Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. In this video I’m going to share with you the easiest way to swim freestyle with almost zero effort. If you look at the smoother swimmers at your local pool, you’ll notice that they’re probably not trying harder than you. They might not even be fitter than you. But what they do really well is they know how to let the water support them and balance their body and how to use their catch, their rotation, their kick and their timing to help propel themselves forward with very little effort. So in today’s video I’m going to share with you the three things that will help you swim freestyle for almost no effort, but it’ll make you look smooth, it’ll help you move through the water very comfortably and it might even be a little bit faster than what

you’re currently doing. So the first thing that we want to make sure we get in place is that we let the water hold us up. We let the water balance our body because if we’re swimming in a way where our hips and legs are really low, it takes so much effort to overcome that. And the very first thing I always go to is head position because your head weighs five or six kilos, so how you hold your head in the water can really impact what happens out the back of your body. So the way I like to think of this is we look anywhere from straight down to 45 degrees and more importantly think of your head like an iceberg where just the top of it, 10% or so is above the water, but the majority of it is below. And that’s one thing that will help you balance in the water. Now, the second part of this is how you hold your body. And this is your posture. Now, you may never have thought about posture before when you swim, but posture

is very, very important. And the reason for that is if you have bad posture or poor posture when you swim and the way I think of that is like a teenager lying on the couch, hunched through the shoulders. It’s really hard to firstly use your stronger muscles like your lats. Secondly, your body is going to have this curve through it and it won’t have this tautness through the frame. And we want to be like a needle, not like a noodle in the water. So we need to think about being tall and proud and really long through the body. And the other part of that posture is imagine you’re trying to squeeze into a tight pair of jeans where if you did that squeezing here, you’d suck your tummy and you’d squeeze your butt cheeks together. I’ve got that from Andy Donaldson, which is a good way of thinking about it. Now, with that posture and frame of the body, we have this tautness or this little bit of tension through the body so we’re not wriggling and moving around.

And that is the real key to then being able to use your lungs for balance and buoyancy. Because for most people, your buoyancy will come from your lungs, the air that’s in there. So if you imagine you’ve got a balloon, you try and push it down. It’s really hard to do. It wants to come back up because of all the air. Now, we’ve got a similar thing here in our chest with our lungs. So if we hold our body tall and proud and we apply a little bit of downwards force through the chest, that’s going to help bring the hips up and the legs up because that’s going to change the balance of our body for the better. So we need to do those couple of things to make sure that we are horizontal and not dragging our toes along the surface of the bottom of the pool. Now, the third part there is with our legs. What do we want to do with our legs? They are not necessarily for propulsion, even though you’ll get a little bit from it.

Your legs are more to help you rotate to the other side and to help counterbalance you as well. So the way I see the legs working is it’s not like we’re using them to kick really hard and move ourselves forwards. It’s like if you were to throw a ball, you’ve got something stable to press off of and then you can really throw a ball fast and a long way. But in the water, we’ve got nothing stable to really work with. So our legs out behind us are providing that counterbalance to work with, to be able to press off and help us rotate to the other side. So that’s the main purpose of it. And the key to swimming with almost no effort and making sure your legs do the right thing is I want you to feel like you’re bringing everything into the center, like you’re almost bringing your inner thighs together and we’re just doing this little flick of the foot and that little flick of the foot is going to help you rotate to the other side

as opposed to doing this big kick like you’re riding a bike, for example. So if you can do those three things, that means that you’ll be horizontal. You’ll feel the water supporting you. And that is step number one to swimming with freestyle with almost no effort. So the second step in swimming easy freestyle is using our rotation to help us recover easily and to help us reach and be long in the stroke. So we’ve built the frame of our body. The next step is we’ve got to rotate side to side. Now, we need to rotate enough so that we can comfortably recover our arm over the top of the water. Because if we stay flat, it’s really hard to get the arm over the top because our shoulder just doesn’t work very well that way. So we need to rotate enough to comfortably get the arm over the top. Now, the important thing here with our recovery is that it’s called recovery because we shouldn’t be tense and shouldn’t be stiff.

So I like to think of a relaxed hand or relaxed wrist as I come over the top of the water. And we want to be opening up this underarm here, almost showing this underarm to the side of the pool. And we want to feel like the elbow is the thing that’s almost carrying the rest of the arm over the top. That is how we have this relaxed recovery. Whereas a lot of times people will be very stiff and very tense as they come through. So we want this sense of relaxation over the top. And your arm weighs a couple of kilos. So that means that when we swing this arm forwards, we generate some momentum with it. And if we do this in a relaxed way, we carry that momentum forwards. And then as we enter the water, we want to enter fingers first with our elbow up. Because in that position, we’re going to carry that momentum in and send it out in front of the shoulder. And that’s where we start to get that feeling of like we’re skating through the water

or gliding through the water without much effort. Now, once we enter with our fingers, we want to feel like we are just straightening the arm in front. Don’t feel like you are spearing the arm in because it can cause you to do some funny things. We want to feel like we are just straightening the arm and that will send us out in front. Now, you’ll notice as I rotate, that also gives me a little bit more length in the stroke. I get a little bit further up here. And so generally a longer body is going to be a faster body. So that will help us get an extra few centimeters within the length of our stroke as well. So we want to rotate enough to comfortably recover and enough so that we can get into a good long position and strong position with our arm out in front of us. And a good position there to start is making sure your hand and your fingers are about underarm depth when we finish extending forwards. Because that’s where we’re going to be most streamlined

and that is a really good place to then begin our catch. Because what we don’t want to do is enter and drift up and put the brakes on as we call it. But we drift up and press against that water because that’s going to slow us down. I also don’t like it when swimmers go too deep with the hand because if you’re starting that far below your shoulder, that does create quite a bit of drag on the arm. So I like to teach get to shoulder depth when you finish extending forwards. And so our starting position or our base position every time is arm up here, rotated on the side, that is where we’re going to be very streamlined. And if you can transition from that position here to that position on the other side and you do that on a continuous basis, that’s when you start to get that feeling of this effortless way of moving through the water. But that’s not going to be enough. We need to make sure we do step three.

Step three to swimming freestyle with almost no effort is making sure that we time the stroke correctly and that we do something effective with our arms. So we use them as for propulsion. Now, the timing of our stroke should be what I’d consider front quadrant. Now, all front quadrant means is that if you split the body into four quarters, the front quadrant would be always having an arm above our head or in front of our head if we’re swimming. And the way that we do that is we need to make sure we’re patient with our arm as we’re extending forwards in front. So the last thing we want to do is enter and immediately go down. Even though it feels like we’ve got to get going when we want to pull through, you’re actually better off entering and extending out in front and rotating at the same time because you’ll be longer in the water and you’ll also be more streamlined in the water. And more importantly, it’ll help with your timing.

So if you keep that arm in front a little bit longer as you’re extending out and you give this arm a little bit of a chance to not catch up completely, but catch up almost to it. So we get to this position here where this arm is about to begin what we call the catch and this one is about to pass our head. That will mean you’ve always got something in front of your head. And the reason that’s really helpful for swimming freestyle with almost no effort is because then we get to coordinate all these different parts of our body together. So we first to get to begin the catch here. So we’re starting to press back. The momentum from this arm is going to come over and then we’re going to tie that together with our shoulder rotation where everything goes together. And that means that we’re not just swimming with our arms and our legs separately. It means we get to tie in the whole body. And that’s where you can really start to notice that difference.

So take a little bit of time to reach out. This arm comes through and then we swap. We swap. So almost this arrow position is like your trigger point. That is when we start to swap. So that’s the timing that we need. The next thing is with our arms, we want to make sure that we’ve got a good amount of surface area pressing back on the water. Now, the way that we do that is we want to get a high elbow catch. But rather than thinking of a high elbow catches, your elbow needs to be right up near the surface. That’s not a good way to think of it. Really, it just means the hand’s got to be a bit higher than the fingers. But the way I would think of it is if we’re looking on the side and we were to draw a line from my shoulder to my fingers, that elbow should be somewhere above that imaginary line. And that way we’ve got our hand and forearm, which is our big paddle, that’s going to be pushing backwards. And that means we’re going to move forwards with it.

So the way to do this is to not think of your catch as the power phase of the stroke, but think of it as the setup phase of the stroke. And all that means is we don’t want to muscle that initial movement because we’re not very strong overhead. And our main goal there is to get a high elbow catch, meaning we need the hand and forearm to face backwards. And it’s easier to do it if we go for something like a four or a five out of 10, in terms of the effort and the power through the catch, instead of a 10 out of 10. That’s where a lot of people try and rip hard at the water, which we don’t want to do, particularly at the start of the underwater phase of the arm. So in order to get that high elbow position, there’s two things that I think of. One is we want to get the fingers to point down. And secondly, we want the elbow to bend or fold. So it moves out to the side, it moves a little bit wider than the hand while it’s moving down.

And that gives us a space to be able to set up this high elbow position. Then you end up getting this big armful of water, which you can then accelerate back past the hip, and that is what’s gonna help move you forwards. There’s a number of drills you can do, which we’ve got inside of our membership, and you’ll probably see on this channel as well. But the main thing is we need to point the fingers down, let that elbow go out to the side. Now the last thing that’s gonna help you swim with effortless freestyle, where it just feels very, very easy, is to use our kick the right way. And your kick does not provide that much propulsion for most of the swimmers that I coach, but it’s very important to do it well. The main role of your kick is actually to help you rotate to the other side and provide a little bit of a counterbalance and stability out behind you. So the way that your kick works is when you’re reaching forwards

and you’re about to start your catch. So you’re in this streamlined position on the side. Your kick on that leg that is lowest in the water there, or the side that you’re on, that’s going to, you’re gonna kick down and that’s gonna help you start rotating back onto the other side. And that’s what’s then gonna help you go through your catch and your pull through, and you’ll be rotating back and that will get everything to work together. So if we’ve got something like what we’d call a two beat kick, which is one kick per arm stroke, then that kick is gonna be the thing that will help you initiate the rotation back onto the other side. And that is when you time that well, that is when it becomes really easy. So the way you can think of that, there’s two different ways to think of your kick timing. One is you can think of your opposite hand entering the water when your other leg kicks down. So that might be your left hand

enters the water as your right leg kicks downwards. Now the other way you can think of it is think of your catch happening at the same time. The leg on that side is kicking. So same side kick and catch. Now it doesn’t matter which one you think of, they’re kind of the same thing because if you think about it, your left hand is gonna be entering roughly when your right hand is finishing the catch and you can kick down on that right leg. Same thing, just a different way to think about it. Now that’s a little bit more advanced for a lot of swimmers, particularly if you’re new. But if you can get that right and use that kick to help you rotate back onto the other side, then your freestyle and your timing will feel very easy and that’s where it starts to feel effortless. Now if you’re not sure where to start, we have two courses available. One is our beginner freestyle program. The other one is our eight week faster freestyle program.

I’ll put the links below. If you’re a beginner and you’re struggling to go more than 100 meters, get the beginner course. If you can swim 400 meters without stopping, then the eight week faster freestyle course would be the best option. I’ll include those below. Thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe. We put out videos every single week to help you swim faster. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.