3.2. How to Properly Stroke in Freestyle?

The exchange of freestyle arms should look roughly like this.
Did you notice anything unusual that surprised you or made you think you had imagined it differently? We often encounter something like this. In this execution, the glide phase on the hand is missing, and that’s wrong. Imagine how gliding looks when skating on cross-country skis – we shift our weight and ride for free on one ski, then shift weight to the other and glide for free again. We want to achieve the same glide in swimming, so the hand always extends forward just below the surface for a moment before it starts to drop and pull. This is super important to remember and try in every exercise and with every stroke, because there’s nothing harder than relearning a wrongly learned pattern later.
The exercise where hands meet at the front is called catch-up, meaning that after each stroke, the hands catch up with each other at the front before exchanging and the other hand starts pulling. This is a great exercise because it gives you time to think about each hand separately, focus on the entire stroke path, but most importantly, it forces and teaches swimmers to glide on the hand that isn’t currently swimming, even though that hand would really want to start dropping to provide support so you don’t sink. This is a survival instinct everyone has at the beginning, but try to learn this basic catch-up exercise well, even with the help of swimming aids, because it will make your life much easier.
In our swimming school, we teach swimming by first learning everything with this catch-up freestyle and only then do we start to move away from the catch-up. The resulting freestyle then looks like the front hand waits and waits, and just before the other one arrives, the first one escapes. They never meet at the front. Here we find big differences between individual swimmers – some rotate their arms like windmills, others almost swim catch-up. Unfortunately, a swimmer who rotates their arms probably doesn’t have any glide and doesn’t take advantage of the fact that the body can coast forward by inertia after each stroke, like on cross-country skis. And how can such a swimmer speed up? Only by increasing frequency even more, but that doesn’t work indefinitely. Just like on those cross-country skis, if a skier were just making small steps without gliding, they could of course make those steps faster, but without gliding, they simply won’t keep up with a fellow skier who glides beautifully. It’s necessary to find a compromise and glide as much as the body position in freestyle allows. In other words, the better the body position, the more we glide; the more sunken the body position, the more we’re forced to go into a high-frequency freestyle.
So at what moment should the gliding hand start to drop? The ideal average between a windmill and extreme catch-up is roughly at ¾ of the stroke, meaning at the moment when the hand has traveled ¾ of the entire circle and the fingers pass the head, the gliding palm can start the next stroke. Until then, it should be as if glued just below the surface.

If we add breathing to this, then during the entire breathing window, that quarter of the stroke when the palm travels from the thigh to the head and we breathe in, the other hand waits and waits just below the surface. At the moment when the hand passes the head, at those ¾ of the entire circle, several important things happen:

• the exchange of both hands begins, the one that was waiting at the surface goes into the stroke
• the head tilts toward the bottom because it has completed inhalation
• the body begins to rotate from one side directly to the other