How to Improve Your Swimming Technique
, by Sandesh Prasannakumar, 7 min reading time
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, by Sandesh Prasannakumar, 7 min reading time
Mastering any sport takes discipline, focus, and sacrifice. The same is true for swimming. With its variation in styles and strokes, perfecting the swimming technique for each stroke takes a lot of time and practice. Professional or elite swimmers usually start training at an early age, building their bodies and lifestyles to match an endurance athlete’s. Swimming, even for amateurs, is a great exercise that requires minimum preparation in terms of equipment or accessibility. You can swim in any water body, and it has minimum risk of injury, unlike other forms of exercise. The water acts as a natural cushion for weakened or injured joints. It also has a huge impact on your cardiovascular health.
There are always the basics that you need to learn before you can master an art or a sport. These skills might seem rudimentary to some, but they are the first hurdles any professional swimmer has to overcome before becoming an expert in their style.
This is the most fundamental skill that every swimmer needs to learn to be able to become a professional. Being able to stably float on the surface of the water and tread without making too many big movements is the most time-consuming part of this sport. In some countries, it is believed that human beings have the innate ability to swim; only our fear or inhibition of water hinders many of us from relearning it. In these countries, parents let their toddlers tread in deep waters on their own and watch them miraculously learn how to float with minimum assistance.
It might not seem much when you are an adult, but to ensure minimum to no injury, beginners should always start with the awareness of how to get in and out of the water safely. They should be made aware of the risks of certain movements, dives, and playfulness in water. Especially children should be taught how to quickly get out of the water, even without the help of a ladder.
The biggest fear for those who hesitate to learn this life skill is not being able to breathe underwater. The trick here is to learn how to release your breath underwater, come out of it to take a full breath, and hold it in to release it again when inside. This skill builds a lot of confidence and capacity in swimmers.
Swimming is a sport that requires movement from your entire body - your back muscles, legs, arms, chest, etc. Ensuring that all of them work in tandem with each other is a skill that later helps in developing control of your muscles to switch from one style to another.
There are four basic strokes in swimming. However, a few combination styles have been developed by masters in the field over the years. Once you have mastered the basic styles, you can then go on to learn these combination styles to enhance your skills.
This is the image most people get when swimming is mentioned. You keep your body parallel to the water and make a windmill-like motion with your hands to propel yourself forward, with your legs moving in up-down motion to keep you floating. While moving forward, you also have to remember to draw breaths by lifting your head up at regular intervals.
Here are a few tips to master this stroke:
For leisure, this style of swimming is the most relaxing; however, it requires quite a bit of skill and technique to develop professional-level speed.
If not freestyle, breaststroke is the next choice for beginners and children to start learning swimming. The simple loop of pull, breathe, kick, and glide sums up the basics of this stroke.
This style is known to be the most difficult to learn and master. You have to masterfully coordinate the timing and rhythm together to execute a powerful butterfly stroke.
You can use the above-mentioned swimming techniques to improve each stroke to gain speed and better movement. Whether you are a professional or an amateur, these tips will help you swim in the right manner to gain maximum expertise. You can start slow by picking up easier styles like the freestyle or breaststroke and move on to the more difficult butterfly stroke. Keep your breathing and arm positions in check to increase stamina and pace. Keep yourself updated with new tricks of the trade to improve your game.
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