How to Swim: Advanced Freestyle

Olympic athlete Dan Kutler provides tips for improving freestyle swimming techniques.

Dan Kutler: Hi! My name is Dan Kutler and right now we are going to learn how to swim Advanced Freestyle. Male Speaker: When trying to take your free style to the next level. You need to think about your head and your spine being in axis, on which your body, your shoulders and your hips rotates around. Try to keep your head as still as possible and just let your shoulders and your hips, rotate around your head and spine axis. Unless of course I am trying to get a breath in which case you definitely want to attach your head to that rotation out of the water. But unless I am trying to get a breath, my head does not sway with the sway of my shoulders and hips. Keep it very relaxed. Keep the head down and just detach your head and spine from the rotation of your shoulders and hips. The head is a very heavy part of the body, it's about 30 pounds, so it doesn't make sense to lift it out of the water. The less that you fight the water and the more you give yourself over to the water, the better swimmer you are going to be. That is why, I want you to let your head relax in the water when you are swimming. Contrary to popular belief which states that you should sort of keep the water at eye level. You actually want to just let the water flow over the back of your head. Let the water support your head, it's going to make your stroke a lot smoother and you will use a lot less energy. Exceptions to this of course, so when you do need to look ahead just to get an eye line just to where you are going and when you happened to be sprinting at much higher speeds in which case your head is just going to sort of naturally rise the water which is fine. But even then let it rise on its own, don't force it, don't lift it up. Good freestylers always have one thing in common and that is their elbows are always higher than their hand, whether it's in the recovery phase like in this shot as you can see my elbow rises and my hand is underneath, my hand follows underneath, or in this shot where the hand enters the water and as you can see my hand drops but my elbow stays high. And what this allows you to do is really grab onto the water, really grab onto a big mass of water, whereas if your arms were straight, they wouldn't be able to, they would just kind of slide through the water like sticks. So the other way to improve your freestyle stroke is to have a strong kick. You want to have a six-beat kick, that means for every arm rotation you are kicking six times. You don't really have to think about it mathematically like that when you are doing, but just try to have a strong kick as you can see in this shot. It's going to require a little bit of effort, the legs or the biggest muscles in your body, they use up a lot of oxygen. But once your body gets used to, once you develop your cardiovascular system enough, so that it can afford to kick that strong and throughout your workout, you are going to be a much better swimmer. Dan Kutler: Okay, so those are a few tips that you can use to help advance your freestyle stroke. Next, we are going to move on to the breaststroke.