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.

If you find that when you’re swimming freestyle and your arm drops down when you go to take a breath, there’s five main reasons why I find that happens. In this video, I’m going to break down what those five reasons are, how you can fix them, so that by the end of this video, you can swim a lot further for less effort, and you feel like you’ve got all the time in the world to get your breath every time you’re taking a breath is just swimming your freestyle. First thing that I will often look at is the breathing. How are they breathing? Now, the two main mistakes that people make here that causes that lead arm to drop is they’ll lift their head up while above the water. And that sort of comes from that they end up pressing downwards on the water to lift their head up above the water. And, and then obviously, you’re not going to be able to get into that good catch position. So we need to make sure you’re not lifting the head up while

above the water. And we need to make sure you’re looking in the right position. And the right position is straight to the side. So if I’m working with someone, I might get them to look at the lane rope or the side of the pool and try and look there once you’ve turned your head to the side to breathe, because sometimes people will look too far behind them or too far in front. And it really just throws their alignment out. And if you think of swimming freestyle and breathing, I like the analogy of imagining like you got like a skewer through your spine and through your neck. And your head is a bit of meat on that skewer. And when you go to breathe, you’re just turning the skewer, but it stays aligned on that skewer. So you turn to the side and coming back, you’re not shifting your head way off to the side. Now with some elites, and as I see the head come off the side a bit, but generally just try and keep it mostly centered because that’s going to keep

you better aligned. So we’ve got to check the breathing first and foremost. Now the other thing that can help there too is you want to try and keep part of that bottom goggle in the water when we turn to the side. But the other thing is where your mouth is when you breathe. So last week, I was working with someone who’s in our stroke analysis membership. And we looked at his breathing and his breathing was like a gasp for air. It was like open mouth, really sort of upper chest breathing. Now what I have got him to do is to just almost like reach around with his mouth off to the side and try and just make it more of a controlled or a steady inhale instead of this big gasp for air because that’s going to cause you to it makes it difficult to stay calm and relaxed when you’re breathing if you do it that way. So we need to make sure we’re breathing the right way. So first thing is just breathing. If you have trouble

with that, you can do a couple of simple drills like in the first week of our eight week faster freestyle course, we work on some sink down drills just to relax. But if you’re looking to just get that breathing position right, side breathing drill with a kickboard is probably your best bet. So if you put some fins on, hold a kickboard out in front and you can just practice that skewer like approach to breathing to the side. Now it’s OK if when you first start that you find it difficult and you can’t really keep that bottom goggle in. If you need to turn that little bit further, that’s OK. But just over time, you’ll get more comfortable with it until you can get that split vision that we’re looking for.

Hey, real quick, in case you didn’t know, we run swimming camps around the world from the Maldives, Thailand, Japan with Sundays, Galapagos Islands, plus a bunch of new locations for next year. So if you’d like to join us at a future camp and improve your swimming and explore and experience some of the best locations to swim in the world, then go to effortlesswimming.com forward slash camps. We’ve got all the dates and locations listed there. A question I get all the time is I’m not that quick. Will this camp be suitable for me? We have a wide range of speeds and abilities come to the camps. So as long as you can swim a kilometre, there’s a very good chance that these camps will be suitable for you. And if you’re not sure, just get in touch with us and we’ll make sure that we do find you a suitable camp. Thanks for listening. Let’s get back to the podcast. Now, the other thing that we then look at is the rotation through the shoulders.

So overrotations are fairly common problem that I see, particularly on the breathing side. So if we’re looking front on it, someone swinging towards us, you’ll see that for the most part, you know, most good consumers are 30 to 40 degrees through the shoulders if you measure that shoulder rotation at its furthest point. Now, if you’re going past that and if you’re particularly going to 90 degrees through the shoulders, it’s very hard to keep that lead arm in front because of the pressure it can put on your rotator calf, the pressure it can put on the shoulder there. So a lot of people struggle to keep their lead arm in front if they’re going to 90 degrees. So we just want to check how far you’re rotating through the shoulders as you turn to the side to breathe. Now, often that over rotation is a result of the head turning too far or lifting, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes people will just want to rotate more than what they actually need

to. So that’s the second thing we want to check in with. And if you are going too far, then what you can do there is just work on reducing that rotation. And like I mentioned in the video last week about how to swim relaxed, one of the things that can help you just get the right amount of rotation is think of rotating your torso, think of rotating it forwards instead of side to side. Because like Karl and Pipe said that we want to be rocking side to side and not rolling side to side. And I think when you think of that as rotating forwards instead of side to side, that’s what that’s a way that can help you do that. The third thing that can lead to that lead arm dropping when you breathe is actually the entry of the hand and of the arm into the water. And again, working with a different swimmer in our stroke analysis coaching last week, I had a look at his entry and he was coming over and landing elbow first. And when you’re basically

landing elbow first, it means that you’ve essentially fully extended and reach forwards above the water. So by the time you go to get the hand in, you end up pressing straight down because you’ve got nowhere else to go. It’s very hard to then continue reaching forwards in the water, which is what we want to happen when you’ve done that above. So what we want to work on changing there is making sure you into fingertips first, elbow up, and then you slide the hand forwards in the water out in front of the shoulder before you start to catch. Because if you if you don’t, if you are going elbow first and the hand is just landing in last, you’ll find that that’s that hand, that arm just wants to go straight down to the bottom of the pool. So that’s another one we’ve got to check in with. And another simple drill you can do there with fins and a kickboard is just entry drill. So holding the kickboard out in front, get that hand to come in

fingers first, and that kickboard is going to force you to enter early enough so you go fingers first because if you overreach, your hand is going to hit the top of the kickboard. And you’re not going to be able to get that sliding forwards of the hand in the water. So another really simple drill that you can use to check in with that. The fourth thing I check in with here is the exit of the opposite hand. So let’s say you breathe to the left and it’s your right hand that’s reaching forwards. We want to have a look at what’s happening with this left hand as it’s finishing the last part of the pool or the press phase of the stroke. Because a lot of people tend to finish too short there. They come out before their hip. And if you’re doing that, then you’re not going to get that last bit of propulsion at the back part of your stroke that helps you reach and rotate forwards. So sometimes one of the causes of people not being able

to get that lead arm reaching forwards is they’ve just got no propulsion at the back to be able to actually get it. Because if you don’t have it there, it’s coming out short and you tend to just fall down, collapse on it a little bit. So we need to make sure that the hand is number one pressing back past the hip. So just past the hip. And number two, make sure the palm of the hand is facing behind you nearly all the way back past the hip. Because another common thing we see there is this palm of the hand ends up turning into the body and it’s sort of the hands almost slicing or cutting throughout the back. So again just missing out on that propulsion there. Because that press back past the hip works hand in hand with that reach forward and extension out there. And then that’s where you get that nice lengthening through the body and through the shoulders. So we’ve got to check the exit. The last thing that I will often check here is what’s happening

with that arm as it’s going forwards. We want to look at the what we call the starting catch position where we want to have this very slight downwards angle and primarily looking for is the wrist dropped as they’re reaching forward. So sometimes if people are reaching forwards this wrist is is dropped there like that and that elbows drop down then it doesn’t really lead to being able to continue reaching forwards because with a dropped elbow dropped wrist that arm just wants to go straight down. So I’ve got to make sure that our lead arm is in the right position and in the right shape. And so that’s having the fingers below the wrist, wrist below the elbow in a very slight downwards angle there. Because if it’s the opposite with the elbow lower than the wrist, wrist lower than the fingers then it’s it’s very hard to continue reaching forwards there in the correct way. So we want to make sure that’s happening. Now just as a

side note as a bit of a bonus there the other thing we can sort of look at is where is this shoulder as you’re reaching forward. So with good freestyle as you’ll see this shoulder is somewhere up near the cheek. Not on the cheek but near the cheek. So it ends up staying up there through that reach phase. Now with the students who are new to the sport sometimes we find that that just is dropped down. It’s not near the cheek. It ends up being well below it and again it’s just it’s one of those finer details that’s worth checking in with. So there’s a drill you can do something like shoulder to cheek scoop drill which you may have seen on our other videos before where this will encourage you to or force you basically to keep that shoulder up near the cheek as you’re going through this catch motion. Now in that drill that shoulder is probably a bit too close to the cheek. You wouldn’t actually want to keep it that close but it’s a great way just to get a feel

for that rough position that we’re trying to get into. So if you follow that checklist you can see whether or not you’re doing each those things and that can help you keep that lead arm out in front. Now the very final thing you could do here let’s say you just didn’t want to you didn’t want to go through any of that and just like what’s the what’s the quick fix or what’s a way that I could get this sorted without having to think too much about it. Well if if you want to just try something you know quickly one of the things that’s worked with a few of the swimmers that I work with is just really think of holding the glide or reaching forwards for about twice as long as what they expect. So exaggerating that reach out in front or that glide out in front. Now for example I’m thinking of one of the swimmers that I coach online when he sends me videos we were having trouble with him getting getting a good catch he was just sort

of that arm was dropping down he was too straight with the arm and he was always going too deep so what he had to do was exaggerate how long he felt like he was reaching forwards for by about twice as much so I said to him okay next next video that you send me I want you to exaggerate it to the point where you think this is way too much this is way too too much glide out in front and just send it and we’ll see what happens and when he did that it was the right amount and his timing was actually a lot better the catch was a lot better and then over the course of about three or four weeks he was able to to basically fix it and it’s so much better now so that’s kind of like the quick fix approach won’t work for everyone but for some swimmers we found that that to basically just fix it pretty quickly so a couple of ways that you can go about it I know this is a longer video but sometimes these things require a bit more detail than others

so hope you enjoyed the video and if you do enjoy this stuff check out the effortless swim membership there’s 14 days free have a look at the eight week faster freestyle course inside there because that is what most of our members are going through at the moment and we’re getting some really good results there so thanks for watching please like and subscribe and share this with anyone you know who’s trying to improve their swimming and I’ll be back with another video next week 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