Help!

Crawler, It seems that your head position and the amount of water you're catching has already been addressed. But here's a way to visualize the solution to each of those problems: 1) When you're really swimming fast, you're contracting your ab muscles like you're doing a crunch. This drops your head, and your hips pop right to the surface because when swimming freestyle, your center of gravity runs straight through your sternum and you can pivot around it like the fulcrum of a see-saw. 2) When you finish your stroke, you want to feel like you're actually throwing water past your feet. In the (long gone) days when I could go sub-22 in the 50 free, I could often enough actually feel the wave of water I'd just "thrown" roll down my legs past my feet. A decent drill to achieve a better catch is the "duck-butt" drill. To do this, focus on finishing your stroke all the way to your thigh, and continue the stroke even further. Before beginning the recovery of the stroke, let your fingers breach the surface and flick water over your backside, like a duck kicking water over it's tail.

Crawler, It seems that your head position and the amount of water you're catching has already been addressed. But here's a way to visualize the solution to each of those problems: 1) When you're really swimming fast, you're contracting your ab muscles like you're doing a crunch. This drops your head, and your hips pop right to the surface because when swimming freestyle, your center of gravity runs straight through your sternum and you can pivot around it like the fulcrum of a see-saw. 2) When you finish your stroke, you want to feel like you're actually throwing water past your feet. In the (long gone) days when I could go sub-22 in the 50 free, I could often enough actually feel the wave of water I'd just "thrown" roll down my legs past my feet. A decent drill to achieve a better catch is the "duck-butt" drill. To do this, focus on finishing your stroke all the way to your thigh, and continue the stroke even further. Before beginning the recovery of the stroke, let your fingers breach the surface and flick water over your backside, like a duck kicking water over it's tail.