arm on your hip and your legs as straight as they can be. Point your toes! Close your eyes and RELAX! Gently exhale and let the water support you. You should feel your top hand on your hip out of the water. If you want to, you may kick a little, but keep your toes pointed and DON'T BEND YOUR KNEES! Kick very lightly from your butt. If you move backwards, that's OK. Forward or backwards motion isn't the goal here. Also, if your legs start to sink, that's only natural. Drive your head down and put your ear against your armpit. This will bring your legs up a bit. Let's not kid ourselves here - having strong abs, obliques and back (a strong core) is paramount here! Strong core muscles will help to keep you straight. The off-season is the perfect time to get into Pilates. It is without a doubt, the best "strength training" you can do for your swimming!So how do you breathe? It's easy, and yet, rather hard. SLOWLY rotate your head up (AND ONLY YOUR HEAD), by the neck alone, and take a breath of air. Then SLOWLY rotate back down again. NOTHING ELSE SHOULD MOVE! Keep your hands in fists (FistGlove trainers really help). The temptation will be to use your hands to press down to support you as you rotate your head up. But this is exactly the thing we are trying to avoid and correct here! And what happens if you don't get the balance right? You'll probably sink. SO SINK! It's better to go under in the shallow end of the pool while maintaining the side-balance position than to lose it and use your hands to breathe. If you have to drown, THEN DROWN! You won't actually drown; you'll just stand up, breathe, and try again. Proper balance form under water is far better than poor form above it. Keep practicing (on each side) until you can maintain the side-balance position with NO BODY MOVEMENT for about two minutes. This is the foundation for all swimming.
This means that the longer you make your body (tips of your fingers all the way to your toes) the less drag your body will create. Long skinny sailboats are faster than shorter ones. How do I know this? I’m also a sailor! You are not a motorboat which goes so fast that it can plane up and above the water’s surface. You are a displacement boat and you need to move water out of the way in order to swim forward. SO LENGTHEN YOUR BODY! How? First, make your reach as far as it can go. Think of getting something off of the very top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. Do you face it shoulder square and reach up? No. You twist your body to one side and extend your shoulder. There you go - now you can reach it. Swimming is the exact same way. It's that twist (or roll) and the extension from you shoulders and lats. For an extra inch or two of reach, twist your hips in much the same way that a belly dancer would, one hip higher than the other. It’s from this ‘core’ that comes great swimming. So don’t ignore that Pilates class at the gym! Swimmers don't have huge arm muscles or triceps; they have great back, abdominal and oblique muscles! So makes sure that each and every reach is as far out in front of you as you can. It's a good stretch too. Go into the weight room before your swim and go to the chin-up bar. Grab it with one hand, twist, and let your body hang for 20-seconds. Do your belly dancer hip twist and see how far down you can go. It’s a great pre-swim stretch.
You have to try and maintain a slim, sleek, torpedo shape. Back and legs straight as a board. Think of your body swimming through a narrow two foot-wide-tube. Most swimmers' legs tend to sink. You need to overcome this by two things: First, improve your back, abs and oblique core muscles. I can’t stress enough how good exercises like Pilates are for swimming! And second by lowering your head and pressing your chest down, you raise your legs. This is known as “downhill swimming”.Unusual Training Tip: Try to look at your feet! That's right. As you swim, I want you to try and look under and behind you. This is going to drive your head down, get your feet up and make you more streamlined in the water. Your chin should be against your chest.