How to Do Breathing Drills for Freestyle Swimming

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to Expert Village. I'm Phillip Toriello from the Avila Bay Athletic Club. Breathing drills for freestyle are really quite important to help maximize your V02 capacity and most importantly, to keep that head down and focused. When you are on land, we are breathing as comfortably as we wish to. However, in freestyle, and most in particular with freestyle, your face is in the water and it's rather uncomfortable for a lot of people who aren't used to swimming (but, the more often you swim, the easier it will become and you'll be able to loosen up a little bit and adapt to the water environment). One very important drill that beginner swimmers can use is simply in their own bath tub or in a jacuzzi or a swimming pool and that's simply putting your face in the water, blowing your bubbles out nice and slow and turning your face to the side. I highly recommend this particular drill to help people who aren't as used to swimming, acclimate to the pool environment. For the more competitive swimmer, breathing drills would include the 3-5-7 drill during which you'll utilize the pool buoy. The 3-5-7 drill is something that you can use in a twenty five yard pool or even a fifty meter pool. It basically provides the opportunity to do a length breathing every three strokes, to do a length breathing every five strokes, to do a length breathing every seven. Again, this is just really working on your aerobic thresholds and kind of pushing those limits to help your body maximize it's use of the oxygen you are taking in with every breath.