Balanced-Body Rolling (BBR)

This drill is best done with a training snorkel. Push off from the wall in the same position you used for the FB drill—on your belly and with both arms at your sides, nose pointed toward the bottom of the pool—and begin kicking easily. Keep a tight line and keep enough pressure on your buoy to stay balanced. Once you are balanced, roll onto your side. Keep your nose pointed straight down and keep your hands at your sides. If you keep a tight line and keep pressure on your buoy as you roll, you will already be in a balanced position when you reach your side. Stay balanced while on your side. With your arms at your sides, you’ll likely need a bit more buoy pressure to be balanced than when you had one arm extended in front. After you are well balanced, roll again to your front, keeping a tight line and pressure on your buoy as you roll. Do this drill rolling in both directions.

Feedback Tools

• As you roll from the front position to the side position, you should feel the strip of flesh from your shoulder to your wrist become exposed to the air all at once without having to adjust your balance.

• As you roll back to the front position, you should feel the cheeks of your butt become exposed to the air without having to adjust your balance.

• To stay balanced, you may find that you need to keep a bit more pressure on your buoy when you are on your side than when you are on your front.

Experiment a Bit

Again, spend time consciously shifting back and forth between holding a tight-line posture and relaxing into a schlumpy posture. If you do enough of this, you will begin to set up an automatic feedback cycle that will set off alarm bells in your head whenever you begin to break out of good posture.

 

FOCUS POINT ➤ Red Dot

In many swimming drills and in full-stroke swimming, it can be helpful to imagine a 2-inch (5 cm) red dot in the center of the top of your head that you keep underwater at all times. A person watching you from a vantage point under the water as you swim toward him should not be able to see that red dot move up, down, or side to side as your body rotates or as you take strokes. They would only see the dot rotate as you turn your head to breathe. This focus point combines the three head-related ideas discussed thus far: the neck tension of aquatic posture, keeping your nose pointed toward the bottom of the pool when not breathing, and the zero head-lift of risky breathing.