What you see before your turns can give you some idea of how fast your turns are.

**Why do it:**
Keeping your eyes down into the turns allows you to maintain more momentum as you come into the wall.

**How to do it:**
**1** - On EVERY turn, keep your eyes in the most appropriate position for swimming.
**2** - Using the markers on the bottom of the pool on every turn, starts to get you used to using them at ALL pools.
**3** - Making sure your COUNT is correct for any backstroke turn will become MUCH more important.
**4** - Even if you're doing an open turn on an IM from back to breast, there's still never a reason to look at the wall.

**How to do it really well (the fine points):**
Especially in your home pool, you should know exactly how many strokes to take once you see the "T" on the bottom of the pool.  When you get to other pools for meets, part of your warm-up is to practice hitting the walls just right... without looking up at them.

This video shows many variations on the turns, only skipping the crossover transition turn.  Our demonstrator was a great sprint freestyle swimmer, so she didn't do the other turns quite so often. :)  However, her instinct to keep her eyes down into the turns is evident.

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Turns - Eyes Down.