1.1. Why is exhaling into the water so important?

Can you swim 20 meters of crawl and then barely catch your breath?
Then I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you.
The bad news is that not a single breath you took along the way was correct. You only managed to swim it because those 20 meters took about 20–30 seconds and you simply held your breath the whole time.
The good news is that this is the same issue for 10 out of 10 crawl beginners. And I’ll now show you that if you do it the right way, you’ll soon be able to swim 50, 100, or even 1000 meters of continuous crawl and feel like you’re just going for an easy jog.
Breathing into the water is the first and most important thing you need to learn when you’re starting to swim. You can’t begin to learn anything else until you can breathe properly – if you’re gasping for air after a few meters, that’s what needs fixing first.
At the beginning it will be tough. Water might burn your nose, your nose might sting, you might feel cold, you’ll struggle with the crawl – but give it your full effort, because these growing pains will pass quickly.
Only once you learn to breathe properly can you start focusing on arms, legs, rotation, speed, endurance, and so on – not before.
So, now let’s dive into how to actually do it.
In swimming, you inhale above water but always exhale into the water.
You simply don’t have time for both inhale and exhale above water – you only have time for the inhale, and even that’s limited. So, it’s necessary to separate inhale from exhale and learn to exhale underwater. In the next lessons, we’ll learn the rhythm – how often we breathe, how much air we need, and whether we breathe through the nose or the mouth to avoid gasping.
How long will it take to learn breathing?
For some, it will feel completely natural, and they’ll fly through all 10 breathing levels from easiest to hardest in a flash.
These people will learn crawl much faster – in a few weeks they’ll already be swimming efficiently.
For others, breathing might feel very unnatural, and they’ll get stuck on basic exercises for hours. In that case, all other topics (arms, legs, rotation) will have to wait until breathing feels natural too.
I’d say that getting comfortable with exhaling into the water shouldn’t take more than 3 × 20-minute sessions.