1.7. Breathing Frequency: Continuous Exhalation or Holding your Breath?

What is breathing frequency? Well, clearly, how often you take a breath. It’s good to know that in crawl we never breathe on every stroke – that is, to the left and then immediately to the right.
Everyone needs to find their own breathing frequency, but the most common is breathing every second stroke.
That means if it’s easier for you to breathe on the left, you’ll breathe in with your left arm stroke and exhale with every right arm stroke.
If breathing every second stroke feels too rushed, you can try breathing every third stroke – alternating left and right breathing sides.
And if every third stroke still feels too quick, you can try every fourth stroke, though that’s not generally recommended – it’s more for connoisseurs who enjoy pushing their limits.
Still, it’s a great drill for improving lung capacity.
I’d say about 2/3 of swimmers breathe every second stroke, and 1/3 every third stroke.
Triathletes might breathe slightly more often on the third stroke because they rotate their arms faster.

Now, about the intensity of exhaling, what do you think:
Should you exhale continuously, or is it better to hold your breath and then exhale forcefully? This question only makes sense if you’re breathing every third, fourth, or fifth crawl stroke. If you breathe every second stroke, we don’t deal with this issue. To help you visualize what this means, let’s look a bit closer.
In books and videos, you’ll come across two approaches to exhaling. The first one is a slow, continuous exhale — you exhale throughout all the non-breathing strokes.
In other words, if you breathe regularly every third stroke, you inhale on the first, then exhale slowly through the second and third strokes.
I must not exhale all my air at the beginning and run out of breath by the end of the two exhaling strokes — the breathing needs to be really evenly distributed, and a long continuous exhale should flow smoothly into the next inhale, and the inhale should smoothly lead into the next exhale.
The second approach is the held-breath exhale, where you exhale only during the last stroke just before inhaling.
In other words, if I’m inhaling regularly every third stroke, then on the first stroke I inhale, on the second stroke I hold my breath, and on the third stroke I exhale forcefully.
So what’s the correct way?
Competitive practice says clearly — both.
I asked several dozen competitive swimmers and triathletes, and the answers were almost evenly split (slightly in favor of continuous exhalation).
It’s definitely worth trying both options—you might discover which one suits you better. I like to include this exercise in our group classes, and the results are not only 50:50 for both options, but swimmers are often quite surprised and confused that someone might prefer the other method.
However, what I’ve observed is that breath-holding—the second approach—can help swimmers who struggle with body position. Those who tend to sink more beneath the surface benefit from holding air in the lungs longer, because the air helps with buoyancy. This improves floating at the surface and leads to smaller fluctuations in the gliding position. And that’s exactly what we want—the body shouldn’t be bouncing up and down.