Freestyle

Freestyle is what you would call a asymmetric swimming style. Well, asymmetric is a strong word, but almost. What I mean by this? Imagine you are laying on a floor on your stomach, face down and your arms are along side of your body. Now you move one arm along the floor to the front of your head. Now you have one arm in front of your head and one at a side, this is quite asymmetric, isn't it. As opposed to symmetric swimming style where both sides of your body do the same things, so both arms would move from the position along side of your body to in front of your head at the same time.

Now that we have that covered, let's focus on freestyle swimming. It is very similar to what I have described above with your body being on the floor face down with one arm extended in front of your head and one arm alongside your body. Now just imagine you are in the same position in the water and start rotating your straight arms at the same time. So the front arm goes down in the water and the back arm comes up. Like a very slow windmill. If someone tells you that you should start the freestyle stroke only when your back arm reaches your front arm, they are wrong as that is not how to properly swim freestyle. I have discussed this catch up drill and is only used for fine tuning your arm movements in slower speed.