How to Stop Pulling Across Your Body In Freestyle

It is one of the most common mistakes in freestyle where a swimmer pulls across their body and is crossing over their midline with their hand and arm. There are two main causes of crossing over the body; the first one is keeping your arm straight in your pull through rather than bending your elbow and having the two levers like we spoke about in last week’s news update. The other reason is that swimmers that cross over their body are rotating too far around with their shoulder and are pushing their shoulder too deep in the water.

00:09 – How to Stop Pulling Across Your Body In Freestyle
00:21 – Keeping Your Arms Straight In Pull Through
00:33 – Rotating Too Far/ Shoulder Too Deep
01:32 – Shoulder to Chin Drill: Mastering Freestyle Program

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Like you can see in this video the reason this swimmer is crossing over their body is due to them rotating a little bit too far under the water with their shoulder.

In this picture you can see the green lines and see that Sam doesn’t have too much of an angle between the surface of the water and his shoulder. He may have about 30 degrees which is about right.

However in the image with the red lines you can see that would be a swimmer that is rotated to far; that swimmer would be crossing their body when they pull through because their shoulder is pushing too deep and is on to much of an angle.

If you cross over the centre of your body you might want to try rotating less with your shoulders in the water. It is ok to rotate above the water with your shoulders as much as you need to as long as you are not throwing your body out of line. If you are rotating your shoulder too far and pushing them too deep it is hard to avoid crossing over your body in freestyle.

In the Mastering Freestyle Program one of the drills that we do is shoulder to chin drills where you are kicking on your side and bringing your shoulder up close to your chin and then bringing it back down. This is practicing to keep your shoulder nice and high in the water and not rotating too far when you are on your side.

If you are someone that crosses over your body with your pull a way to avoid it and get a better pull with less resistance is to rotate a little bit less and push your shoulder not quite too deep in your freestyle.

That’s it for swimming news this week; I will see you next week.