Do you want to improve your swimming technique but do not know how? Practicing sports is a healthy habit but, if we do not know how to do it, we can make mistakes that make physical activity not beneficial. The key to practicing regular physical activity is to find a sport that you can do well and that you enjoy doing. In the case of swimming, poor technique can provoke pain in the neck and upper back, and can cause us to abandon the activity. To help you lead a healthy life, on OneHowTo.com we give you a few tips to improve your swimming technique so that swimming becomes enjoyable and beneficial.
Before going into details about swimming technique, you need to know some basic information about your equipment. Always wears flip-flops, especially if you swim in a public pool, for hygiene reasons and also to prevent slipping. In addition, it is essential that you get a swimming cap to stop your hair from getting wet and goggles to protect your eyes from the chlorine and other elements that are used to purify water. Additionally, you can use ear plugs to prevent the clogging of your ears and nose strips to facilitate breathing.
Once in the water, the most important advice we can give you as to how to swim well is the position of your neck. As already explained, poor neck posture while practicing swimming technique will eventually provoke muscle pain in the neck and also on the top of the back.
The neck should always be relaxed when you practice your swimming technique. That is, you must take a natural position, without forcing yourself, in line with your back or slightly forward. What you have to avoid is throwing your neck back, as this is the way to force and cause muscle tension in the area. Many novice swimmers end up with neck pain because poor breathing technique forces you to throw the neck backwards to get some air.
So, apart from an optimal position of the neck, in order to swim well you also need to master breathing techniques. The air you need to breathe in, in the case of front crawl, you need to get it from turning your neck to the left or right, but never by throwing your head back. This is a very important tip to improve your swimming technique.
Another common mistake that makes us not swim very well is the tendency to only propel our arms and the upper and middle of the back. This leads us to not use the strength of our legs and thus, we don't exercise the lower limbs properly when swimming. So, in order to improve your swimming technique, remember to also take advantage of your leg strength to propel yourself and not just the upper body.
Another important aspect so that you swim well is the manner in which you move your arms and, specifically, how you put them in the water. A rule that you should always follow is to try and submerge the arms as horizontal to the water as you can. You have to try and prevent the arm from entering the water at a perpendicular angle, which doesn´t make you go very far and makes you tired more quickly. So, the position of the arms is another very important tip to improve your swimming technique.
The last tip we give you so that you improve your swimming technique is that you go to the pool frequently, i.e. practice all the time. It is preferable to swim 20 minutes or half an hour, three days a week, than swim for an hour four times a month. If done well, swimming is one of the most complete sports and suitable for almost everyone, as swimming has many health benefits.
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