Read Triathlon swimming made easy for Free Online

breathing at will, and with "weightless" arms. And this kind of effortless balance is achieved by cleverly positioning your body parts and redistributing your body mass. You can almost forget about pulling and kicking.
    The way to do it is fairly simple. First, keep your head in a natural, neutral position - as close as possible to the way you hold it when you're not swimming. Second, angle your hand steep and deep on entry. And third, shift your body weight forward, pressing your rib cage into the water, until you feel the water pushing your hips back out. Pressing in is, of course, counterintuitive. But virtually everything about balance in the water is non-instinctive, as TI Coach Emmett Mines explains:
    "For a child learning to balance while walking, a certain amount of time and repetition are needed Moreover, that repetition needs to be pretty much just walking.
    Now for a person to maintain balance while break-dancing on a trotting horse's hack (I took my kid to the circus last week), to avoid falling off and getting trampled by the elephant next in line, a great deal more time and repetition are needed And that repetition needs to be pretty much just break-dancing on a horse's back, or pieces of that skill ordered in a progressive manner, so as to end up with something people will pay to see.
    My sense is that swimming is more like break-dancing on a horse's back than walking Whenever we do anything in the water, the neuromuscular system is inextricably drawn to the 'wrong' conclusions about what balance is and how to achieve it. Not wrong for landbased activity - wrong for water-based activity."
    Which suggests that it takes a fairly deliberate and exacting process to master this elusive skill. Here are the elements.
    Balancing Your Freestyle "Hide" Your Head
    In the early days of TI we stressed the importance of leaning on your chest or "buoy." Years of teaching balance have shown us that head position is actually far more important. In fact, simply getting the head in a neutral (aligned-with-the-spine) position dramatically improves balance for many of our workshop students. So our teaching progression now starts with teaching swimmers to "hide" the head.
    From the deck, the coaches know your head is in the right position when we can see no more than a sliver of the back of your head or cap above the surface. We also imagine that a laser beam is coming from the top of your cap - directly aligned with your spine. We want to see that laser beam pointing directly at the far end of the pool. From your point of view, it should feel as if:
    • a thin film of water could flow over the back of your head at any time
    • you're looking directly at the bottom between breaths, using peripheral vision to peek just a bit forward
    • your "laser beam" is pointing straight ahead
    • your hips and legs feel lighter and are riding noticeably higher.
    Hiding your head does not mean burying it, nor pressing it down. It simply means holding your head in a neutral position, the way you hold it when you're not swimming. One of the simplest ways to achieve that head position is to simply let go! Just give up the weight of your head entirely to the water and let it find it's own most natural position.
    When I'm coaching, as I look across the pool, I want to see that tiny sliver of the back of your head showing above the surface whenever you're not breathing. Or a thin film of water flowing over it. Ask a friend to eyeball you as you swim and drill, after showing them the photo on the next page.
    Reach Deeper
    Once you have learned to hide your head, your next emphasis should be on slicing your hand into the water - entering it close to your head - and slice it down to make your "catch" at a position well below your head. You'll learn the right position for your hand in the Skating drill in Chapter 10, Lesson One, then imprint it in the "Switch" drills to follow and continue focusing on in whole-stroke swimming. One simple way to begin