Hi! Welcome to the Effortless Swimming YouTube Channel my name is Brenton Ford. This video is about breathing we’ve done quite a few of these in the last couple of weeks and there’s a lot to it. In this video, I want to show you a good principle to maintain your posture and your alignment to help you with your breathing that will also help
with your alignment throughout the stroke. A good way to think about breathing is if you imagine that you’ve got a pole or a stick that runs all the way through your head,
your neck and your spine and when you go to turn your head to breathe, the head shouldn’t come off that pole or that stick through the middle of the body. When you turn to breathe, the head should, for the most part just turn straight to the side and come back. What we see quite regularly when people breathe is the head turning
off to the side and sort of moving off the alignment of the spine and what that will often do is it can cause the legs to sway or kick off to the side and for the hips to move out
to the side and for you to lose some of that alignment and stability through the core. It’s okay to somewhat lift the head a little bit just before you turn to breathe not too
much but just a little bit is okay. If you look at swimmers like Katie Ledecky, she will somewhat look forwards just a little bit before she turns her head but not to the point
where she’s looking directly forwards. Again there’s sort of variations within each different style of freestyle but for the most part, it’s quite a good thing to maintain is
thinking of aligning the spine. Even when you turn your head to breathe, the head doesn’t move off that line of the spine. A great drill for practicing this, get
a flat paddle put that on top of your head about halfway in between your forehead and your hair. so that should pretty much sit smack bang right there. Now, if you place it
there when you’re swimming freestyle you should be able to keep that paddle on your head even when you turn to breathe. I had a swimmer recently that I did this with and
one of his biggest issues is he just he moves his head up and down as he turns to breathe. He’s a really good swimmer but this is this part of his strokes really letting him down. So I got him to do this drill and took him 150 meters of this drill to actually get the paddle to stay on his head, it’s a great drill to practice this alignment through the spine even when you turn your head to breathe. This is a another aspect of breathing that can help you through your swim stroke and it really plays out through the rest of the stroke because typically when we look at someone from above anything that happens out in front in terms of crossover, in terms of the head moving off to the side that will often play out all the way through their body so we’ll often end up all the way through their hips their legs their feet and so on so if we can really keep good alignment on the entry and the extension. Keep that head fairly still, it makes such a difference all the way through the rest of the body. I hope you enjoyed this video make sure you
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benefit from this video and I’ll see you next week
