What is bi-lateral breathing?
Bi-lateral breathing requires the swimmer to change breathing sides after each stroke cycle. The cycle could be 3 strokes, 5 strokes or so on. This skill will help eliminate neck and shoulder fatigue and promotes better balance and body alignment. Bilateral breathing is also an essential navigational skill in open water.

Why bi-lateral breathe?
Bi-lateral breathing helps swimmers ‘balance out their stroke and teaches them to rotate their hips on both sides of their stroke.

One of the most common faults in free style swimming is to under roll on the non-breathing side. It’s easy to roll on the side you breathe too, but not so easy to roll on the side you don’t breathe to. This under-rolling can lead to less power as you don’t finish your swim stroke as strongly as you could if you were on your breathing side. Bi-lateral breathing helps you smooth out the stroke, keeps you balanced, and in some cases lets you swim in a straighter line.

One of the most important benefits of bi-lateral breathing is that is helps you to limit the amount of stress that is put on your shoulders due to the constant strain of breathing to only one side. Another benefit of bi-lateral breathing is that you can watch your recovery (is your elbow high and are you fingertips dragging across the water?) and you can watch you hand entry (does your hand enter in the order of fingertips, wrist, elbow, and at a 45 degree angle?). Being aware of what happens on both sides of your stroke will allow you to see what is happening and let you make corrections as you progress. One last advantage of BLB is that in a race you can see what is going on both sides of you, not just one. If the waves are breaking over your right side, you can switch to breathing to your left or vice versa. Also, if you have a swimmer you want to keep up with, you can always see where he/she is if you can BLB.

Bud LaCombe running strong at IMAZ 2008.

How do I improve my bi-lateral breathing?
The best advice I can give someone who is not proficient at BLB is to ‘just do it’ – start with breathing on your weaker side (the one you aren’t used to breathing on) – when I coached swimming there was always one set per day that had to be swum on the weak side (WS) – it was tough and most swimmers hated it, but it made their BLB swimming that much better. Back then my instructions were to jump in and swim 500 yards on your WS. Now that I am a more compassionate coach I would recommend swimming a 25 BLB, then 50 normal, then 25 BLB again. I like to see swimmers progress from 25 yards all the way up to 200 in a few sessions. Once you get to 200 yards then you can swim sets – like 5x200 on 10 second rest BLB. But wait! You are saying only 10 seconds rest after a 200 yard swim? Yes, that would be correct. The key is to swim the BLB sets easy enough that you not sucking wind (think ‘long and strong’ on your swim stroke. If you can do this then soon enough you will be swimming 1,000 yards or more pretty easily.

BLB swim sets:

• Warm-up: 200 yards alternating BLB every 3rd length.
• Main set: 4x100 on 10” rest, with 1st and 4th length being BLB
• 4x100 on 10” rest with middle 50 being weak side breathing
• 3x200 on 15” rest. Swim 200 as follows: 50 blb, 50 ws, 50 blb, 50 ws
• Cool down – same as warm up

More Advanced (simple but effective):

• Warm-up: 200 yards alternating BLB every 3rd length.
• Then 45 minutes of 200s blb on 10” rest. These are easy enough to not need much rest, but hard enough to make you focus on the blb. Slow the stroke down and focus on all aspects of your breathing, hand entry, pull, finish, recovery.

If you want to swim fast correctly, you need to learn to swim slowly correctly first! Good luck with developing your new breathing technique!

Michael Ricci is a Level III USAT certified coach. He can be reached for personal coaching at mike@d3multisport.com.

The Weakest Link: Getting through a plateau, Cont'd
By USAT Level III Coach Mike Ricci

Taking a closer look at some of the world’s best endurance athletes we see that usually run or swim twice per day. Even cyclist ride for a few hours, refuel and ride some more. When these athletes train they are focusing on one sport at a time. If you have the desire to get better you should think about implementing some sport rotation into your season. Letting your body focus on one event at time will help it adapt more quickly and improve on technique and endurance. If you continue to keep training the way you are now and you aren’t improving then what do you have to lose by trying this approach?

If you are interested in using sport rotation (some coaches may call them ‘Run Camps’ or ‘Swim Camps’ etc) then my suggestion for this program would be to focus on one sport for three weeks, take an easy week, and then repeat the cycle. If you use two months to focus on one sport, then a complete rotation would take six months. After six months you can return to a more balanced approach. If you live in a part of the world where you have all four seasons you can let the seasons dictate your schedule and it would look something like this: Starting around November 1st you start your run focus. By early January you would start your swim focus and by early March you would be starting your bike focus. You don’t have to make it that rigid as we usually have off weeks, colds in the winter, and life that gets in the way of training. It happens.

So how would we set up a typical cycle? If you look at your training in terms of time and frequency, then you would want 50-75% of your training time to be focused on that sport. Let’s take running for example: If you currently run 3 days a week, work yourself up to five or six days per week, even if that fifth or sixth day is only a fifteen or twenty minute run. That is ‘frequency’, and it will help you to run better the more you are on your feet. In the other two sports, I would still train two times per week. I would do one drill session in the pool and on the bike, and I would add in an endurance set for each as well. Since the focus is on the running, the other the non-running workouts are just maintenance and or skills (drills) sessions. After my two month cycle I would switch to swimming where I would try to swim at a higher frequency and increase my time in the pool. The running and cycling would be two times per week, with the focus on drills and endurance. Once we move into the cycling phase, we are repeating the process. Cycling becomes the focus with the other sports maintain the fitness gained and continuing to work on skills and endurance.

Most importantly, during these phases, become a runner during your run focus. Run with people who are better then you. Watch how they train. Swim with the swimmers during your swim focus months. Become a fish. Watch the fast swimmers swim. Watch their form and see what you can learn. On the bike, become a cyclist during your focus months. Ride with a group. Learn bike handling skills. Learn to ride in a pack. During these focus months you can learn a lot, you can improve a lot, and you can take your fitness levels to places you haven’t been before. Don’t become a slave to training. Use these ideas as a guideline, but not the end-all for your training. I have tried this approach with many athletes and even in situations where we only did a three week block of focused training, there was improvement. So, if you really want to improve that weakest link, spend some time focusing on it, and in a few weeks, you may just turn a weakness into a strength.

Michael Ricci is a Level III USAT certified coach. He can be reached for personal coaching at mike@d3multisport.com.