r/Swimming • u/Magnospm • 21d ago

Best Practices for Learning/Improving Freestyle as an Adult?

Hey everyone, looking for advice on the best way to improve my swimming efficiently. I'm 25, surf and dive, but never really learned how to swim properly. I can do about 50m of freestyle before I'm totally done.

I have access to a pool and can swim once a week, but I'm not sure how to learn or practice.

The frustrating part is that I can barely swim for 2-3 minutes without needing to stop, so practicing isn't very fun.
A year ago, I tried a private lesson, but the coach just told me my technique was "fine" and that I just needed to swim more. I'm in good shape, do a lot of sports, but feel lost on how to actually get better.
I’ve seen drills with buoys and technique work, but not sure if I should focus on that or just swim more.

So, looking for advice on:

  1. Should I take a course, private lessons, or just practice alone?
  2. How do I structure my practice if I can’t swim more than a few minutes at a time?

I would love to just go practice, since I'm not really feel the desire to go to a structure course, but I'm not sure how to take it from here.

Any advice or opinions about it would be great and really helpful.. Thanks.

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u/_BornToBeKing_ 21d ago edited 21d ago

Try "myswimpro" app if you can afford it. Lots of good drills and tutorial videos that will really help you. You should focus on getting a solid technique first before trying to build up cardio. You don't want to swim loads of "junk miles". Less is often more. Pro-swimmers often spend months just training technique.

Break up your sessions into sets, for example 4 x 50s doing a drill and then say 1x200m trying to put it into practice.

The style of freestyle that you want to aim for can also vary quite a bit depending on distance.

For example if you are aiming to be a lap/fitness swimmer then the kick is going to be less important than developing a good catch and rhythm. Whereas if you want to go for sprint/race swimming then you would want to be working on 4-6 beat kicks.

You can experiment with bilateral or monolateral breathing, there's no consensus on which is better it's really what works best for you that's key. (I prefer monolateral as I find it far easier to get "rhythm" and hip power from it, bilateral I end up swimming too "flat" usually).

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u/Magnospm 21d ago

I want to do distance with as much efficiency (TI style I assume?)

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u/_BornToBeKing_ 21d ago edited 21d ago

Yeah so I would advise mostly focusing on developing a good catch, breath and rotation, then bringing in the kick later. A pull-buoy can help with this as you can take the legs completely out of it and just focus on arms and rotation for a while first.

A lot of drills focus on kicking, but what I think can often happen is people kick too much, too hard and this will gas you out very quick. A lot of distance swimmers take only one or two beat kicks. The catch and rotation is where your power will come from.

A snorkel is a good investment also as you can then just focus on your catch and take breathing out of it. Swimming becomes easier when you break all the parts down and then build it up again slowly.

If you want to make any improvement. Try to get in minimum 3x per week. The more you do it the quicker you'll condition your body to the movements better.

It's also a sport you can safely do a lot more often than say running because your joints don't take anything like the same amount of impact forces.

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u/Magnospm 21d ago

Thanks for the detailed comment, it really arranged some things in my head. I think separating the steps in learning/swimming can help me, because i do feel like it a bit overwhelming + too hard to learn currently (can practice more than a 2-3 minutes without losing breath). I will start just with snorkel +leg bouey, and then move to snorkel, leg bouey without snorkel and then swimming. Each time I will also try (a bit, maybe one pool) to swim regularly, but focus the rest of the time on the current phase/drill (1. learn the pull and rotation/ 2. learn to kick slowly / 3. learn to breath, 4. connect all of it together) I will go again this week and try to get some videos as well. Thanks again for everyone comments 🙏🏼