After swimming around 4 years, primarily breathing to my right side I thought I'd attempt to mix in some bi-lateral breathing to my practices to help develop a more symmetrical stroke.
I'm struggling hard-core. Each time I try to breathe to my left I lose a lot of momentum and rhythm to my stroke. I breathe too late, I lift my head too much, which drops my legs, I scissor kick to maintain balance and generally become a mess. I have improved slightly but still struggle bad.
Right now I'm attempting my entire workouts with a 3 breath pattern but I'm thinking of switching it to 3 breaths on warm-ups/pull-sets/cool-downs and than breathing comfortably on main-sets/sprint sets.
Has anyone tried bi-lateral breathing after being a one sided breather for a while and if so what are some good tips to becoming more efficient at it?
one of the biggest reasons that people struggle with bilateral breathing is because they don't exhale continuously under water
This is my problem with bilateral breathing, too. I can inhale perfectly fine on my left, but first, I spend a bunch of time exhaling before I can even think about intake. I think it's because I'm used to starting the exhale phase while I'm rotating to my right, leading up to the breath.
I also have this problem with butterfly :(
I tend to have a loping stroke, and it doesn't work well with bilateral breathing
Also this. But isn't part of the reason we have loping strokes because of the single-side breathing? Anyway, learning bilateral breathing is hard. There's a lot more to it than just turning your head to the left instead of the right. Seems like one of those things where if you can't do it well, you may as well not do it at all. As long as you can swim in a straight line and remain relatively injury-free, anyway.
one of the biggest reasons that people struggle with bilateral breathing is because they don't exhale continuously under water
This is my problem with bilateral breathing, too. I can inhale perfectly fine on my left, but first, I spend a bunch of time exhaling before I can even think about intake. I think it's because I'm used to starting the exhale phase while I'm rotating to my right, leading up to the breath.
I also have this problem with butterfly :(
I tend to have a loping stroke, and it doesn't work well with bilateral breathing
Also this. But isn't part of the reason we have loping strokes because of the single-side breathing? Anyway, learning bilateral breathing is hard. There's a lot more to it than just turning your head to the left instead of the right. Seems like one of those things where if you can't do it well, you may as well not do it at all. As long as you can swim in a straight line and remain relatively injury-free, anyway.
