I got an email today about bilateral breathing and the more I read it, the more it got me thinking. I do 99% of my breathing on the right side. In fact at last weekend's OW swim, the bouys were all left turns and the only time I made a concious effort to breathe to that side was around the turns (mainly to stretch my neck a bit at a point that made sense.)
After reading this blog as well as some other stuff, I might be convinced to make an efffort to breathe left for longer periods. Has anyone else trained themselves to breathe on their "bad" side and did you see any unexpected improvments like this guy did in his blog? www.feelforthewater.com/.../joel-uses-his-bad-side-to-come-good.html I realze that breathing every 3 strokes makes sense to keep balanced, but what about completely switching sides?
Thank you all for such good insight. Was out sick most of last week with a cold after posting this. So happy to see so many ideas and thoughts on this. Tried it a bit on a long swim this morning in a set of 10x100. I purposely worked on the left side. It feels so awkward and I noticed I really had to thing about arm position. The good thing was that it felt worse than the timing came to be. It ended up being at about the same speed as my dominant side. Going to make a concisous effort to do more of this in practice, like you said. I may suggest to my coach we do some incorporation of the off-side as well to see what he thinks. I'll try to remember to post back in about a month to see how times/feelings have changed. Interesting stuff!
Thank you all for such good insight. Was out sick most of last week with a cold after posting this. So happy to see so many ideas and thoughts on this. Tried it a bit on a long swim this morning in a set of 10x100. I purposely worked on the left side. It feels so awkward and I noticed I really had to thing about arm position. The good thing was that it felt worse than the timing came to be. It ended up being at about the same speed as my dominant side. Going to make a concisous effort to do more of this in practice, like you said. I may suggest to my coach we do some incorporation of the off-side as well to see what he thinks. I'll try to remember to post back in about a month to see how times/feelings have changed. Interesting stuff!
