1.7. Breathing Frequency: Continuous Exhale or Hold your Breath?

What is breathing frequency? Well, it’s how often we breathe in. It’s good to know that in freestyle we never breathe on every stroke, meaning left and then immediately right.
Everyone needs to find their own breathing frequency, but the most common is breathing every second stroke.
This means if you prefer breathing to the left, you’ll breathe in with every left arm stroke and breathe out with every right arm stroke.
If breathing every second stroke feels too rushed for you, you can try breathing every third stroke, which means alternating between left and right sides for inhalation.
And if breathing every third stroke still feels too rushed, you can try breathing every fourth stroke, but I don’t recommend this – it’s more for connoisseurs who enjoy the suffering of air deprivation. However, it’s a great exercise for increasing lung capacity during training.
I would say that about 2/3 of swimmers breathe every second stroke and about 1/3 breathe every third stroke. Among triathletes, breathing every third stroke might be slightly more common because they rotate their arms faster.

Now regarding the intensity of exhalation, what do you think:
Should exhalation be continuous, 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 freestyle stroke. When breathing every second stroke, it’s not an issue. To help you visualize this better, let’s look at it more closely.
In books and videos, you’ll encounter two approaches to exhalation. The first is slow continuous exhalation, where you exhale during all non-breathing strokes. In other words, if you breathe regularly every third stroke, you inhale on the first stroke and continuously exhale during the second and third strokes.
You shouldn’t exhale all your air at the beginning and have nothing left by the end of those two exhalation strokes. It must be truly evenly distributed – a long continuous exhale that smoothly transitions into inhalation, and inhalation that smoothly transitions into exhalation.
The second approach is held exhalation, where you exhale only during the last stroke right before inhalation.
In other words, if you’re again breathing regularly every third stroke, you inhale on the first stroke, hold the air in your lungs during the second stroke, and forcefully exhale on the third stroke.
So which is correct?
Competitive practice clearly shows – both.
I asked several dozen competitive swimmers and triathletes, and the responses are almost fifty-fifty (slightly favoring continuous exhalation).
It’s definitely worth trying both variations; you might find that one suits you better. I like to include this exercise in our group lessons, and the results are not only 50:50 for both variations, but swimmers are always surprised and confused that someone could prefer the other method.
However, what I’ve observed is that held exhalation, the second approach, can help swimmers with poorer body position. Those who are more submerged under the surface benefit because air provides buoyancy, so holding it in the lungs longer supports better floating on the surface, resulting in fewer fluctuations in the streamlined position. And that’s exactly what we want – to prevent the body from bobbing up and down.