Breathing While Swimming: Basic Tips and Exercises

This article discusses a few basic tips and exercises that you can use to become familiar with the breathing technique used while swimming.

This is important because controlling your breath is one of the big challenges that you have to overcome when you start swimming.

Once you have good breathing control and have also learned to float easily, incorporating breathing into your swimming becomes more straightforward.

Basic Breathing Tips

To help you get started, here are some general tips on breathing while swimming:

1) Wear swimming goggles. Without goggles, water can get into the eyes and irritate them. Water in the eyes can also restrict your vision, which can lead to anxiety.

You can minimize these problems by wearing swimming goggles. As a result, you will be more relaxed and can better focus on your breathing.

2) There are several swimming strokes where the head is submerged during the stroke cycle. But, you should not hold your breath while the head is underwater.

Instead, you should exhale continuously in water. If you do this correctly, your lungs should be almost empty when the head breaks through the water surface to take the next breath.

3) You should breathe in quickly as soon as your mouth is above the water surface. This should be easy to do if you have previously emptied your lungs in the water.

Basic Breathing Exercises

The following basic exercises can be used to become familiar with the breathing technique in the water. Wear swimming goggles when performing those exercises.

Exercise #1: Go into the shallow water. Crouch down until your head is underwater. Stay in this position for a few seconds and then stand up.

Exercise #2: This exercise is similar to exercise #1, except that you blow bubbles through your nose when your head is underwater.

Exercise #3: This exercise is similar to exercise #2, but now you blow bubbles through both your nose and mouth.

Exercise #4: Crouch down in shallow water until the water surface is located between your nose and mouth.

Now, practice breathing in through your nose above water and breathing out through your mouth underwater.

Exercise #5: Crouch down in shallow water until your face is submerged. Start to blow bubbles.

Grab the edge of the pool and continue to blow bubbles while getting into a horizontal position with the face down.

To get into a horizontal position, you can use a relaxed flutter kick.

Exercise #6: Bob up and down in shallow water so that your head dips into the water and pops up again.

Breathe in when your head is above water and breathe out when your head is underwater.

This exercise introduces you to rhythmic breathing, a technique that you will have to use while swimming.

Conclusion

This concludes our article on basic tips and exercises for learning the breathing technique in swimming. I hope this information will be helpful to you.

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