Bilateral Breathing is the only thing I do [unless there is big chop from one side]

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"on your Left"

I don't do bilateral. That may be personal, but I don't think it has hurt that I don't do it. People tell me I have a very symetrical stroke, and I have never done bilateral breathing, so it may not be necessary.

If your postion is skewed, try straightening out your head and legs - your head acts like a counter weight and the legs act like a rudder and if they are off they will throw your whole body off. Most swimmers with postion problems I see have head-postion problems.

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"My strategy is to start out slow and then peter-out altogether" Walt Stack

I was a one sided breather and always pulled to that side. Took a tri swim course and they had my doing both sides. Felt really wierd at first but I've been working on it for two years so it now feels almost natural.

JAY,

If you're doing a 'form' workout, then try to do some specific sets of Bi-L breathing. If you're doing an endurance set or even a speed set, I would work the B-L breathing into your main set, say, every other 100 do 50 of B-L until you start to get comfortable. Once you get comfortable, do some 100s breathing only to your weak side. After a while, it becomes quite easy.

As for the long term advantages, I think they are many:
1. Did you see the 'Duel in the Pool' AUS vs USA. In the last 50mm of the womens free, two women were dueling out for the win. It just so happened the woman on the right had to switch her breathing side to keep an eye on the other woman. She did it without even the smallest hitch and it helped her put on the gas when she needed to.
2. In triathlon, it's nice to be able to breathe away from someone you are passing or are being passed by. That is, you don't want to attack on your breathing side. You'll end up swallowing more water.
3. It balances your stroke and makes you faster.
4. Sometimes the prettiest view in the swim is on
your other side. :-)

Hope this helps and good luck!

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Adam Duncan
New York, NY

note: by no means do I have any swim coaching expertise, this is only a personal observation.

My stroke and "glide" through the water feels a lot smoother when I breath bilateraly, so I force myself to do it "always", though I tend to relapse in the right side only when I get tired.

Cannot explain why and is best left to those who know, but I'd guess it has to do with the hip/body rotation in the water, but I swear my swim feels more efficient breathing bi.

Henk

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Alex Jonker

I’m not a bi-lateral breather but I am trying to work on it during easier swims. When I am going all out I have a hard time breathing to my right side. I'm working on it because I think it would be helpful in sighting the course during ocean swims (and seeing who is around me) to be able to look on both sides of me since visibility is generally very low when trying to look around you under water.

Do it until you feel you can comfortably on either side for sighting purposes.

But some people will naturally do better with a slightly asymmetrical freestyle. Grant Hackett isn't close to equal. There was discussion on r.s.s a while back about how an awful lot of other elite swimmers had a decided 'lope' to their stroke as well. As long as head and hips are in the right places, and you aren't uneven by more than, say 60/40 in terms of exertion on each side, a little bit uneven might just be what works for you.

I was nowhere an elite swimmer (only under 5:45 for 500yds on a good day) but I spent years and had many coaches trying to get me breathing bilaterally all the time, but I always came back to right side breathing because I'm simply faster and lower exertion that way.

I've been bilaterally swimming for 3 or 4 years.. and this is the only year that i've really "swam".. I did all my training bilaterally.. and i definatly feel faster doing that because it allows me to pull completly through on both sides, but i find near the end of a hard race.. I tend to go into o2 debt, and simply start breathing on one side, simply to get more oxygen in.. but i still think its faster to bilateral.. and if your new, and what to go faster.. definatly work on it.. the long term flexibility is definatly worth it.

I believe everyone should learn to breathe bi-lateraly. I do this exclusively for drills and pool training. But, when I race and swim in open water, I tend to breathe every other stroke which means I only breathe to one side. I found that when learning to breath bi-lateraly my overall swim stroke improved. It helped with my body roll, and as someone else mentioned, I tend to glide better when I breathe this way. The reason I don't do it in races is I like to get as much air as possible and my races are generally at a higher effort than training. This means I have to focus even harder on my form during a race since I'm swimming a bit differently than my pool training.

You should always, or atleast should, bi-lateral breathe in a triathlon. Besides the other reasons above, if your stroke is unbalanced by breathing to one side, you won't swim straight and we all know the fastest way to get someplace is a straight line. =)

I wouldn't watch Phelps, or Hackett, or Coughlin or Davis in the Duel in the Pool for simple stroke technique. Yeah, they're World Record holders but not all of them have an efficent stroke in the breathing catagory. Lot's of people are breathing out of the turns too. Big no no. =) Though Ian Thorpe has to have the best freestyle I have ever seen.

So there are two components of swimming fast: the physics of it, and the physiology end of it.

Physics, it's the easy part of the equation. Develop a model, run your model, and figure out how to maximize propulsion as the human body travels through the water. Seems like most of the swim books out there are written from the physics end of it.

But the problem is that the best way to swim from a physics standpoint isn't really the best way to get across the point from a physiology standpoint. The fastest, most propulsive stroke from a physics standpoint is butterfly. Look at backstroke and breaststroke these days: both are swam over short distances, and both are taking significant elements from butterfly these days. In back, it's the extended fly/dolphin kick at the start and turns, and for breast, it's the more fly-like movement through the water instead of a 'flat' stroke.

But in the case of butterfly, it ends up not being as fast because it does not play well with human physiology. The arm stroke has no glide phase to it. Kicking fly underwater leads to oxygen debt/quick build-up of CO2. It takes a lot more energy to swim it right than freestyle does, so for 99% of the population, freestyle is faster than fly for distances more than 25 yards.

And you don't see so much talk about the physiology end other than from an injury prevention standpoint. Getting your strokes to fit your body/body type is more art than science, and at times more than a little voodoo. Best coach I ever had, he could take a group of six swimmers, tell them to do entirely different things with their strokes, and then all six swimmers would hit the top 12 at state meet with strokes that didn't necessarily look anything like what their teammates were doing.

At the elite level, Ian Thorpe does one thing and wins Olympic Gold, Grant Hackett does another and gets his gold, and Brooke Bennett does something that would seem to be totally contrary to lessons learned from Thorpe and Hackett, and gets her Olympic Gold.

Lesson of the story: once you get the basic physics of swimming down, then it's time to start tweaking your stroke to fit the physiology end of it, because sometimes working with a stroke adapted to your own body is going to be a better solution than trying adapt your body to some sort of stroke mechanics ideal.