5 Reasons Your Arm Drops When You Breathe

Last week I got a couple of emails from different swimmers asking about the same problem: They were having trouble keeping their lead arm in front and reaching forward while twisting to

breathe

, so what they found is that their lead arm was dropping and not they did it. It doesn't bother them much

when

they

breathe

and that's why they were wondering how can I fix it, so in this video we'll see what causes it and how you can fix that problem in

your

freestyle so that you have a better grip and a better catch and ultimately, a faster freestyle.

Now

when

I work with someone face to face, there is a little checklist that I often go through to make sure that they have these elements in their style because there is not just one cause of this, there can be several different

reasons

why this happens, so we'll go over the top five

reasons

I find that cause someone to press the water without being able to keep their arm in front of them. while they're catching their breath and the reason we want to fix this is because you're probably going to lose a lot of balance in the water if

your

arm falls down and you won't be able to hold it up much. out of the water, so you're not going to propel yourself forward very well if that front arm

drops

down, so the first thing I often look at is breathing, how are they breathing now?

The two main mistakes people make here. What causes the main arm to drop is that they lift their head high above the water and that's because they end up pressing down on the water to lift their head above the water and then obviously you don't go. to be able to get into that good catching position, so we need to make sure that he's not lifting his head too high above the water and we need to make sure that he's looking in the right position and that the right position is straight to the side, so if I'm working with someone I might ask them to look at the lane rope or the side of the pool and try to look there once they've turned their head to the side to breathe because sometimes people look back too much. them or too far forward and it really throws off their alignment and if you think about swimming freestyle and breathing, I like the analogy of imagining that you have like a spike through your spine and your neck and your head is a piece of meat. on that skewer and when you go to breathe you just turn the skewer but it stays aligned on that skewer so you turn to one side and come back, you're not moving your head to the side now with some elite Swimmers, I see the head tilting a little bit to the side, but generally they're just trying to keep it centered because that's going to keep them better aligned, so first we have to check the breathing, now the other thing that can help there as well.

We want to try to keep part of those bottom glasses in the water when we turn to the side, but the other thing is where the mouth is when you breathe, so last week I was working with someone who is in our stroke analysis membership and we looked at . in his breathing and his breathing was like a gasp for air it was like open mouth really kind of upper chest breathing now what I have to do is almost like stretch my mouth to the side and try to um just do make it a more controlled or steady inhalation rather than this big gulp of air because that will make it difficult for you to stay calm and relaxed when you breathe if you do it that way, so we need to make sure that we are breathing the right way, so that the first thing is simply to breathe.

If you're struggling with that, you can do a couple of simple exercises, like in the first week of our eight-week Fastest Freestyle course, we worked on some sinking exercises just to loosen up, but if you're looking to just get into that sinking position breathing, the right side breathing exercise with the board is probably your best option, so if you put some fins on, hold the board in front of you and you can practice that spike breathing approach to the side now it's okay if when you first start Maybe you find it difficult and you can't really keep the lower glasses on if you need to turn a little more, that's okay, but over time you'll get more comfortable with it until you can get that split vision that we're looking for now, the other thing that we then look at It's rotation through the shoulders, so it's a pretty common problem that I see particularly on the breathing side, so if we look straight ahead if someone swings towards us, you'll see that for the most part, yeah, the Most good swimmers have between 30 and 40 degrees across the shoulders if you measure shoulder rotation at its farthest point now, if you go beyond that and if you are particularly Going to 90 degrees across the shoulders, It's very difficult to keep your arm forward because of the pressure it can put on the rotator cuff, the pressure it can put on your shoulder there, so a lot of people have a hard time keeping their arm forward. if they're going 90 degrees, then we just want to check how far you're rotating your shoulders when you turn to the side to breathe.

Now often over rotation is a result of the head turning too much or lifting, but sometimes it's No, sometimes people will just want to rotate more than they really need to, so that's the second thing we want to check. and if you go too far, what you can do there is just work on reducing that churn and, like I mentioned. In last week's video on how to swim relaxed, one of the things that can help you achieve the right amount of rotation is to think about rotating your torso, think about rotating it forward instead of side to side because, as Carl said and Pipe, we want to rock from side to side and not roll from side to side and I think when you think of that as rolling forward instead of side to side, that's one way that can help you do that, the third thing that can lead to that.

The drop of the lead arm when you breathe is actually the entry of the hand and arm into the water and again I worked with a different swimmer in our stroke analysis training last week. I glanced at his entrance and he was coming over and landing elbow first. and when you're basically landing elbow first, it means that you've essentially fully extended and extended forward over the water, so when you go to put your hand in you end up pressing down because you have nowhere to go. It's very difficult to continue stretching forward in the water, which is what we want to happen when you've done the above, so what we want to work on changing there is to make sure that you first enter your fingertips with your elbow up and then slide your hand forward. in the water in front of your shoulder before you start catching because if you don't, if you go elbow first and your hands land last, you'll find that's the hand, that arm just wants to go straight. to the bottom of the pool so that's another one we have to go over and another simple draw that you can do there with fins and a board is just an entry exercise so holding the board out in front make that hand enter with your fingers. first and that keyboard will force you to enter early enough so that you go fingers first because if you go too far your hand will hit the top of the board and you won't be able to slide forward. in the water, so another really simple exercise that you can use to check that.

The fourth thing I check here is the output of the opposite hand, so let's say you breathe to the left and it's your right hand that extends forward. to take a look at what's happening with this left hand as you finish the last part of the pull or the pressure phase of the punch because a lot of people tend to finish too short, they come out before their hip and if you're doing that then you're not going to get that last bit of propulsion in the back of your stroke that helps you reach and rotate forward, so sometimes one of the reasons people can't get their front arm to reach forward is that they have I just don't have propulsion from the back to be able to grab it because if you don't have it there, it falls short and you tend to fall a little bit, so we have to make sure that the hand is number one press back past the hip, so right after the hip and number two, make sure that the palm of the hand is facing back almost to the hip because another common thing that we see there is that the palm of the hand ends up turning. into the body and the hands almost cutting or cutting through the entire back, so again we miss that propulsion there because that backward press beyond the hip works hand in hand with that forward reach and extension there and that's where it comes gets that nice. elongating through the body and across the shoulders, so we have to check the output now.

The last thing I often check here is what happens to that arm as it moves forward. We want to see what we call the initial capture position. where we want to have this very slight downward angle and we're mainly looking for the wrist to drop as they reach forward, so sometimes if people reach forward, this wrist is dropped, they're like this and the elbow

drops

down and then No. It doesn't really lead to being able to continue to reach forward because with a dropped elbow, dropped wrist, that arm just wants to go down, so I have to make sure that our main arm is in the right position and in the right form, and so on. is. having the fingers below the wrist, the wrist below the elbow at a very slight downward angle because if it's the opposite, with the elbow lower than the wrist, the wrist slower than the fingers, then it's very difficult to continue moving forward there the right way, so we want to make sure that's happening now, as a side note, it's a plus.

The other thing we can look at is where this shoulder is as you go, so with good freestyles you'll see. the shoulder is somewhere near the cheek, not on the cheek but near the cheek, so it ends up staying there during that reach phase. Now, with swimmers who are new to the sport, sometimes we find that that just drops down and is not close to the cheek. ends up being way below and again, it's just one of those finer details that's worth checking, so there's an exercise you can do, like a shoulder to cheek paddle exercise that you may have seen in our other videos before and that this will encourage you.

It will basically force you to keep that shoulder close to your cheek as you perform this catching motion. Now in that exercise, that shoulder is probably too close to the cheek. You wouldn't actually want to keep it that close, but it's a great way to get a sense of that difficult position we're trying to get into, so if you follow that checklist, you'll be able to see whether or not you're doing each one. of those things and that can help you keep that leading arm out. up front now, the last thing you could do here, let's say you just didn't want to, you didn't want to go through any of that and just what's the quick fix or what's a way that I could get this done. sorted without having to think about it too much, if you want to try something you know quickly, one of the things that has worked with some of the swimmers I work with is to simply think about holding the glide or reaching forward. about twice what they expect, so exaggerated, extending in front or sliding in front now, for example, I'm thinking about one of the swimmers I coach online when he sends me videos and we were having trouble getting him to understand.

When making a good catch, he would just have his arm drop down, he was too straight with his arm and he was always going too deep, so what he had to do was exaggerate the time he felt like he was reaching forward by about twice as much. So much so that I said, "Okay, the next video you send me, I want you to exaggerate it to the point where you think this is too much, this is too much, scroll to the front and send it, we'll see what." It happens and when he did that it was the right amount and his timing was much better, the catch was much better and then over the course of about three or four weeks he was able to basically fix it and it's much better.

Now, it's like the quick fix approach doesn't work for everyone, but for some swimmers we found that it's basically to fix it pretty quickly, so there's a couple of ways you can do it. I know this is a longer video but sometimes these things require a little more detail than others so I hope you enjoyed the video and if you enjoy this check out the three effortless membership there's 14 days free check out the fastest eight week freestyle course there because that's what most of our members are going through right now and we're getting really good results there so thanks for watching, like, subscribe and share this with anyone person you know who is trying to improve their swimming and I will be right back with you. another video next week