Flip Turns and Underwaters: How to Swim Them Fast

Written by Candice Darr · Approved by Melanie Margalis Fink · Updated Aug 18, 2026 · 9 min read

Watch a race from underneath the water and the wall work tells you more than the stroke count does. A swimmer who looks average on top can still win off a clean flip turn and a strong streamline, because that stretch under the surface is where a meaningful chunk of every race gets decided.

This guide is written to your swimmer directly, in language they can use at the next practice, and built for you to read alongside them.

You don't need to coach the turn. You just need to know that the wall and the underwater phase are trainable skills with real time hidden in them, so it makes sense when your swimmer talks about it on the drive home. This guide also covers the 15-meter rule that puts a hard limit on how long anyone can stay down there.

Swimmer, the rest of this is for you.

How to do a flip turn, step by step

A flip turn is really three movements stitched into one continuous motion: the flip, the landing, and the push.

The flip starts about a body length from the wall. Tuck your chin toward your chest and pull your knees up and in, like you're trying to touch your knees to your forehead while somersaulting forward.

Exhale steadily through your nose as you rotate. Water pressure on an upside-down face can make beginners panic and hold their breath; that throws off the timing of everything that follows.

The landing decides whether the turn is fast or slow. Your feet need to hit the wall a few inches below the surface, roughly in line with your hips. Too shallow, and you'll push off toward the surface and waste the streamline; too deep, and you'll shoot toward the bottom of the pool and burn energy correcting your angle on the way up.

Coaches often have swimmers practice the landing in isolation (walking through the wall approach from the flags, without doing the full flip) just to groove the foot placement.

The push is where the turn either pays off or doesn't. Extend into a tight streamline, hands stacked, arms squeezing your ears, and drive off the wall with both legs at once. A turn with a weak push looks fine on video but loses half a second to the swimmer in the next lane.

Foot spacing is easy to test on land. Many coaches have swimmers jump on the pool deck with their feet in different placements to feel where the strongest push comes from – too close together and the power drops, too far apart and it drops again. Find the sweet spot in the middle on dry land first, then bring it to the wall.

For one practice, count your turns, not your times – how many times you hesitate before the wall, or glide in flat instead of accelerating into it. Most swimmers are surprised at how often they coast into the last stroke before a wall, rather than attacking it.

What happens underwater after the turn

Once you've pushed off, the real work starts. This is the underwater phase, and it isn't just recovery time before the next stroke. A tight streamline moves through water with less resistance than any swimming stroke, and a well-timed dolphin-kick sequence can carry you faster than you'd go on the surface.

One summary of elite start research clocks the underwater phase at more than half of the total time from the gun to the 15-meter mark – or more than the block, flight, and free-swimming portions combined. Elite adults aren't high schoolers, and pool starts differ from in-race turns, but the underlying point is the same – the underwater is not a pause, but a race phase with its own technique and its own payoff.

A dolphin kick off the wall comes from the hips and core, not the knees. A kick that starts at the knee produces almost no propulsion; a kick that starts at the hips and travels down through a relatively straight leg moves real water.

There’s no typical count at the high school level. Plenty of swimmers – distance swimmers especially – take zero or one kick off each wall, while sprinters hold more. Kicks still break out earlier in a 500 freestyle than in a 50, where the whole race is a sprint from wall to wall.

Breaking out too early throws away free speed breaking out too late means you’re holding a streamline that's no longer doing much work. Neither mistake shows up clearly from the pool deck, which is part of why underwater technique gets less attention in practice than stroke mechanics.

The 15-meter rule, explained

Every competitive swimmer eventually asks how far can you actually go before you have to come up. The answer is specific, and it's the same across every sanctioned pool in the country. Both USA Swimming and the NFHS, which governs high school racing, allow you to stay completely submerged through the turn and for up to 15 meters, about 16.4 yards, after the start and after each turn. That applies to freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly. Some part of your body has to break the surface by the 15-meter mark, and staying under past it is an automatic disqualification.

There’s a wrinkle to this rule. Once your head breaks the surface, you can’t drop back under, even if you’d still be inside the 15-meter zone. Ducking back down after surfacing is a disqualification, even though you never passed 15 meters while submerged.

Breaststroke follows a different structure, and the 15-meter rule does not apply to it. A breaststroker gets one arm pull, one optional dolphin kick, and one breaststroke kick underwater, and can surface anywhere in the lap as long as that’s all they take. What limits the pullout is the stroke cycle itself, not a distance line.

Officials measure this from the wall, using the flags and lane-line markers most pools set at the 15-meter mark so swimmers and coaches can gauge position without guessing. If your pool doesn't have a visible marker, ask your coach where 15 meters falls in your lane relative to a landmark like a specific ceiling beam or wall tile. Guessing during a race is how good underwaters turn into disqualifications.

Building a better underwater, one wall at a time

None of this improves through a single big session of "working on turns." It improves the way most swimming technique does: repeated at low intensity until it's automatic, then tested at race speed.

Coaches typically break the skill into three practice pieces:

Landing drills isolate the wall approach and foot placement without a full flip, useful for swimmers who over-rotate or under-rotate.

Kick-count sets have a swimmer hold a fixed number of dolphin kicks off every wall for a full practice, which builds the muscle memory to hit a breakout point on command instead of guessing mid-race.

Breakout-timing work drills the transition from underwater kick to the first stroke, since a sloppy breakout can cost as much time as a bad turn even when the turn itself was clean.

If a swimmer's turns look fine in practice but fall apart in meets, that's usually not a technique problem, it's a pacing one: swimmers who arrive at the wall gassed tend to shorten the flip, land shallow, and cut the underwater short because they want air. Fixing the approach speed into the wall often does more for turn quality than any turn-specific drill.

Frequently asked questions

How do you do a flip turn in swimming?

The steps are simple to list and easy to rush: somersault about a body length out, plant both feet on the wall a few inches under the surface, and push off in a tight streamline before rolling to your front. The part that actually separates a fast turn from a slow one isn't the flip, but where your feet land. Aim them at hip height, not too shallow and not too deep, and most of the turn takes care of itself.

How far can you go underwater in swimming?

Fifteen meters is the official limit in freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly, but most high school swimmers surface well before that because their dolphin kick slows down. In other words, the rule is a ceiling, not a target. Chasing the full 15 meters with a kick that's already fading usually loses time rather than gaining it.

Does the 15-meter rule apply to breaststroke?

No. Under both NFHS and USA Swimming rules, the 15-meter limit covers freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly only. A breaststroker can surface anywhere in the lap, provided the pullout stays within the allowed pull, single dolphin kick, and kick. The rule that actually trips up breaststrokers is your head having to break the surface before your hands sweep back in – and missing that means you’ll be disqualified long before distance is even a question.

How many dolphin kicks should you take off a wall?

There's no official number, and the right number isn’t your maximum made off a fresh push. It's the number you can still hit on the last wall of the race when your legs are tired. A swimmer who blasts 8 kicks off the first wall and fades to 3 by the end would often be faster holding a steady 5 the whole way. Pick a count you can repeat under fatigue, then make it automatic. Consistency beats a big number you can't sustain.

What happens if you surface late off a turn?

Nothing, as long as your head is still within 15 meters when it breaks the surface. Surfacing late is legal. What's not legal is surfacing and then dropping back under to steal another second of streamline. That's a disqualification even if you never crossed 15 meters submerged. Once you're up, you have to stay up until the next turn.

Why do coaches care so much about underwater technique?

Because it's the most improvable part of a race and the least practiced. A swimmer moves faster in a tight streamline with a strong dolphin kick than in almost any surface stroke, so every wall is free speed sitting there for the taking. Unlike dropping a stroke's worth of conditioning, a better underwater doesn't require more fitness, just better mechanics and honest repetition. It's rare to find that much time available for that little physical cost.

Your swimmer’s next step

A flip turn and the underwater that follows it are free speed available at every wall in every race, and neither one needs more fitness to improve, just better mechanics and honest repetition. Start with the landing, since a clean foot plant fixes more turns than any other single adjustment, then build a consistent kick count your swimmer can hit under fatigue.

For the stroke this skill matters most for, see fixing the big mistakes in your freestyle technique, where turn setup connects directly to stroke rhythm.

Once the walls are solid, the next skill worth locking down is what happens at the very start of the race, which racing starts and relay exchanges covers.

For the bigger picture of how a season and a program fit together, High School Swimming: A Complete Guide for Parents covers the rest of what a first-year swimmer and their family need to know.

This article is for general information about stroke mechanics. It is not medical advice. If you experience persistent knee, shoulder, or joint pain, talk to a sports medicine provider rather than training through it.

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