How to coordinate hands and feet in swimming

When practicing swimming, first of all, you must control your legs and feet, and it is best to keep your body connected, like a fish, so that you can swim well. Here are some tips for swimming. First, relax your leg muscles. Then slide your legs and feet alternately and rhythmically. Also pay attention to the strength of your arms and keep your body flexible. You will learn it slowly.

When practicing the coordination of hands and feet in freestyle, it is best to have mastered the leg and hand movements of freestyle. Otherwise, when practicing, it will be easy to forget how to kick your legs when you want to paddle, or only focus on the leg movements and forget to paddle your hands, resulting in a lack of coordination between hands and feet. Therefore, before introducing the freestyle hand and foot coordination exercises, let's review the kicking and rowing.

The leg movement is: when kicking, the legs are slightly straight, the knee joints are relaxed, the soles of the feet are flat, inward-facing, and the angle of the legs is about thirty to forty centimeters below the water surface. The movement formula is: the thighs drive the calves, bend the knees and press down, straighten the knees and move them up, and kick the water alternately with the feet.

The hand movement is to catch the water at a distance of 20 to 30 centimeters from the water surface, use the elbow as a fulcrum, use the forearm and palm to paddle the water from the front to the chest along the midline of the body and then push it to the thigh. The movement formula is: stretch forward to grab the water, paddle the water in front of the chest, push the water with the waist, and move the elbow forward high to slide into the water.

There are three ways to practice the coordination of hands and feet: single-arm paddling exercises, alternating paddling exercises, and cross-stroke exercises.

One-arm water-skiing exercise

After starting the kick, hold one hand in front and repeat the stroke several times with the other hand. After practicing several times, switch to the other side and practice with both hands. If your feet stop kicking water as soon as your hands slip during practice, you can continue kicking your legs after one stroke, and then row again after moving forward a certain distance. In other words, leave a few seconds between two strokes. This will improve the phenomenon of your feet stopping as soon as your hands stroke.

Water kicking exercise with alternating arms

After you become proficient in single-arm paddling, you can practice alternating paddling, which means switching to the other hand after paddling with one hand. It doesn't matter if you can't breathe at the beginning. You can use one hand to paddle once for each hand as one cycle, stand up to change your breath after each cycle, and then do two cycles. If you can tolerate holding your breath, slowly increase the number and distance of the cycles. To increase the proficiency of hand-foot coordination. In this way, even if you don't know how to breathe, you can still swim a long distance.

Cross-stroke drill

Once you have become proficient in the alternating stroke, you can then practice the smooth freestyle stroke, which is the cross-stroke movement. When both hands are in front and after pushing off the wall to start, one hand paddles forward and backward first. When the hand is out of the water and wants to move forward, the other hand in front of the body starts to grab the water. When the hand is about to slide to the pushing stage, the hand moving forward just enters the water. The paddle is taken turns in this way, with one hand extending forward and the other hand pushing backward. This lengthens the paddling distance and speeds up the forward movement. Such a cycle can form a smooth movement and generate continuous power, which can prepare for practicing breathing.