If you have a hard time, keeping the head connected as you rotate from the head down position to the breathing position, then one great exercise to try is combination or combo free backstroke, because it is simply a rotation, an extra degree of rotation that will help you to not worry so much about breathing low and in the trough and keeping one goggle in and all that stuff, which we're going to talk about in a lesson coming up. But right now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take four strokes of freestyle, and three strokes of backstroke. And I'm going to demonstrate this for a little bit. And then we will talk about the process of the rotation. But I'm just going to go through this now the idea here is that, as I rotate over, the head stays in line, because I'm not worried about staying low on the side, which is where a lot of people push up and lift their head. So we'll go and demo the four, three, and three back. And we'll do that a few times. And so hopefully, the head will just rotate very easily, in a straight and direct line, from front to back, and back to front, or from down to up and up to down.

You may have noticed on that one, that as I rotated from the down to the up position, that my head was very low, very close to the surface of the water, even having the water come over my face a little bit. That's a key point in this. And that keeps the head in line and we'll discuss it further in the next lesson. But the idea here is that it's simply a rotation within a 360-degree cylinder, and you're trying to stay as low as possible as you go to that breath. So we hope that that was a fun one for you. And we will explain in further detail the transition from down to up and the transition from up to down


Sign In to watch video

Free Back Combo Drill