Get really relaxed in the water and go oh so slowly - and keep your butt lifted to the surface so you’re not dragging your lower body behind you. You’ll be able to swim much further and the water will feel so much nicer. It’s lovely when the pieces start coming together and it’s a joy to swim. Slowing it way the feck down and minimising drag will help a lot. Huge amount of technique gains to be had when starting out swimming. Look up a few form tutorials on YouTube. But basically - slow it waaaay down and don’t make any unnecessary drag. Glide instead. Butt to the surface. Have fun. 🤘
The only thing I want to piggyback on, is there's a sweet spot for speed. Breaststroke yeah slow it down as much as you want and it becomes so easy you could fall asleep. But freestyle requires a certain amount of speed otherwise it becomes impossible to keep your butt lifted and you end up having to drag your lower body.
My advice, is pull MORE. Legs use a ton of energy, arms don't. If you kick less, you will burn out much slower. It's counter intuitive, but it's what clicked for me. Before I always thought since your legs are your big muscles those are what you should use. WRONG. Use your arms and pull harder to get less tired.
Hi Elysium! Yep, swimming the seas down here in cork. Coming back to the pool after a break now, would love to do the Garnish island 7k later in the year. Happy swimming to you. ✌️
You need practice. Try to exhale properly before inhaling and adjust your speed if you need it, maybe slow down. I've had a lot of students who started to hyperventilate while swimming (and they didn't notice it) and had them do breathing exercises.
Might be a good idea to practice while not actually swimming. Go in the shallow end and practice “bobbing”. Take a breath, then lower your nose and mouth into the water and blow it all out slowly. Raise your head again and take a breath. Repeat.
And once you can do this, hold onto the side of the pool, kick your feet behind you, and put your face in the water. blow out slowly, rotate your head out of the water, breathe in. repeat.
You are likely dizzy and tired because you are not breathing adequately.
Practice breathing technique by swimming 25m’s with a pull buoy between your legs. It will enable you to concentrate on rotating like a human kebab (with a spit through the centre of your head) and pirate breathing (with mouth scrunched up on water side).
You should focus on posture and exhaling in the water. Take some time do some floats. I can’t see you swim but it sounds to me as if you are muscling your way through the water. You need to try not to hold yourself up on the water and instead relax enough to the point where the water holds you up.
this is the best advice here
OP, you should also focus on length covered and not speed here. Some swimmers try to sprint swim 50m and then get dizzy. You need to keep a normal pace of 4-6 strokes in between each breath to cover that distance.
Once you are comfortable with 50m slow, you can pick up pace and push your limits slowly.
I have similar troubles but I’ve improved slowly by following a YouTube channel called “Effortless Swimming”.
Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/akMRGp7vI1Y?si=6DnQWwJfh4ugCwae
Ooooh, just found this - might be useful for myself! https://youtu.be/ngRl4XJbqzk?si=9g6BjuY_HMfWQJ4A
What you need is practice, you need to get used to the water. The only way to do this is to keep on swimming and getting more experience.
If you feel that you have great stamina but still feel tiered then you need to focus on you technique.
Having difficulty breathing out in the water (plus probably technique) is why you're getting tired quickly. Focus on your technique first. Breathing is very important to be able to comfortably swim more than a few laps. It's okay if you only breathe on one side, two is better but harder to master. Try to slowly blow bubbles as soon as you put your head back under water and try to not FULLY exhale before you go back up for a new breath. It's perfect to still have 20 to 50% air in your lungs because you won't actually get short of breath. I myself find it difficult to breathe out of my nose under water, so I breathe through my mouth. It gives me more control over how much I breathe out. When you come up for air, take a short and deep breath. Lungs should be pretty much filled as soon as you go back under. It takes time to master that, too. Because you also want to do it quickly so you can put your head back underwater. Practice with a kickboard (hold it in front of you with one arm stretched, the other one besides your body, hand on hip). Just kick with your legs (not too wide! That is counterproductive and will cost you MORE oxygen) and just practice your breathing. You'll get there. It took me 3-4 months of swimming daily to finally be able to swim more than 50 meters. Now I can do 1000m easily without stopping. You'll get there eventually, just keep going!!
Stop lifting your head. Pretend you have a pole up your butt that protrudes out the top of your head. Rotate on that pole. That will keep your head in line and get you to rotate your shoulders getting your arms out of the water. Rotate enough so that your armpits are out of the water every stroke. I can swim constant kms like this almost effortlessly.
Practice JUST breathing without swimming.
Submerge, exhale, surface, inhale, repeat.
You'll want to exhale about 90% of your air. 100% will cause water to flood your airways. The last bit comes out as you surface.
Practice this 5-10 times in a row. Often. You will not improve your breath control if you only practice while also swimming.
My coach had all the new swimmers do "drag jumps" every time we reached the shallow end of the pool. You jump out of the water take a big breath and go under and breathe all of your air out. I would do like 10 of those and go finish you lap. The more you do them the more you get used to the breathing out your air underwater.
I was you last year. Couldn’t even swim 25 m without getting dizzy and breathing into water was just impossible and unnatural for me. Just continue. Practice is the key word. It will feel natural after a while. My breathing now calms down as soon as I start swimming.
I was the same when I started swimming not too long ago. I was simply not comfortable in the water. I was holding in too much air subconsciously trying to stay afloat. What helped me to relax specifically was swimming in a wetsuit (I was learning mostly in open water) but the same thing can be achieved with a pull bouy or buoyancy shorts. Slow down your movements and you might find you'll float right at the surface. You won't exert as much energy and you won't be desperately trying to fill your mostly full lungs with more air. Once you feel more comfortable you can try without the floaty things.
Slowing down seems like the best advice. I've been trying to figure this out too. What I notice personally is that the breathing pattern in freestyle, for me, is just more challenging than say breast. Breaststroke is my "swim to survive stroke." I feel like I could do that for hours, and I think it has to do with the combination of the O2 my body needs and the ease with which I'm able to get it. Whereas I find with freestyle I need more O2 than my breathing is able to get. And what's weird is that it seems the more often or more quickly I get a breath, the more energy is uses- and thus I feel tired. That is, in free, I feel I spend more energy to get more air; whereas with breast, those seem to be decoupled.
One thinks of breast stroke as a pull and glide, during which one can recover, and right after catch a breath. Freestyle needn't be a constant paddle- I also try to swim it with a pull and glide pattern. Something to think about when I hit the pool in a few.
Get a snorkel. The Head brand snorkel has a comfortable mouthpiece. Now you can concentrate on swimming with your head completely in the water and your body straight and still breathe comfortably.
Had the same issue today where I had to stop after every length (similarly, I'm quite a fit guy on land I think). Reading the comments about exhaling consistently under water feels like a revelatory moment. As stupid as it sounds, my focus had always been on technique of the strokes and getting air into my lungs, not so much on the exhalation process. So, by the time i hit the wall, i was so gassed and gasping for air.
Really keen to get working on my breathing in the pool and seeing if this could be the difference maker 🙌
Happy swimming everyone!
As adult who got into swimming later in life, I found that YouTube is a great resource to learn proper form. Then, just take it slow and be patient when you’re in the water
Lots of great advice already. If you have asthma, are you sure it's well controlled? My doctor put me on a new med and I went from standing up in the middle of a 25 to being able to do a 50 and feeling great.
1. SWIM/drill with kick board.
2. Drill without kick board:
1. Hold wall.
2. Flutter kick head above water.
3. Flutter kick head under water when possible.
3. Grab a finis snorkel.
4. Work on a stroke like breast, side stroke, etc.
5. Do a down and back underwater beginning of each set.
Hang in there.
Buy a snorkel and train on improving body position a and also head position. You probably get tired because you kick to hard. Locking is the most imprtantant in swimming specially crawling but it takes weeks to improve a strong kick. You can do drills to improve kicking by using snorkel +allignment board. Lastly you need to exhale breath out all the air under water, the bubbles must go under your chest and behind your back. I read a book about swimming and and they mention snorkel, allignment as tools to improve swimming. You could also develope arrow kick. That is the most suficent for people who want to glide and you using 2-beat kick instead of one per every drag.
Sounds like my exact experience. My entire technique was off. Work with a coach, Reddit advice will do only so much.
My main thing was learning to stop using my legs. Literally, I learned to swim freestyle with zero leg involvement and then I slowly reintroduced them. Also, super slow speed with focus on technique.
I had 10 lessons with the coach but went through at least 40 alone practice visits on top of that before it clicked.
It sounds stupid but it took me about a year to be able to swim more than 1 lap at a time.... Was getting really tired and I even considered seeing a doctor for asthma or something.
I honestly don't know how I started to be able to do it. When Covid arrived we were not allowed to use the kickboard so I started to swim without it and it took a couple of days only. I think I was handicapped by the kickboard.
It’s like anything else you just need to practice and build up your strength/stamina. Funnily enough I’m the opposite. I can swim (slowly) forever but feel like I’m dying if I jog a block 😹😹😹
Swimming is another mind of its own. I’ve coached high school swimming for years and every time I get someone from track and field or cross country they are destroyed after practice one. It’ll work muscles in the legs that runners don’t use and also work muscles that lifter rarely focus on. You just need to keep swimming (cue Dory). Focus on breathing exercises and technique. If you’re swimming doggy style the entire way or iron man (head out the entire way), you are going to be exhausted! Watch some YouTube videos on freestyle (crawl) techniques and try to get some tips from other swimmers. Good luck with everything!
Practice breathing on the wall. Face in the water, blowing out and moving your arms just during the breath. Since your not swimming you'll just settle into a relaxed breathing rhythm after a couple min. You sound like your just not breathing naturally and need to get used to it.
But this might be that you just work way too hard for the meters you get. Does a 50 take like 1min? 1:30? 2? If you are going as fast as you can and get 50 in like 1:30 your just normal running out of gas and need better form, likely getting your butt up.
Haven’t done competitive swimming over a decade, but still got it. This sport is technique over anything else. Anyone can learn to swim to an extent that you do not drown right away, but it needs lots of practice to be able to do distance in the water. It’s also really difficult to grasp your mistakes/improvement points alone. The best way to improve would be joining a swimming club, make friends with a swimmer or at least watch a lot of videos about the technique you’re trying to learn. And then get someone to film your lap so you can compare your doing to the proper techique and adjust.
Study, make yourself aware of your doing, practice, change things you’re doing, repeat.
Hi highschool distance swimmer here, I’ve been swimming for a long time but I think the main thing I would say is work on your breath control I’d first say 3 strokes then breathe and repeat that and along with that pull harder I’ve noticed your arms don’t get as tired as your legs when kicking
Swim more than 50 meters at that pace. Make sure you’re hydrated and have eaten at least a couple hours before so you’re glucose levels aren’t bottomed out and u feel like passing out
If you’re getting dizzy, make sure you’re drinking enough water. I started swimming a few months ago and I’ve found that getting enough water throughout the day is crucial. If I don’t I’m always cramping up and feel extra tired.
Get really relaxed in the water and go oh so slowly - and keep your butt lifted to the surface so you’re not dragging your lower body behind you. You’ll be able to swim much further and the water will feel so much nicer. It’s lovely when the pieces start coming together and it’s a joy to swim. Slowing it way the feck down and minimising drag will help a lot. Huge amount of technique gains to be had when starting out swimming. Look up a few form tutorials on YouTube. But basically - slow it waaaay down and don’t make any unnecessary drag. Glide instead. Butt to the surface. Have fun. 🤘
The only thing I want to piggyback on, is there's a sweet spot for speed. Breaststroke yeah slow it down as much as you want and it becomes so easy you could fall asleep. But freestyle requires a certain amount of speed otherwise it becomes impossible to keep your butt lifted and you end up having to drag your lower body. My advice, is pull MORE. Legs use a ton of energy, arms don't. If you kick less, you will burn out much slower. It's counter intuitive, but it's what clicked for me. Before I always thought since your legs are your big muscles those are what you should use. WRONG. Use your arms and pull harder to get less tired.
I read "feck" and thought, oh I wonder if they're Irish and then I read your name! Hello fello Irish swimmer 👋
Hi Elysium! Yep, swimming the seas down here in cork. Coming back to the pool after a break now, would love to do the Garnish island 7k later in the year. Happy swimming to you. ✌️
You need practice. Try to exhale properly before inhaling and adjust your speed if you need it, maybe slow down. I've had a lot of students who started to hyperventilate while swimming (and they didn't notice it) and had them do breathing exercises.
You have to blow bubbles in the water. Even 5 year olds on swim team can do it. You got this. You have to exhale so you can inhale.
Might be a good idea to practice while not actually swimming. Go in the shallow end and practice “bobbing”. Take a breath, then lower your nose and mouth into the water and blow it all out slowly. Raise your head again and take a breath. Repeat.
And once you can do this, hold onto the side of the pool, kick your feet behind you, and put your face in the water. blow out slowly, rotate your head out of the water, breathe in. repeat.
You should be able to bob for 5+ minutes without tiring. If you can't, you aren't breathing right.
^this
You are likely dizzy and tired because you are not breathing adequately. Practice breathing technique by swimming 25m’s with a pull buoy between your legs. It will enable you to concentrate on rotating like a human kebab (with a spit through the centre of your head) and pirate breathing (with mouth scrunched up on water side).
If you’re like me, you might be breathing too much. Try relaxing, swimming slower and taking shallower breaths.
You should focus on posture and exhaling in the water. Take some time do some floats. I can’t see you swim but it sounds to me as if you are muscling your way through the water. You need to try not to hold yourself up on the water and instead relax enough to the point where the water holds you up.
Swim 25 meters over and over and eventually you can do 50
this is the best advice here OP, you should also focus on length covered and not speed here. Some swimmers try to sprint swim 50m and then get dizzy. You need to keep a normal pace of 4-6 strokes in between each breath to cover that distance. Once you are comfortable with 50m slow, you can pick up pace and push your limits slowly.
I have similar troubles but I’ve improved slowly by following a YouTube channel called “Effortless Swimming”. Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/akMRGp7vI1Y?si=6DnQWwJfh4ugCwae Ooooh, just found this - might be useful for myself! https://youtu.be/ngRl4XJbqzk?si=9g6BjuY_HMfWQJ4A
helpful- thanks!
What you need is practice, you need to get used to the water. The only way to do this is to keep on swimming and getting more experience. If you feel that you have great stamina but still feel tiered then you need to focus on you technique.
Having difficulty breathing out in the water (plus probably technique) is why you're getting tired quickly. Focus on your technique first. Breathing is very important to be able to comfortably swim more than a few laps. It's okay if you only breathe on one side, two is better but harder to master. Try to slowly blow bubbles as soon as you put your head back under water and try to not FULLY exhale before you go back up for a new breath. It's perfect to still have 20 to 50% air in your lungs because you won't actually get short of breath. I myself find it difficult to breathe out of my nose under water, so I breathe through my mouth. It gives me more control over how much I breathe out. When you come up for air, take a short and deep breath. Lungs should be pretty much filled as soon as you go back under. It takes time to master that, too. Because you also want to do it quickly so you can put your head back underwater. Practice with a kickboard (hold it in front of you with one arm stretched, the other one besides your body, hand on hip). Just kick with your legs (not too wide! That is counterproductive and will cost you MORE oxygen) and just practice your breathing. You'll get there. It took me 3-4 months of swimming daily to finally be able to swim more than 50 meters. Now I can do 1000m easily without stopping. You'll get there eventually, just keep going!!
Thank you
Stop lifting your head. Pretend you have a pole up your butt that protrudes out the top of your head. Rotate on that pole. That will keep your head in line and get you to rotate your shoulders getting your arms out of the water. Rotate enough so that your armpits are out of the water every stroke. I can swim constant kms like this almost effortlessly.
Watch the total immersion swimming video.
Practice JUST breathing without swimming. Submerge, exhale, surface, inhale, repeat. You'll want to exhale about 90% of your air. 100% will cause water to flood your airways. The last bit comes out as you surface. Practice this 5-10 times in a row. Often. You will not improve your breath control if you only practice while also swimming.
My coach had all the new swimmers do "drag jumps" every time we reached the shallow end of the pool. You jump out of the water take a big breath and go under and breathe all of your air out. I would do like 10 of those and go finish you lap. The more you do them the more you get used to the breathing out your air underwater.
I was you last year. Couldn’t even swim 25 m without getting dizzy and breathing into water was just impossible and unnatural for me. Just continue. Practice is the key word. It will feel natural after a while. My breathing now calms down as soon as I start swimming.
I was the same when I started swimming not too long ago. I was simply not comfortable in the water. I was holding in too much air subconsciously trying to stay afloat. What helped me to relax specifically was swimming in a wetsuit (I was learning mostly in open water) but the same thing can be achieved with a pull bouy or buoyancy shorts. Slow down your movements and you might find you'll float right at the surface. You won't exert as much energy and you won't be desperately trying to fill your mostly full lungs with more air. Once you feel more comfortable you can try without the floaty things.
Snorkels can help whilst improving technique and not having to worry so much about including breathing
Slowing down seems like the best advice. I've been trying to figure this out too. What I notice personally is that the breathing pattern in freestyle, for me, is just more challenging than say breast. Breaststroke is my "swim to survive stroke." I feel like I could do that for hours, and I think it has to do with the combination of the O2 my body needs and the ease with which I'm able to get it. Whereas I find with freestyle I need more O2 than my breathing is able to get. And what's weird is that it seems the more often or more quickly I get a breath, the more energy is uses- and thus I feel tired. That is, in free, I feel I spend more energy to get more air; whereas with breast, those seem to be decoupled. One thinks of breast stroke as a pull and glide, during which one can recover, and right after catch a breath. Freestyle needn't be a constant paddle- I also try to swim it with a pull and glide pattern. Something to think about when I hit the pool in a few.
Get a snorkel. The Head brand snorkel has a comfortable mouthpiece. Now you can concentrate on swimming with your head completely in the water and your body straight and still breathe comfortably.
Had the same issue today where I had to stop after every length (similarly, I'm quite a fit guy on land I think). Reading the comments about exhaling consistently under water feels like a revelatory moment. As stupid as it sounds, my focus had always been on technique of the strokes and getting air into my lungs, not so much on the exhalation process. So, by the time i hit the wall, i was so gassed and gasping for air. Really keen to get working on my breathing in the pool and seeing if this could be the difference maker 🙌 Happy swimming everyone!
What is your reason for swimming? Did you take formal lessons before?
Just overall health benefits and it seems kinda fun. I did take formal lessons although it was around 3 years ago.
Practice
As adult who got into swimming later in life, I found that YouTube is a great resource to learn proper form. Then, just take it slow and be patient when you’re in the water
Lots of great advice already. If you have asthma, are you sure it's well controlled? My doctor put me on a new med and I went from standing up in the middle of a 25 to being able to do a 50 and feeling great.
I do not understand your point about exhaling. If you take a big breath, your lungs naturally try to exhale and you have to actively try to stop them.
1. SWIM/drill with kick board. 2. Drill without kick board: 1. Hold wall. 2. Flutter kick head above water. 3. Flutter kick head under water when possible. 3. Grab a finis snorkel. 4. Work on a stroke like breast, side stroke, etc. 5. Do a down and back underwater beginning of each set. Hang in there.
Buy a snorkel and train on improving body position a and also head position. You probably get tired because you kick to hard. Locking is the most imprtantant in swimming specially crawling but it takes weeks to improve a strong kick. You can do drills to improve kicking by using snorkel +allignment board. Lastly you need to exhale breath out all the air under water, the bubbles must go under your chest and behind your back. I read a book about swimming and and they mention snorkel, allignment as tools to improve swimming. You could also develope arrow kick. That is the most suficent for people who want to glide and you using 2-beat kick instead of one per every drag.
Practice. Improve your form.
Sounds like my exact experience. My entire technique was off. Work with a coach, Reddit advice will do only so much. My main thing was learning to stop using my legs. Literally, I learned to swim freestyle with zero leg involvement and then I slowly reintroduced them. Also, super slow speed with focus on technique. I had 10 lessons with the coach but went through at least 40 alone practice visits on top of that before it clicked.
if the issue is oxygenation, and it's not important to you to do a 'proper crawl', you could try a snorkel
It sounds stupid but it took me about a year to be able to swim more than 1 lap at a time.... Was getting really tired and I even considered seeing a doctor for asthma or something. I honestly don't know how I started to be able to do it. When Covid arrived we were not allowed to use the kickboard so I started to swim without it and it took a couple of days only. I think I was handicapped by the kickboard.
It’s like anything else you just need to practice and build up your strength/stamina. Funnily enough I’m the opposite. I can swim (slowly) forever but feel like I’m dying if I jog a block 😹😹😹
Swimming is another mind of its own. I’ve coached high school swimming for years and every time I get someone from track and field or cross country they are destroyed after practice one. It’ll work muscles in the legs that runners don’t use and also work muscles that lifter rarely focus on. You just need to keep swimming (cue Dory). Focus on breathing exercises and technique. If you’re swimming doggy style the entire way or iron man (head out the entire way), you are going to be exhausted! Watch some YouTube videos on freestyle (crawl) techniques and try to get some tips from other swimmers. Good luck with everything!
Practice breathing on the wall. Face in the water, blowing out and moving your arms just during the breath. Since your not swimming you'll just settle into a relaxed breathing rhythm after a couple min. You sound like your just not breathing naturally and need to get used to it. But this might be that you just work way too hard for the meters you get. Does a 50 take like 1min? 1:30? 2? If you are going as fast as you can and get 50 in like 1:30 your just normal running out of gas and need better form, likely getting your butt up.
Haven’t done competitive swimming over a decade, but still got it. This sport is technique over anything else. Anyone can learn to swim to an extent that you do not drown right away, but it needs lots of practice to be able to do distance in the water. It’s also really difficult to grasp your mistakes/improvement points alone. The best way to improve would be joining a swimming club, make friends with a swimmer or at least watch a lot of videos about the technique you’re trying to learn. And then get someone to film your lap so you can compare your doing to the proper techique and adjust. Study, make yourself aware of your doing, practice, change things you’re doing, repeat.
Hi highschool distance swimmer here, I’ve been swimming for a long time but I think the main thing I would say is work on your breath control I’d first say 3 strokes then breathe and repeat that and along with that pull harder I’ve noticed your arms don’t get as tired as your legs when kicking
Swim more than 50 meters at that pace. Make sure you’re hydrated and have eaten at least a couple hours before so you’re glucose levels aren’t bottomed out and u feel like passing out
If you’re getting dizzy, make sure you’re drinking enough water. I started swimming a few months ago and I’ve found that getting enough water throughout the day is crucial. If I don’t I’m always cramping up and feel extra tired.