Freestyle Improvements

Hello again, I’m here to give you an update on my progress. Right now things are going really well with rebuilding my technique. I’m keeping the fundamentals my top priority in working on. The two fundamentals I’ve perfected or have greatly improved upon, is achieving sweet spot breathing and rotating my hips as I cut through the water. In achieving sweet spot breathing, I slowly worked at moving my whole body sideways as I was searching for air. When I’m breathing for air, my back is facing opposite to where I’m breathing, one eye is above the water while the other is below, and my mouth is breathing below the valley of the wave. This way, I’m keeping my head low and preventing my shoulders from toppling each other. I started to focus on this, going slowly through the water. Once I got the hang of it, I went on to doing 50s followed by 100s and 200s. It was pretty painless because I was so focused on aligning my spine when going for air. Also when I finished a set and felt very comfortable and not tired, I knew then that I could do more. The next thing I worked on was rotating my hips. I had worked on this mostly with my pull-buoy and my fulcrums. The fulcrums definitely kept my elbows high. Whenever I cut my arm through the water, I shift my hips toward my leading hand. So when I lead with the right hand my left hip is higher than my right, and vice versa when leading with the left hand. Once again I need to make sure that my hips and shoulders are not on top of each other. Today I did a 1000 of focusing shifting my hips from one leading hand to another. It was rough because afterward I really felt my shoulders hurting. The next big step is to lower my stroke count and strengthen my kicking. More importantly I need to find the perfect left and right targets with my leading hand. I need to remember to lean on my armpits. I will keep you posted on my progress, take care.