Freestyle Technique: Reducing Drag

Courtesy of Gary Hall Sr., 10-time World Record Holder, 3-time Olympian, 1976 Olympic Games US Flagbearer and The Race Club co-founder.

It is well known that swimmers cannot feel their drag forces while swimming. There is simply too much going on for the human brain to comprehend all the forces happening at once in the pool. Swimming is analogous to riding your bicycle into a 20 mph head wind, yet not able to feel the wind in your face. Regardless of working hard, little forward progress will be made.

While generating strong propulsion from your kick and pull, and timing that with strong coupling motions, like shoulder rotation and arm recovery, is important in developing speed, so is reducing drag.

Here are ten great suggestions on how you can reduce your drag with your freestyle technique. Instead of swimming like a slug, with these changes in your freestyle technique, you will transform yourself from a slug into a slithery eel.

1. Get your head down. Your head should be slightly under water after your breath. That means you are looking straight down, not forward. Become a submarine, not a barge.

2. Take a low-profile breath. Many swimmers lift the crown of their head for their breath. The higher your head elevates for the breath, the more drag you will cause. Keep the crown of your head pointing forward during your breath to reduce drag.

3. Hyper-streamline off your walls. Don’t use a regular streamline position off your walls, use a hyper-streamline. That means you extend your chest out, keep your chin on your chest, arms behind your head, squeeze your elbows together, hyperextend your shoulders, stack your hands and squeeze your thumb and fingers together. If you are comfortable in this position, you are not in hyper-streamline.

4. Fingertips up, not down. Once upon a time, swimmers were taught to slide their hands into the water in this order: fingers, wrists, elbows. Not so with the new freestyle technique. Rather than driving the fingertips down, elite swimmers today are lifting their hands during the recovery, entering them into the water only after the arm is fully extended. There is a lot less drag in air than there is in water.

5. Squeeze the fingers and thumb together. Once the hand enters the water, most swimmers will relax the wrist and fingers. From the flow of water, the fingers will spread out, the wrist may flare out, or worse, bend backward….all of which will increase drag. Squeeze your fingers and thumb together before entry and keep them that way, with the fingers pointing forward, until you start your catch.

6. Pop your elbow up to start your pull. The high elbow pull is critical to reduce drag in the freestyle pull. Rather than starting your pull with your entire arm, try to keep your elbow near the surface while dropping your hand and forearm, keeping your pulling hand just inside your elbow. This awkward pulling motion will help reduce drag in your races over 200 meters.

7. Maintain a tighter, faster kicking motion. Over bending your knees is one of the leading causes of increased drag in freestyle. Learn to kick correctly by using fins with an elastic band placed around your legs, just below both knees. With the band on, you won’t be able to over bend your knees.

8. Point your toes. Whether kicking or gliding off the wall, the toes need to stay pointed most of the time. When the feet are hanging down, it will add 30-40% more drag than while pointed, depending on your speed.

9.  Elevate your core. Many swimmers try to power their way through the water by rearing their shoulders back, causing the head to elevate and the hips to sink. Keep your head down by engaging and lifting your core. Your hands will help keep the front end of your body elevated at the start of the pull. The air in your lungs will help keep your chest elevated from the added buoyancy. The feet (with a decent kick) should help keep your legs elevated. From the chest to the feet, however, you need to lift your core to keep that part of your body elevated.

10. Avoid the out sweep and in sweep in your pull. If you allow your hand to move outside your elbow during your pull, or if you allow your hand to move well under your body during the pull, you will lose propulsion and increased drag. Neither will help you. The only two forces which really help are downward forces at the beginning of the pull (lifting your body up) and backward forces, which generate propulsion.

Here’s to the new slithery eel!

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Gary Hall, Sr., Technical Director and Head Coach of The Race Club (courtesy of TRC)

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