O2 in H2O - part 1

I had my first viewing of O2 in H2O today.  

It runs for about 55 minutes and spends time on both side breathing (ie: for freestyle) and forward breathing (ie: for breast stroke and butterfly). 

I am going to have to watch it a few more times to absorb everything and then a few more times as I try the exercises but rather than write an essay on everything in the DVD I thought I would post about it progressively.

This first post is an overview of the key skills of breathing.  There are two.  First relates to head spine alignment, the second to breathing with your body.

Head spine alignment

I have learnt that to keep my body buoyant it needs to be balanced and in alignment from my head along my spine to my toes.  If my head is too high up out of the water my hips, bum and legs drop causing drag.  Not so strangely enough, the body also needs to maintain this alignment when I turn breathe . 

In the DVD Terry Laughlin puts it this way:

“Visualise a laser beam coming from the top centre of your head, that laser beam should always point forward and never up”.

Yep, check I get that.

Breathing with your body

Or "rolling to the air".

According to the DVD, the best way to keep head spine alignment when breathing is to:

“... minimise independent movement of your head as much as possible by bringing your mouth to the air with body movement not by lifting or turning your head. In freestyle that means rotating your torso as if you mean to breathe with your belly button. Your head should go along for the ride.”

This means I need to use my belly and hips (ie: use big muscles) to lead and roll my body to allow me to bring my mouth out of the water instead of lifting and craning my head and neck (ie:  don’t use little muscles to turn my whole body).  Guilty as charged when it comes to neck craning! I even recall coming home from lessons with a sore neck because of all said craning.

While this all makes absolute sense, I tried it out on dry land to be sure I got it.  Face down on my bed, right arm out in front past my ear, left pointing to my toes -  see what happens when you just turn your head to the left as opposed to using your belly and hip to rotate.


So put simply, when turning to breathe, keep your head as close to the water as possible and roll your body around to get air rather than lifting your head and neck out of the water.   Yep I get the drift - in theory.


As an aside – the DVD shows lots of underwater images of Terry swimming.  One thing I noticed is that when we swims he is constantly rolling from side to side.  Almost as if his spine is an axis on which he is smoothing tilting one way and then the other.  He never goes so far as to have his shoulders stacked vertically though. Hmmm, interesting.