Freestyle Technique: Fixing the Big Mistakes That Slow You Down

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

If your swimmer has run the same 200 freestyle a dozen times this season and the time barely moves, the reason usually isn't fitness. It's a handful of technical habits that quietly tax every stroke, meet after meet, without ever showing up as a specific problem in practice.

This guide is written to your swimmer directly, in language they can act on at the next practice, and built for you to read alongside them. You don't need to coach the stroke. You just need to know what good freestyle technique looks like so the four fixes below make sense on the drive home.

Freestyle is the place to start because swimmers spend more time in it than any other stroke: warm-up, warm-down, distance sets, and usually their fastest event. A small leak in freestyle stroke technique costs more total time across a season than the same leak in backstroke or breaststroke ever could.

This piece breaks down the four places that leaks show up, which are body position, the catch and pull, the kick, and breathing, and what fixes each one.

Swimmer, the rest of this is for you.

Freestyle body position: the foundation everything sits on

Before the catch, before the kick, before any of it, ask one question: are you lying flat? According to U.S. Masters Swimming's guide to freestyle body position, the single most important skill in the stroke is holding your body in a straight line at the surface of the water. Almost everything else in freestyle either supports that position or wrecks it.

Two versions of bad position show up constantly.

Swimming with your head up and your feet trailing low, which turns your legs into a drag anchor instead of a source of speed.

Your hips and shoulders swing side to side while your head stays roughly still, so your body snakes through the water instead of moving in a straight tube.

Both cost real energy. A body pushing through the water at a bad angle has to work far harder to cover the same distance, which means the fix isn't more yardage. It's a straighter line at the same yardage.

But flat and straight does not mean rigid. Freestyle swum completely flat, without rotation, asks more of your shoulder than it can give. Rotating your torso toward each stroke is what lets your arm reach a strong catch and recover cleanly.

Aim for a straight line that rotates around its own axis, not a plank. Check this first whenever a stroke feels hard for no clear reason. Nine times out of ten, hard means leaky, not weak.

The freestyle catch and pull: where your speed actually comes from

Your kick matters. Your turnover matters. But the catch and pull generate most of your forward motion – and it's the piece most high school swimmers get only half right.

The mechanism is simple. You're creating the biggest possible paddle with your forearm and hand together, then pushing that paddle straight backward as hard and as fast as you can.

The most common failure mode is a dropped elbow, where the hand does the pushing and the forearm just trails along for the ride. That cuts your propulsive surface area roughly in half, but you don’t notice because the stroke still feels like it's working. The fix is what coaches call a “high elbow catch”: elbow high, forearm and hand dropped and facing backward. This causes the whole limb to press water toward your feet.

A second, quieter mistake is pulling at one constant speed from entry to exit. Swimmers who pull at one speed the whole way leave power on the table even with perfect hand position. Real propulsion comes from accelerating through the pull; starting the push relatively slow and speeding it up as your hand travels back toward your hip.

U.S. Masters Swimming (USMS) advises athletes to increase hand speed throughout the pull. If you're sprinting, start fast and get faster. On a distance swim, start slower and finish slightly faster. The push should also travel straight back rather than sweeping wide, since sideways pulling wastes energy that should be moving you forward.

To feel the difference at your next warm-up, swim 100 freestyle focused only on your forearm, not just your hand. Press against the water on every stroke. Don’t worry about speed. Most swimmers can feel the gap between a hand pull and a forearm-and-hand pull within two or three lengths once they know what to look for.

Freestyle kick technique: the glue, not the engine

Ask five coaches how many kicks per stroke a swimmer should use, and you'll get five answers. USMS's own kick guidance treats 2-beat, 4-beat, and 6-beat patterns as all legitimate depending on the swimmer and the event.

The kick's real job in freestyle isn't raw propulsion. It's holding your body position, supporting a smooth rotation, and adding whatever extra speed your conditioning allows on top of that.

Distance swimmers often lean toward a 2-beat kick to save oxygen and spare their legs over a long race. Sprinters lean the other way, using a fast 6-beat kick because a 50 or 100 doesn't demand the same energy conservation.

Neither is more correct in some abstract sense. The mistake is copying a kick pattern from a swimmer in a different event without recognizing whether it fits your race distance and your training base.

Freestyle breathing technique: don't let air hunger wreck your line

Breathing is where a sound stroke falls apart fastest under fatigue. The goal, per USMS, is a breath that's essentially invisible to your stroke rhythm. You want to avoid any dramatic head-lift, pause in the pull, or stall in body position.

The common failure is lifting the head straight up and to the side to grab air. The breath should come from turning your head to the side, flowing in partnership with your body’s natural rotation – not from a lift.

Lift instead of turn, and your hips sink, your body starts swinging side to side instead of tracking straight, and your pulling arm gets yanked out of position at exactly the moment you need it working hardest. Swimmers who breathe late, or put their face back in late, disrupt the same body line.

Many swimmers use bilateral breathing. That’s when you alternate sides every third stroke instead of breathing to the same side every time. Whether it's better depends on your race. USMS frames breathing as a swimmer preference more than a rule. Some breathe only left, some only right, some alternate every third or fifth stroke.

Distance and open-water swimmers get real tactical value from bilateral breathing, since it lets them track competitors on both sides. Sprinters often skip it, because in a 50, oxygen matters less than not disrupting the stroke at all.

What the rulebook actually requires

Freestyle swimming isn't quite "any stroke you want" without limits. Both USA Swimming and the NFHS, which governs high school racing, use the same rules:

You can swim any style, but some part of your body must break the surface throughout the race.

The only exception is that you can be fully submerged during a turn and for up to 15 meters after the start and each turn, as long as your head has broken the surface by that mark.

You cannot grab the lane line to pull yourself forward.

None of this changes your technique day to day, but it explains why coaches watch the underwater phase off every wall so closely. Swim past 15 meters submerged and the stroke you built all season doesn't matter, because the swim won’t count in competition.

Frequently asked questions

What is the biggest mistake in freestyle swimming?

The dropped elbow, because it wastes the part of the stroke that produces the most speed. It’s common because coaches can’t see it from the pool deck and it doesn’t feel wrong to the swimmer in the water. When a stroke feels smooth but produces a slow time, look at the pull before you look at conditioning.

How do you fix a freestyle catch?

It’s a feel problem, not a strength problem. The fix is repetition at slow speed until the shape becomes automatic. One-arm and catch-up drills work because they slow your turnover enough to let the position register. Fistgloves or swimming with a loose fist help too, since taking your palm out of the equation forces your forearm to do the gripping. Give it two or three focused sessions before you judge whether it's working.

Is bilateral breathing better in freestyle?

For a balanced, symmetrical stroke and for racing where you need to see both sides, yes. For a 50 where every breath costs you a fraction of a second, no. The strongest case for learning it isn't race day at all, but practice – training bilateral smooths out the small asymmetries that creep into a one-sided stroke, even if you end up breathing to one side when you race.

How many kicks per stroke should I use in freestyle?

Enough to hold your body position and support your rotation, and no more than your legs can sustain for your race. If your legs are dead at the back half of a race, you're kicking too hard for that event. If your hips are sinking, you're not kicking enough. Let those two symptoms tell you where you sit between a 2-beat and a 6-beat, rather than picking a number in advance.

What does a high elbow catch mean?

Picture reaching over the top of a barrel to grab it and pull yourself forward. Your elbow stays up near the surface while your forearm and hand drop down and back, so your whole arm, from elbow to fingertips, presses water toward your feet. It’s also called “early vertical forearm.” The goal is getting your forearm pointing straight down early in the stroke, rather than sweeping it through as one long paddle.

Why do I sink in freestyle when I breathe?

The obvious culprit is lifting your head; that drops your hips like a seesaw. The sneakier cause is timing. When you turn to breathe a beat too late, your face is still down when your recovering arm is already coming over, which stalls your rotation and pulls you off balance. If fixing your head position alone doesn't solve it, you're probably breathing late. Turn your head with your body's rotation, not after it.

Your swimmer’s next step

Freestyle technique isn't one big fix. It's four connected habits, and improving one tends to expose whichever one your swimmer was compensating for underneath it. Start with body position, since everything else builds on it. Watch from the side, and film it if you can. What a swimmer feels in the water and what's actually happening rarely match at first look.

Once the stroke feels solid on the surface, our guide to flip turns and underwater technique covers the breakout mechanics that connect one length to the next.

If your swimmer is building a full event lineup, How to Swim the Individual Medley shows how freestyle fits alongside the other three strokes.

High School Swimming: A Complete Guide for Parents walks through the meet structure, scoring, and gear that this article assumes you already 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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