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Read time: 8min.
By Coach Yan Busset
Swimming can be the most challenging part of a triathlon for many athletes. It's the most technical discipline of the three, and it can seem overwhelming when you think about all the different aspects. Just like a watch, each individual part is simple, but when you see them all together, its mechanism looks complicated. The key is to focus on one element at a time, without getting overwhelmed by the bigger picture. In this article, we'll break down seven straightforward tips that will help you improve your freestyle technique, piece by piece. Let's get started! For each of these technical elements we’ll discuss, I’ve linked one of my shorts so you can immediately visualize what I’m talking about, as a visual cue worth a thousand words.
Hand Entry in Freestyle: How to Make It Efficient
One of the most common mistakes in freestyle swimming is an improper hand entry. Many swimmers extend their arm too much and enter the water with their elbow leading before the hand. This creates unnecessary splashes and turbulence, which increases resistance and slows you down.
To avoid this, focus on entering the water with your fingertips first, just slightly earlier, and complete the extension underwater. This allows for a much smoother and more efficient entry, reducing drag and keeping your stroke fluid.
Another common but often misguided recommendation is to enter the water with the thumb first. I don't recommend this approach because it forces you to readjust your hand position before the catch phase. This extra movement is unnecessary and disrupts the natural flow of the stroke. Additionally, an inward rotation of the hand at entry can lead to crossing over in front of your body and place extra strain on your shoulders, increasing the risk of injury.
By refining your hand entry and eliminating these inefficiencies, you’ll improve your stroke mechanics, reduce resistance, and swim with better control and less effort.
Hand Exit in Freestyle: Maximizing Efficiency
A common mistake in the exit phase of freestyle is pulling the hand out of the water too early. This often leads to dragging water, which increases resistance and disrupts the flow of the stroke. Instead, the key is to push all the way back until the arm reaches full extension, around 180 degrees, with the palm facing toward the feet.
To help achieve this full extension and an efficient hand exit, proper hip rotation is essential. Engaging the hips adds extra power at the end of the stroke, allowing you to push all the way through while maintaining momentum. This not only maximizes stroke length but also makes the recovery phase smoother, reducing unnecessary effort when bringing the arm back to the front. By fully utilizing the exit phase, you improve both efficiency and fluidity in your freestyle technique.
Underwater Alignment: Keeping Your Hand on Track
During the underwater phase of freestyle, your hand path should stay parallel to your direction of movement. To maximize efficiency, imagine swimming within two shoulder-width rails, ensuring that your hands travel in line with them.
A common mistake is letting the hand drift too far outward or inward. This disrupts balance, creates unnecessary lateral forces, and results in an inefficient zigzag motion instead of a straight, streamlined stroke.
To maintain stability and efficiency, aim for an elbow angle between 90 and 120 degrees. This keeps your elbows wide and provides a strong, controlled position—similar to a bench press or push-up stance. Just like in those exercises, this alignment helps generate power while maintaining balance in the water.
Check out the video to see this concept in action!
Forward Extension: Reaching Efficiently in Freestyle
A common mistake in the forward extension phase of freestyle is over-extending the arm. While reaching far is important, some swimmers drop their elbow below the hand, which leads to inefficiencies.
That said, don’t misunderstand the concept, you should absolutely reach as far forward as possible, but it needs to be done in the right direction. The term “overreach” can be misleading because the goal is still to maximize length. Using shoulder rotation effectively helps achieve the longest possible extension while maintaining proper alignment.
First, when the elbow is too low, the palm and forearm are exposed to frontal resistance, increasing drag. Second, this position causes the swimmer to push down on the water rather than applying force in the direction of movement. This leads to wasted effort and reduces forward propulsion.
Additionally, fully extending forward allows you to take advantage of elastic energy return when transitioning into the catch phase. This elasticity in the muscles contributes to the overall efficiency of the freestyle stroke, making it smoother and more powerful.
To optimize this phase, aim to keep the hand, elbow, and shoulder aligned. Depending on an athlete’s mobility, it can be beneficial to enter the water fingertips first and extend slightly deeper under the surface. This small adjustment prevents the dropped-elbow mistake and allows for a more direct transition into the catch phase, improving stroke efficiency.
Avoiding Crossover in Freestyle: Staying in Line
A common mistake in freestyle is crossing the centerline during the forward extension. Instead of aligning the arm extension with the shoulder, some swimmers let their hand drift too far inward—sometimes in front of the head or even beyond it.
Why is this a problem? Crossing over creates lateral forces that lead to unnecessary side-to-side movement, which wastes energy and disrupts forward propulsion. Instead of moving efficiently in a straight line, the swimmer ends up fighting against their own misalignment. Additionally, this improper positioning can place extra strain on the shoulders, increasing the risk of discomfort or injury over time.
This mistake is often linked to hand entry mechanics, especially when swimmers enter the water thumb first. Simply correcting this by leading with the fingertips and ensuring the hand enters directly in front of the shoulder, extending in line with it, helps eliminate crossover. Focusing on this proper alignment improves stroke efficiency, reduces wasted energy, and protects the shoulders from unnecessary stress.
The Catch Phase in Freestyle: Positioning the Elbow for Maximum Efficiency
The catch phase is the most important part of the freestyle stroke. Why? Because this is the moment when the swimmer’s relative speed is at its lowest, making it the most effective phase for propulsion. By contrast, at the end of the underwater stroke, when the arm is accelerating, the relative speed is higher, reducing the effectiveness of propulsion. This makes it crucial to execute the catch at the right moment and with the right technique to generate maximum forward force.
To be efficient, the propulsive surface, which includes both the hand and forearm, must be oriented correctly. Following Newton’s third law of motion (action-reaction), force must be applied in the exact opposite direction of movement. This means that the hand and forearm should be perpendicular to the water surface as early as possible.
The execution of this technique depends largely on the swimmer’s mobility. Highly flexible and experienced swimmers can achieve this position far in front of them, while most age-group triathletes, who tend to have less mobility, will achieve it later, either slightly further back or deeper in the water.
The key principle is to avoid letting the elbow drop and to focus on maintaining a high elbow position throughout the catch phase.
The position of the elbow is crucial because it determines both the orientation of the forearm and hand and the muscles engaged for propulsion. If the elbow drops, the majority of the work is done by the arm and shoulder muscles, which are smaller and fatigue more quickly. But if the elbow stays high, it allows the swimmer to engage the large back muscles, from the lower back to the shoulders, creating a much stronger and more efficient pull.
One of the most common mistakes among age-group triathletes, as seen in the following video, is letting the elbow collapse. This results in pushing water downward instead of backward, wasting energy and reducing forward propulsion.
Learning the correct elbow position can feel awkward at first, but it’s the most effective way to generate power. A great way to develop this technique is by using the single-arm drill, which allows swimmers to focus on one side at a time and build proper muscle memory. A helpful cue is to keep the fingertips pointing downward and imagine that there’s an eye on your elbow that needs to look up toward the ceiling throughout the catch phase.
The Streamline Position: The Foundation of Efficiency
This is one of the most underestimated aspects of freestyle, especially among triathletes, yet it might be the most important point of all. I often see my athletes pushing off the wall with a lazy, unstructured position—arms slightly bent, hands apart—which is a missed opportunity to train the most hydrodynamic body position in the water.
The streamline position, or “arrow” position, is the key to minimizing resistance. It involves stacking one hand over the other, fully extending the arms, tucking the head between the biceps, and making the shoulders as narrow as possible. The entire body should be engaged—core tight, legs together, feet pointed—creating a long, stretched-out tension from fingertips to toes.
This position is critical because it reduces frontal resistance while maximizing body length. The moment you start stroking with your arms and kicking with your legs, you naturally break this perfect alignment and create more drag. Of course, movement is necessary for propulsion, but the goal should always be to maintain a body position that stays as close as possible to this optimal streamline.
If you don’t make a habit of reinforcing this position at every push-off and turn, you’ll struggle to hold an efficient posture during regular swimming. A weak core leads to energy leaks, making every stroke less effective. Imagine surfing—would you rather have a stiff, solid surfboard gliding smoothly over the water, or a soft, inflatable mattress that bends and wobbles with every movement? Your body in the water works the same way—the more rigid and connected you are, the better you move forward.
To put it into perspective, think of body tension on a scale from 1 to 10:
1/10 is completely relaxed, like sinking into a couch.
10/10 is so tense you can’t move, like a statue.
When swimming, you should aim for 7/10—engaged but mobile.
During a push-off and streamline, it should be 9/10—fully extended, holding maximum tension to maintain the best glide.
If there’s one takeaway from everything we’ve covered, it’s this: the streamline position is the foundation of an efficient freestyle. Mastering it will improve everything else in your stroke.
Take Your Freestyle to the Next Level
Now you have a clear understanding of seven key points to work on to improve your freestyle technique. Remember, don’t try to change everything at once—focus on one adjustment at a time for the best results.
To identify which areas matter most for your stroke, I strongly recommend getting feedback from a coach. An external perspective, especially through video analysis, can help pinpoint the specific aspects you need to refine.
I also invite you to follow me on YouTube, where I regularly post technique breakdowns and drills. And of course, subscribe to this blog to receive weekly swim tips—I’m here every Saturday with new insights to help you progress.
If you know a friend who could benefit from these tips, feel free to share this article with them. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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