The technique errors that limit most recreational and masters swimmers share a common thread: they are largely invisible to the swimmer making them. Unlike a sport where inefficiency is immediately punishable, swimming lets you reinforce poor movement patterns for months or years while still making forward progress. The water is forgiving enough to let bad habits persist.
The following seven errors are among the most common observed across lap swimmers at all experience levels. Each is correctable, and each correction has a measurable effect on speed and efficiency.
"The first step to fixing a technique problem is having accurate information about what you're actually doing, not what you think you're doing."
Elevated head position
Lifting the head to look forward is the single most common error in freestyle, and it creates a cascade of secondary problems. When the head rises, the hips drop in compensation, dramatically increasing frontal drag and the effort required to maintain speed.
The correction: Your gaze should be directed toward the pool floor, with the waterline intersecting your head somewhere between the hairline and the mid-skull depending on your stroke. The back of your head should remain visible at the surface.
A useful drill is "eyes-down" freestyle: swim without checking your direction, focusing only on maintaining a downward gaze. Most swimmers find the adjustment feels dramatic at first; the corrected position is often further down than expected.
For swimmers who lift their entire head to breathe, the correction is different: breathing in freestyle is accomplished through rotation, not elevation. The ear stays submerged; the mouth clears the water through body rotation. The correction takes consistent drill work to automate.
Knee-initiated kick
The flutter kick originates at the hip, with the knee bending slightly as a passive consequence of momentum, not as an active joint driving the movement. When the knee initiates the kick, the result is a cycling motion that creates significant drag and fatigues the quadriceps without generating meaningful propulsion.
The correction: The kick should feel like it comes from the front of the hip flexor and the back of the glute, with the entire leg moving as a relatively unified unit. Kick amplitude should be modest, typically 12 to 18 inches total, and ankle flexibility plays a key role in how much propulsive surface area the foot presents to the water.
Excessive glide between strokes
The concept of an "efficient, long stroke" is often misapplied. It is true that elite swimmers have a longer distance-per-stroke than recreational swimmers, but this is a consequence of powerful mechanics, not of pausing between strokes. A pronounced dead spot, where both hands are extended simultaneously and the body decelerates, trades any efficiency gains for significant speed loss.
The correction: Efficient freestyle is characterized by "front-quadrant timing": the recovering arm should enter the water before the pulling arm passes the hip. This maintains continuous forward momentum and keeps one hand always engaged with the water.
Insufficient body rotation
Elite freestyle swimmers rotate their body significantly with each stroke, typically 45 to 60 degrees from horizontal. This rotation serves several functions: it lengthens the effective reach of each stroke, enables a more powerful pull by engaging the larger back muscles, and reduces the frontal drag profile of the body.
The correction: Body rotation should feel like rotating around the spine as a central axis, rather than shifting side to side. Side-kick drills are an effective way to develop the feel of proper rotation and build the stability required to maintain it.
Dropped-elbow catch
The catch is the moment at which the hand and forearm engage with the water to begin generating propulsion. A high-elbow catch maximizes the surface area pushing against the water. A dropped elbow reduces that surface area significantly and limits the power of the pull.
The correction: This is among the most neuromuscularly demanding corrections in freestyle technique. The key is to "pin" the elbow at the surface before initiating the pull, feeling the forearm press against the water vertically before the hand sweeps back. Useful drills include doggy paddle with exaggerated high-elbow positioning, and fingertip drag.
Training at a single intensity
Many recreational swimmers default to a moderate-hard effort for every session, fast enough to be tiring but not structured in a way that systematically develops different energy systems. The result is a training effect that plateaus relatively quickly.
The correction: Effective swim training uses a distribution of intensities across the training week. A substantial portion of volume should be genuinely aerobic. Streamline's daily swim sets are structured with this in mind; each workout specifies the intended intensity zone and why.
Inefficient turns
The push-off from the wall is the fastest phase of swimming in a pool. An open turn, a weak flip turn, or a flip turn that sends the swimmer off-axis wastes a portion of that speed on every length. Over the course of a 1500-meter swim, this accumulates to a meaningful amount of time.
The correction: A well-executed flip turn involves a consistent approach (counting strokes from the flags), a tight tuck, a clean rotation, feet planted at mid-pool-depth on the wall, and a streamlined push-off transitioning to a controlled breakout.
A note on prioritization
Most swimmers will recognize themselves in three to five of the errors above. Working on all of them simultaneously is ineffective; technique changes require focused attention and repetition to become automatic. A better approach is to identify your most significant error, work on it with targeted drills until it improves measurably, then move to the next priority.
Video review is essential. It is not possible to accurately assess your own technique by feel alone; the proprioceptive sense of what you're doing is frequently inconsistent with what is actually happening.
Daily Swim Sets (free)
New workouts posted every day across Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced levels. Structured, printable, and updated with the swim training focus in mind.