Some people are born with a very strong competitive drive. Some people are not. If you are on either side, should you enter competitive swimming?  On this video I will share my point of view from both types, since I think I have a little bit of both and I have known both types of swimmers.  Competing is a very unique experience. Sometimes it can be the best feeling in the world and sometimes it is painful and disappointing. Either way, your first competition in the sport or your first in a long time can be nerve racking. You get to the pool not knowing what to expect and with a very strong feeling of making a fool of yourself. However, there is a big advantage to this. Since you are coming in fresh, there are no expectations. You really have a chance to enjoy and do your best. However, if you are not a competitive type you will not see the point of competing. Why would you? I'll give you a few reasons in a bit, but first let me talk to the competitive type swimmers. If you are the competitive type of person and you decide to compete on the sport, you will most surely be beaten by someone with more experience. This is good. It is painful but it is good. When someone is faster than you, you will have painful thoughts that can either tell you to quit the sport or go back an improve. The choice is yours. If you decide to go back and work harder, then losing just served you as a motivation. Every time I lost an event I would warm down and think about what went wrong, then I would try to quickly move and think about what I can do in practice to make sure it never happens again. This lesson to draw inspiration out of failure has made me improve in many aspects of life. Now, if you are not the competitive type, the hardest thing for you is to decide to compete. Two things might be holding you back. Maybe you don't like attracting too much attention to yourself or maybe you don't like the feeling of confrontation. There might be other reasons but I can tell you that in swimming, competing is not about asking for attention. While people might be looking at you, no one has higher expectations of you, than yourself. A swimming competition is about testing the limits of your mind and body. Competing can be sometimes confrontational and in some rare cases people's goal is to intimidate others, but most of the time it is about a few seconds of intense effort, sometimes not even seeing you rivals, followed by respect and appreciation. It is very common to make your main rivals your very best friends. Certainly most of my best friends have all competed against me. They are the ones who better understand what I have been through because they were in the same path, just in another lane.  Some of the best swimmers I have known are not competitive in nature, but ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPgdkGF8Tk8

Since I learned how to swim, I always tried to improve my stroke and feel the difference between different techniques. Once I felt how a good breakout should be like, I never forgot it. It is a game changer. The first few strokes are so fast that you immediately feel the difference between a good and a bad breakout. When you swim, you reach top speed after pushing off the wall or after the start. If you want to swim faster you need to keep that speed for as long as you can. To do that you need a good transition to break the surface. We call this a break out. The break out is exactly that, when the body breaks the surface of the water. We will talk about backstroke and freestyle breakouts because they are very similar. There are several ways you can do this, so we will go over the most common mistakes and the best breakout position. The best position to break the surface is almost horizontal. But by far the most common mistake is to come up when you are too deep in the water. This abrupt change in direction will slow you down. After you slow down it is practically imposible to get that top speed back. That is why you need to practice a good transition from underwater kicks to the stroke. Another common mistake is to go up too high, most of the time to take a breath. This results in a bobbing motion that will slow you down. So try not to breathe on the first stroke. In freestyle the challenging part is that you are not looking at the surface. So you need to know intuitively how deep you are in the water and how many kicks you need to do to go up to the surface without changing directions abruptly. There is no easy way of knowing this, it only comes with practice and a developed intuition. You can also use your peripheral view to better position yourself. In backstroke, it’s a little bit easier since you will look at the surface at all times. Ideally you did dolphin kicks to maintain the speed off the wall and to approach the surface at an almost horizontal position. Once you are close to the surface, you need to do three things. One is to keep one arm where it is in the streamline position. Then, the second arm can start pulling. Thirdly, you need to change your dolphin kick to flutter kick as fast and smoothly as posible. I can't emphasize enough how important the breakouts are. you need to feel it for yourself, improve on them and watch the results. I guarantee you will be able to swim faster. If you want to check out our new skills n talents merchandise, click here. Skills NT Shop: https://skillswimming.com/store1/ Subscribe to our email list: http://bit.ly/SubscribeSkillsNT Our favorite Amazon products: http://bit.ly/SkillsNAmazon Become our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4140610 Instragram: https://www.instagram.co ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK5cvBvKFvs