Swimming Technique for Triathletes: The Complete Freestyle Guide

Search "swimming technique" and you'll find about a million videos. Most of them were made by and for pool swimmers. Some of them are great. A lot of them will have you spending your winter perfecting a hand entry angle while your legs drag behind you like a parachute.

So let's do this differently. This is freestyle technique for triathletes, in the order it actually matters. The stuff at the top is costing you the most time. The stuff at the bottom is worth fixing, but only after the top is handled.

And one thing before we start. Technique is the on-ramp, not the whole highway. Cleaning up your stroke gives you a big, fast drop, and it's absolutely worth doing. But once you're not fighting the water anymore, training structure is what keeps you improving. Fix the technique, then go train it. I wrote more about that balance in how to swim faster.

Here's the order.

1. Breathing: Breathe Out Underwater

Everything starts here. If you feel out of breath after a length or two, it's probably not your fitness. It's your breathing. And until you can breathe comfortably, you'll never relax enough to fix anything else.

Most new triathletes hold their breath with their face in the water, then try to breathe out and in during the split second their mouth is clear. It doesn't fit. Carbon dioxide builds up, and three lengths later you feel like you're drowning.

The fix is simple. Breathe out the entire time your face is in the water. A steady stream of bubbles from your nose, or your nose and mouth. By the time you turn to breathe, the only job left is a quick breath in.

Turn, don't lift. Rotate your head with your body to breathe, with one goggle still in the water. Lifting your head forward is the most expensive habit in triathlon swimming, because it sinks your hips on every single breath. Pro tip: most triathletes think they are rotating, but still complain of swallowing water. What’s happening is you are lifting the top part of your head, but your mouth is still at or below the surface. Focus on lifting the mouth out of the water and tilting the top of your head down toward the surface. Exaggerating it this way usually gets your head turning level with the surface.

Learn to breathe to both sides. You don't have to breathe every three strokes in a race. Most fast swimmers breathe every two. But you need the freedom to breathe to whichever side the chop, the sun, and the buoys call for.

The drills: bobs in the shallow end to learn to exhale underwater, wall kicking with a stroke, and side breathing with a stroke while holding a kickboard or buoy. I walk through all three in how to breathe while swimming.

2. The Kick: Balance First, Propulsion Second

"I barely kick in a wetsuit, so why bother?"

Because your kick isn't really your engine in freestyle. It's what holds your legs up, keeps your body in line, and lets your whole stroke work as one unit. A weak kick sinks your legs and adds drag on every stroke, wetsuit or not.

A good triathlon kick is:

Small. You should kick like your feet have to stay inside a bucket. A big, wide kick creates drag instead of reducing it.

From the hips. Not from the knees. Think of your whole leg moving, with a little bend at the knee, not a bicycle pedal motion.

Pointed. Loose ankles and pointed toes. Stiff ankles turn your feet into brakes.

Steady. Even at an easy two-beat rhythm, the kick should be consistent, not stopping and starting.

The fastest way to improve it is the most boring one: kick every session, even just 200 to 400 meters. More on why in the elephant in the pool.

3. Body Position: Sit Higher In The Water

Once you can breathe and kick, you can fix the big one. Water is about 800 times denser than air, so drag matters more in the pool than anywhere else in triathlon. The higher you sit in the water, the less drag you create, and the less work every single stroke has to do.

Your body is a teeter-totter. When your head comes up, your hips and legs go down. When your chest presses down, your hips come up. Three things control it.

Your head. Keep the back of your neck long and flat, with your eyes looking straight down at the bottom of the pool. Then make a slight double chin. I always say: wrinkles in the front of your neck, not the back. If you feel wrinkles in the back of your neck, your head is up and your hips are sinking.

Your chest. Lean a little weight into your chest, like you're pressing it gently toward the bottom of the pool. That's what lifts the back half of the teeter-totter.

Your core. Don't wait for your hips to float up. Pull them up. Engage your core like you're actively trying to lift your hips to the surface.

When it's right, you'll feel everything from your shoulders to your hips sitting high, close to dry, out of the water.

The drill: Body Position #1 Kick. Put on fins and hold a pull buoy out in front of you with your arms fully extended, almost in a full streamline but without your hands stacked. Press into the buoy just enough that it sits partially or just below the surface. Head in the position above, core tight, and kick just enough to move forward. The fins mean your kick doesn't have to do the work. Your body position does. These are the same muscles and the same head position you need when you swim.

4. The Catch And Pull: Hold The Water And Push It Back

Once your body position is high, this is where your speed comes from. Most triathletes have one of two problems here.

Problem one: overreaching. Reaching way out in front above the water before your hand goes in feels like it should make your stroke longer. It does the opposite. Your elbow drops before your catch even begins, your body sinks, and you end up pushing water down instead of back.

Your hand should enter the water on time, near your lead elbow, and then extend forward under the surface.

Problem two: not pulling water back. Plenty of swimmers push water down, push it out to the side, or slide their hand through without ever grabbing hold of anything. Here's what the catch and pull should feel like:

Anchor your hand. Grab the water like you're grabbing a ladder rung.

Set the catch. Your elbow stays high and points out to the side, so your forearm and hand face backward.

Pull straight back. Not down, not across your body. Back, about shoulder width, all the way past your hip.

The drills:

Fingertip drag. Swim freestyle and drag your fingertips along the surface during your recovery. It keeps your hand close to the water and makes it enter on time instead of overreaching.

Long dog scull. Basically freestyle with an underwater recovery. Slide your arm forward under the water instead of over it, and focus on anchoring, setting the elbow, and pulling straight back on every stroke.

The black line bonus. Do the long dog scull over the black line on the bottom of the pool and try to trace the outside edge of it with your fingertips. It keeps your hand moving straight back and shoulder width apart.

5. Rotation: Drive The Stroke From Your Hips

Most triathletes rotate their shoulders. Very few connect their core and hips to the stroke. And that's a lot of free power left on the table.

The most efficient way to move through the water is on your side. Lying flat on your stomach creates the most drag. So the goal is to get from one side to the other quickly and get rid of the dead time when you're flat in the middle.

To do that, rotate from your hips first. Your catch is just the anchor. It gives you something to hold onto while your hips do the rotating.

I like to think about it like sitting in a swivel chair. You use your core to swivel back and forth. If you let your core go loose, you swivel too far. If you don't use your core to keep moving, you drift back to the middle and stop facing straight ahead. Swimming works the same way. Too loose and you over-rotate. Too passive and you end up flat at the bottom of every stroke.

6. Streamline And Push-Offs: Free Speed Off Every Wall

In the pool, you push off a wall every 25 or 50 meters. Every one of those is either free speed or wasted speed.

Arms squeezed behind your ears, hands stacked, body tight like a pencil, and a few seconds of glide before your first stroke. It teaches you what it feels like to be long and narrow in the water, which is the same body position you want while swimming.

If you want to really feel it, shorten a piece of stretch tubing, tie it to the block or have a partner hold it, and push off against it. A loose streamline gets yanked back. A tight one cuts through.

What About Triathlon-Specific Technique?

Open water changes a few things, and it's worth knowing which ones.

Sighting. Lift your eyes just enough to spot the buoy, then roll straight into your breath. Every time you swim off course, you're swimming extra meters.

Stroke rate. In open water, especially in chop or in a pack, a slightly quicker turnover usually works better than a long, gliding stroke. Gliding is great in a calm pool. In waves, it just means you stall.

The wetsuit. A wetsuit lifts your legs and hides a lot of body position problems. That's great on race day. It's not great if you rely on it, because the day the water is too warm for neoprene, every problem it was hiding shows up at once. Fix your technique underneath it. I wrote about that in beware of the wetsuit.

What Not To Obsess Over

Hand entry angles. Exact finger spread. The perfect early vertical forearm.

These are real things. They matter for elite pool swimmers chasing hundredths of a second. For most triathletes, they're tiny details, and they're a lot more fun to think about than kicking 400 meters every session. If your breathing, kick, body position, and rotation aren't solid yet, none of the fine details will save you. I call it Tiny Details Exaggeration Syndrome, and it's one of the most common ways triathletes waste their winters.

How Do You Know If Your Technique Is Improving?

Two ways, and you should use both.

Film yourself. Most triathletes have never seen their own stroke. You'll feel like your head is down and your kick is fine, and the video will tell you otherwise. A phone on the pool deck is enough. Underwater is even better.

Count your strokes. Count how many strokes it takes you to swim a length, along with your time. If your stroke count drops and your speed holds, your technique is getting more efficient. If you want a structured way to test it, try the lower stroke count challenge.

Good technique isn't about looking like a pool swimmer. It's about wasting less of every stroke. Breathe better, kick for balance, sit higher, hold onto the water, and rotate from your hips. Do that, and every hour you spend training afterward starts working a lot harder for you.

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