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The thing about freestyle is that it can be very demanding on your body. unlike backstroke where you can breathe as often as you want or even breaststroke when you get to breath every stroke, most freestylers learn to breathe on every third breathe. This requires timing and practice and a great deal of breath control. It makes sense then to learn ways to make your stroke as efficient as possible.
Extending your arm that much further allows you to grab more water and have a longer stroke, both of with give you more propulsion. with more propulsion your travel further with one stroke and you therefore use less energy. The use of less energy allows you to be able to travel faster and further.
Below is a movie I found that does a good job of showing a drill that is very helpful in training in good body rotation. My only proviso would be that I would personally prefer that, for a relatively new swimmer or someone who has only just mastered the correct breathing technique, more but not all of this drill should be done with a kick board.
Aside from the above I think it is a great movie.
Simple really.
Freestyle Body Roll. Making It To The Other End Easier.
The thing about freestyle is that it can be very demanding on your body. unlike backstroke where you can breathe as often as you want or even breaststroke when you get to breath every stroke, most freestylers learn to breathe on every third breathe. This requires timing and practice and a great deal of breath control. It makes sense then to learn ways to make your stroke as efficient as possible.
Remain Flat in The Water
New swimmers tend to remain very flat in the water. This is great, it helps maintain your streamline and stability in the water. It also means that there is less tendency to zig zag in the water through over reaching, but once you have mastered remaining flat in the water you need to improve on it.Introduce A Freestyle Body Roll
One of the things that you can do to improve your Freestyle is to introduce a Body Roll. A Body roll is the rotation of your body along your spine as you swim. It is important that as you learn to do this you make sure that you don't introduce over reaching but rather you roll your body so that you can then extend your arm that little bit further.Extending your arm that much further allows you to grab more water and have a longer stroke, both of with give you more propulsion. with more propulsion your travel further with one stroke and you therefore use less energy. The use of less energy allows you to be able to travel faster and further.
Below is a movie I found that does a good job of showing a drill that is very helpful in training in good body rotation. My only proviso would be that I would personally prefer that, for a relatively new swimmer or someone who has only just mastered the correct breathing technique, more but not all of this drill should be done with a kick board.
My Reasoning
My reason for thinking that is: if you look at the movie you will note that the swimmer is over rotating their head slightly when they are taking their breath. Such an action would not be a problem to an already competent swimmer that is only trying to improve their stroke but to someone who is not so confident you could end up practicing in the head action to your breathing and create more problems than you solve.Aside from the above I think it is a great movie.
Simple really.
Enjoy
Richard
Richard
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