Anchor Your Hand

The goal in the ‘pull’ in freestyle is not to drag your arm through the water but to pull your body past that point where your hand enters the water.  With this in mind, you will get a longer stroke.  A lot of correction that I will get people to do in their freestyle stroke is with this in mind.

The ‘skating’ drill (earlier post) helps get that arm and hand way out in front so you can use the power of your lats and core. 

<-IMPORTANT ->

You want to sort of anchor that hand as it goes into the water and drive it forward and down. 

When the hand gets about half way, then drive it backwards. 

As you finish that push with your hand, before it comes out of the water, if it is your left hand, you want kick with your left foot.  Hard.  You should be over on your right side by this time, roughly forty five degrees.  So your hand/arm is pushing back and sort of to the side.  Your kick will be pushing ‘against’ that.  And backwards at the same time.

So, you are driving that forward hand down and forward, grabbing as much water as you can, while pushing out and back with the other and doing a forceful kick at the same time. 

This will help balance your body so that you are not fishtailing.

Using hand paddles and fins to swim a long extended stroke is a good drill.  Feels good as well.

Note: My coaching, all of my pointers, and education here, is directed at distance swimmers, not sprinters.
For distance swimming you need to be efficient.  And still move along.