Effective breathing is in the balance

Juliano Teruel's top five challenges to breathing in freestyle

The most common question for triathletes in swimming efficiently usually involves something with breathing.

In freestyle, it is the first step to get your body position right. Next, for many, you throw in breathing and everything goes out the window! This has to do with lack of balance, using your head and neck instead of your core to breathe.

Here are some of the top challenges in learning how to breathe in freestyle, along with the solutions.

1. Are you not getting enough air?

There are a couple of reasons this typically happens in freestyle. First, you have to make sure you breathe out all of your air before you rotate to take a breath. While learning, some people try to exhale and inhale while they are rolling to the side for air. Simply is not enough time for this! Your exhalations should only be in the water. At first the timing may seem difficult, but eventually you will get used to it. Second, you may be sinking as you breathe. Make sure you are rolling to the side to breathe, and not rotating your head and looking straight up. Also make sure you maintain your kick while rotating will help from sinking.

2. Arms sink while taking a breath?

This is balance issue mostly. While you breathe to one side, your other arm should be extending. For a lot of swimmers, this extended arm pushes down into the water and they sink while trying to inhale. The side kicking drills will also help to improve this.

3. Sacrificing speed because of "pause" while breathing?

A typical incident may occur, do you feel like you are cruising along and then you take a breath and it feels like you have just lost all your momentum? To help this, when you breathe, focus first on breathing to the side, then on having your mouth parallel to the water, instead of over the water. It might take a while to master that, but once you do, it will take care of the pause, and improve your speed as well.

4. Having hard time breathing while navigating in a race?

You need to look up to see where you are going, and at the same time you need to breath. How can you do both? Start with bilateral breathing (breathing on both sides every 3 strokes). That will help you to see where you are without lifting your head up as much. When you need to lift your head up to sight, try not to look straight ahead as this will make your hips sink, throw you off balance and fight water resistance as your legs sink with your hips. Instead, take a quick peek at your target, roll to the side to breath, and bring your head right back down, hips and legs up into horizontal position.

5. Are you sucking water in while taking a breath?

In a race, the waves may cause the sucking of water instead of air (bilateral breathing will help). The drills to practice to improve balance and avoid this unpleasant occurrence are the side kicking drills and the one-arm drills. To perform the one-arm drill, swim a regular full stroke with one arm while your other arm rests at your side. Breathe on the opposite side of the stroking arm. This is a hard drill to perform and takes some practice, but it pays off.

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