Name: How To Swim Perfect Freestyle in 2026
Uploaded: 2026-03-23T17:05:28.000Z
Duration: 11 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

Swimming faster comes down to three things: perfect body position, catch, and breathing.

Present continuous

If you're feeling exhausted after only 50 meters, it's because you're probably making a few fundamental mistakes with your swimming technique and how you're approaching your swim training.

I'm going to show you how to swim faster using less effort.

But you can't train swimming like you do other sports, such as running.

You need to know that water is 800 times more dense than air, so when you're trying to swim fast, you have to overcome this medium that is so thick.

So if you want to swim faster, you have to do two things.

The second is then increasing propulsion.

Now, the reason you're not seeing the results that you want in the pool is because you're focused on too many different things.

Remember, the water is 800 times more dense than air, so if you want to swim faster, you really need to focus on reducing the amount of drag that you have when you swim.

I have two swimmers on the whiteboard to illustrate the point.

Now, the biggest difference you can tell is the head position, because when it comes to swimming fast, we got to make sure the head is in the right spot.

You can see swimmer B, the eyes are looking forward, and

as a result, the legs are now sinking under the water.

And this distance, the depth right there, that displacement is why swimming is so difficult, because if your legs are sagging in the water, you're going to have all this resistance pushing against your body, and

that's going to make it that much harder to swim faster using less energy.

Swimmer A, on the other hand, has their eyes pointed down, and

they're just literally hovering right over the surface.

Now, this extends from your head all the way to your toes.

It's not just your head position, but if you look here, the feet are flexed in swimmer B.

Swimmer A has the toes nice and pointed, and that's basically going to lengthen the body line.

Streamline is the fundamental body position in swimming, and

if you notice, this body position in A is very streamlined, very high in the water, reducing the amount of drag that is being created.

We want to decrease the amount of displacement that we have in the water.

Another thing you want to consider is the body position.

You want to feel like you're swimming downhill.

It's so important that when you're swimming freestyle in all the strokes, actually

you always have this neutral body position where your eyes are pointed down, your whole body is riding high in the water, unlike swimmer B, and

you're carrying that momentum that you have off the push from the wall to carry that speed, and

And when we talk about breathing, this is one of the things that most swimmers get absolutely wrong.

When you breathe in swimming, you really want to focus on keeping one eye and one ear underneath the surface of the water.

This way, as you take your breath, you can keep your body position high, and

you breathe just enough so that way you get oxygen into your mouth.

Now, when you're breathing in swimming, you don't want to overthink this.

And remember, you want to breathe in your mouth and out your nose, and

this is one of the most difficult things for beginner swimmers to understand.

Now, it's not like you're blowing your nose with a tissue.

You want to think about having a certain amount of pressure pushing out of your nose while you swim, so that way when you take your stroke and you rotate onto your side to breathe, you're actually going to have just enough exhale so that way you can breathe in your mouth, close your mouth, and

You should shoot for breathing every two strokes.

And what that means is every time your hand reaches to take a stroke, you rotate your head, you get a breath, you take one stroke, and

then on the second stroke, you rotate back to the same side to get your breath.

Now, it's optional to do what's called bilateral breathing.

This is where you're actually going to rotate to both sides by breathing every three strokes.

Now, this is okay as a more advanced skill, and

it's really going to help you balance your body position so that way you're actually breathing on both sides and you have a symmetrical stroke.

The problem with this is you're probably going to have a more dominant side, and

it's a lot easier to build rhythm by breathing on one side as opposed to trying to balance breathing every three or five strokes.

So for the more advanced swimmers, I highly recommend incorporating some amount of bilateral breathing into your training, breathing every three or every five strokes.

However, most of the people watching this should really prefer one side, and

as long as you incorporate some good drills and technique to balance out your breathing on both sides, you'll be good to just breathe on one side for most of your training.

When it comes to the mechanics of how you actually place your fingertips into the water, you want to think about having a nice, graceful hand entry.

Remember, splash is slow, so you want to slide your fingertips into the water, reach, and really extend.

The more you can extend your body, the better to a point.

You don't want to completely stop moving, but

you're really trying to reach for those extra few inches, centimeters, and

That way you can maximize your distance per stroke.

As you reach and reach and reach, you're now going to initiate the catch, and

this is what we like to call an early vertical forearm, EVF.

You can really call it whatever you want.

The point is you're trying to maximize the amount of surface area that you take with every single pull, and

That's your fingertips all the way through your forearm and into your bicep, all the way into your armpit, and

If you can engage this high elbow catch, you're going to engage a lot more muscles on your back, and

you're actually going to pull with more power and more strength.

Imagine you're doing a pull-up in the gym.

If you have your hands right next to each other or super wide, it's not going to work.

But if you have your hands just outside of your shoulders, that's where you're going to get the most lat engagement, and

you're going to really engage these muscles right here to pull the most water with the most amount of power, and

then carry that speed into the next stroke as you extend your body through the water.

Now, when you're swimming, you don't want to have your hands like this.

The water is going to go through all of those gaps.

You also don't want to have your hand in a cup position.

You're actually decreasing the total amount of surface area that you have to pull the water.

Instead, you want to make sure your hand is relaxed but in a powerful position.

If you're sitting at a table right now, I want you to put your hand right on the table, open your fingers super wide.

You're probably going to feel a lot of control, but

according to physics, all the water is going to go through that, and

On the converse side, if you squeeze your fingertips together, push your hand on the table, and

You don't have a lot of stability and control.

It's actually going to increase the total surface area of which you can pull, and