe by swinging or lifting the head independently, you break that line, and your balance goes with it. When you breathe with the roll, the breath costs you almost nothing.

Rule 4: Keep the lead arm long

Watch a struggling swimmer breathe and you’ll almost always see the same thing underwater: the extended arm collapses.

As they turn for air, the lead arm drops toward the bottom of the pool, the elbow sinks, and they end up leaning on a sinking arm — which pushes the whole body downhill exactly when they need support.

Keep the lead arm reaching forward, light and long, all the way through the breath. Don’t press down on the water with it. Extend forward, breathe off the rotation, and start the pull only once the breath is done.

This is a balance skill, and it’s exactly what side-kicking and shark fin drills train — you’ll find both in the freestyle breathing drills article.

Rule 5: Stay relaxed

Tension is a breathing problem wearing a disguise.

When you’re anxious in the water, you grip your breath — short, shallow, held. That burns through oxygen faster, which makes you more anxious, which makes the breathing worse. It’s a loop, and panic in open water usually starts exactly there.

The way out of the loop is the exhale. A long, steady stream of bubbles is both the technique fix and the relaxation fix — you physically cannot hold tension in your chest while you’re releasing a slow, controlled exhale.

Slow the stroke down, lengthen the exhale, and let the rhythm settle. Relaxed swimmers breathe well; breathing well keeps swimmers relaxed. The loop works in your favour too.

Getting the timing right

Put the pieces in order and one stroke cycle of good breathing looks like this:

• Face in the water: steady trickle of bubbles from nose and mouth.
• As your breathing-side arm finishes its pull and starts to recover over the water, your body rolls to that side — let the rest of your air go.
• Mouth clears the water in the bow-wave pocket: one unhurried breath in. One goggle stays wet.
• Head returns with the rotation before the recovering hand enters the water, and the trickle starts again.

Don’t rush the breath. Rushing turns it into a snatch, and a snatched breath is a shallow one. The rotation gives you more time than you think.

Breathing patterns and bilateral breathing

Swimmers love to ask what the “correct” breathing pattern is — every 2, every 3, bilateral or single-side.

My answer: don’t force a pattern. Breathe as often as you need.

Oxygen is not a luxury. Starving yourself on a strict every-3 or every-5 pattern in hard swimming just builds an oxygen debt that wrecks the back half of your set. Plenty of great distance swimmers breathe every 2.

That said, being able to breathe to both sides is genuinely valuable. It balances out your stroke, gives you options in open water when there’s chop or sun on one side, and stops one side of your technique developing a limp. So practice it in easy swimming and drills — switch sides during your session, swim some 50s breathing 3 then 5 — but when it’s time to swim hard, take the air you need.

Drills that fix your breathing

Reading about breathing doesn’t change it — a few weeks of the right drills does. The full write-up with sets and reps is in freestyle breathing drills, but the short version:

• Exhale rhythm practice — train the trickle-then-release exhale until it’s automatic.
• Side kicking drill — builds the balanced side-on position you breathe from.
• Shark fin drill — adds the recovery arm while you hold that position.
• Kick on side, switching sides — develops your weaker breathing side.
• Breathing 3/5 fifties — controlled pattern work to build comfort, not to race with.

One practical note: breathing drills are where leaky, fogged-up goggles get found out. When you’re working on keeping one goggle in the water, that goggle needs to seal and stay clear — I do these sessions in our NanoClear Strike so the visibility side of it is never the problem.

Frequently asked questions

The takeaway

Breathing is the part of freestyle that punishes force and rewards rhythm.

Exhale steadily in the water. Keep one goggle wet. Turn with the body, not the neck. Reach long through the breath. Stay relaxed and unhurried.

Pick one rule per session, give it your full attention for a few hundred meters, and within a couple of weeks the breath stops being the thing that breaks your stroke — and starts being the thing that sets its rhythm.