Swimming faster than your opponents is a great way to win races, unfortunately, there are many races where the fastest ‘swimmer’ loses. How is this possible? Simple, they have bad habits on their freestyle turns. You will see this more so in distance races as a swimmer will move past their competition. On each lap, the other swimmer will only to be pegged back or even passed on each turn. This means you are expelling more energy than your opponent each and every lap. Then you lose all of your advantages on a simple flip turn.
In a sprint race, it happens as well, a 50-yard freestyle can be won on a great flip turn. This can be regardless of anything else you do in that race. Many contributing factors affect the quality of freestyle turns, it can be from poor streamlines, breathing in or out of the turn and losing momentum or gliding into the wall and treating it as a rest period.
A swimmer spends many hours every week in the water, depending on their volume and their size of the pool they perform anywhere from hundreds to thousands of freestyle turns in varying degrees of tiredness and so it is inevitable that they get a little bit lazy on their turns. Thi
s is not the end of the world and as a coach you have to expect it, however, you need to make sure there are adequate high-performance sets and training where you really hone in on the freestyle turns and focus on them so that in races the laziness does not creep in.
What to work on in your Freestyle turns.
A great way to do this is by doing lower volume work with a high focus on turn performance. An example would be 75-yard freestyles on a slower interval than usual but high focus on;
- No breathing 2 strokes in or two strokes out of the wall.
- Long walls (underwater kick a minimum of 10 yards fast).
- Fast freestyle turns with tight tucked body position.
- Perfect streamlines out of the wall.
- Building speed into the wall to replicate race speed freestyle turns.
Coaching Tip
As a coach, you need to be very strict on this type of set or it completely loses its purpose. A coach cannot be on every swimmer at every wall in every practice. Swimmers should always be focused on good turns practice. Although, it can’t be expected that they keep this level every time. However, setting up a small set to really focus on racing turns allows them to aim for perfection. This also allows them to get a feel for how it should be in their swims. Then from this set, you can implement one or two of these into longer distance sets.
Making a longer swim where there is no breathing allowed two strokes in two strokes out, for example, you could also focus on long walls or only focusing on building into the turns allows the swimmer to think about one aspect at a time in a lower intensity set which will develop into good habits.
Once they get the individual skills locked in overall performance will improve. They will begin to use the skills they feel improve their usual turns best in sets. If a swimmer realizes their 10-yards underwater kick is faster they will use it even when they are tired. This helps them to save energy or keep up with their teammates on tough sets.
Sooo…
Overall fast freestyle turns can make a good swimmer great, shave seconds off their times and is not a very hard skill to improve. In the same respect if neglected by a coach or a swimmer it can turn into a huge weakness. That weakness will be exposed
in a race and could result in a loss. As a coach put it the work and explain the importance of it to your swimmers. and they should be excited to work on them.