Have you ever heard an expression 'fighting the water’? Many of the common mistakes among swimmers are a result of poor adaptation to the water. Swimming training should always focus on improving this aspect of swimming technique. At the same time, there are a few things even experienced swimmers do that are obstacles to your progress in the pool. Here are 4 common swimming mistakes.

High Head Position

Basically, you need to avoid high head position if you want to swim faster. We see over and over again that swimmers (of all levels!) have this problem and tend to both rises it to breathe and to orient themselves. We’ve also found a perfect metaphor for you to think during the workout and it’s by legendary Garrett McCaffrey:
“Imagine you are a whale, there is a blowhole on your neck, and you need that hole accessible at all times so you can breathe or you will die. If your neck is angled you closed the hole and you can’t breathe. You need to position your head so your neck is at the right angle.”

Shortening Your Stroke

This problem is most visible when swimmers are tired. what we do during the long training is we make the hand ext way before our arms are fully extended back by the hips.
It’s easy to see how this shortens distance per stroke and the length of the pull so jug gets even more tired while swimming slower.

The easiest to implement tip is to simply slow down your stroke and do drills where you exaggerate the end of the stroke.

Weak kick and Over-kick

You might have noticed during your kick sets that you are barely moving and it’s often caused by two connected problems – weak kick and over-kick. First of all, you need your ankles flexible to avoid calf cramps. The second thing is the amplitude of the kicks that should not be too wide so it doesn’t affect your overall body position. The third thing is the sync between your kicks and your stroke and breathing. As far es energy consumption go a weak kick often results in swimmers doing a lot of kicking and this simply won’t help you at all.

Flat Freestyling

This happens especially often with beginners and fixed early will significantly improve your freestyle technique and speed. Hips don’t lie as we are reminded by Shakira and the same rule is true in swimming. Hip rotation synced with your shoulder movement results in longer, more effective strokes so be aware of it during your practice to make it a habit.

To help you out with this you can use a simple drill where you start on one side with the bottom arm in front of the head stretched out and the other arm on the hip. After six kicks you switch sides and so on.

It is important to do technique-focused drills to create muscle memory for some of the aspects of swimming but remember to eventually try to bring them all together as this will give you the best results and will maximize your effectiveness in the pool.

 Make your Kick&Drills count with Swimmo

While practicing the techniques we talk about in this post you can still measure them and have them saved in your mobile logbook thanks to Swimmo Training Watch and App. Swimmo is able to track those type of exercises thanks to its Kick and Drill Mode and wireless synchronization with the Swimmo App.

Kamil Market Development Expert at Swimmo

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