2.1. Why is the streamlined body position important?

Floating – does it sound like a baby swim exercise to you?
To me, kind of, but right after comfortable breathing, I would rank it as the most important skill, thanks to which swimming won’t be hell but a breeze.
What do you think affects how much you struggle in swimming the most? Body position in the water. Every centimeter your body sinks unnecessarily deep means you’re fighting the water. You’re pushing yourself through the water like an icebreaker.
Imagine you have to walk 50 meters at a brisk pace. Easy. Now imagine you have to walk 50 meters briskly up to your neck in water 1.5 meters deep. How would that go? Probably badly, because with every step, you’d be fighting resistance like a maniac.
Competitive swimmers, who have a perfectly horizontal body position, glide across the surface like a thrown frog.
During training, we sometimes used small parachutes in the water, which we pulled behind us to increase resistance. They were parachutes about 30×30 cm in size, which is much smaller than shoulder width and sometimes only about bellybutton depth for an adult male, and yet with those parachutes our crawl speed dropped from 1:10 per 100 meters to 1:30 — that’s more than 25%!
If you currently swim 2 minutes per 100 meters of crawl, improving only your body position in the water could bring you down to 1:30. For free. With no effort, no strength training, no endurance work. Just lying there better.
I dare say that beginner swimmers — even advanced triathletes — have their body position up to 50 centimeters deeper than competitive swimmers. That means they plow through the water half-submerged.
How easy do you think that is? Probably not very.
Sure, you’ll learn to swim somehow at any depth. But if you don’t improve your body position through training, neither a perfect stroke, nor a perfect kick, nor perfect breathing, nor ultra-strong endurance will save you.
Practicing floating doesn’t hurt, you won’t overexert yourself doing it, and what you learn, you’ll never forget – it will come back to you even after several months or even years of not swimming.
It’s the best price/performance ratio out there.

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