If You Want Better Breathing, You Need To...

At least where I’m at, the weather is starting slowly get nicer.

While I get outside regardless of what the weather is like, it’s certainly more enjoyable when the weather is a little more forgiving.

I need my fresh air.

Speaking of which, we’re going to touch on one of my favorite topics again- breathing.

Breathing is critical for a lot of things, mostly living;).

That’s relevant to swimming, because priority NUMBER 1 while swimming is getting air.

EVERYTHING is going to go out the window if you don’t get air.

That’s why you see all sorts of breathing mistakes.

The one we’re going to talk about is breathing.

There are two types of late-

1. Starting the breath late

2. Finishing the breath late

The latter is one that I have been personally guilty of in the past, and it actually caused a lot of problems.

I could swim a LOT faster without breathing, and everything fell apart when I did.

Of course, I had to breathe, so this was an issue.

Worse still, it was messing up my shoulders because it affected my arm timing, and that’s pretty common.

It also affected my rhythm- I was smooth without breathing and…not good with breathing.

Bad breathing resulted in a lot of slow swimming, pain, and tiring swimming!

See why breathing is important?

It’s when I took the time to slow down and get the breathing integrated into my stroke that things changed, and ALL of these problems got a lot better.

Rather than just breathing pretty much when I wanted to, I had to learn to breathe within the rhythm of the rotation.

Here’s how I did it.

While both breathing mistakes I mentioned above occur, we’re going to tackle them with the same exercise because the solution is the same for both.

It forces you to breathe with the rotation of the body, and you return the head with the rotation of the body.

Now, the rotation is a lot bigger than normal, but the breath is also a lot bigger than normal.

When both get smaller, you’re right where you need to be.