Search “freestyle body rotation” on the web and look for videos. You’ll see movie after movie of swimmers performing what look almost like catch-up stroke drills, with all the technical swim elements we’ve been talking about throughout the Guppy Challenge series.

These experts preach a 45° angle, that is to say, your body rotates around what swimming coaches call the “long axis,” which is the axis about which you spin if you shish-ka-bob yourself with a skewer passing right through your head and body. To keep with the analogy, imagine you’re getting roasted on the spit, body turning around so that all of you can evenly cook. The difference is, you’re not rotating in a circle, but back and forth, like a washing machine agitator, 45° in each direction.

When I watch videos of you-all swim I often don’t see 45° on each side; rather more than 45° on your breathing side, and no rotation at all on the other side. If you look at those videos you’ll see that body rotation is pretty symmetrical among good swimmers on both sides, even if you only breathe on one side. The image below is a pretty good example of that 45° rotation, which is occurring in the absence of a breath taken. If this swimmer was to swim several strokes on 1 breath the same body rotation would be there.

Teaching body rotation is relatively new. This, along with high elbow during the pull phase, was not taught when I began swimming in earnest as a triathlete 40-plus years ago. In fact, two things have changed in that time: the way freestyle is taught, and the way freestyle is taught to adult onset swimmers. The great revolution in adult swim instruction is almost wholly due to triathlon. During the 1980s triathletes discovered masters swimming and the best masters coaches realized that their methods for teaching were deficient. Triathletes really suffered through the inability of coaches to get the point across to triathletes learning to swim.

“Extend!” my masters coach would tell me. “Reach!” Only to be followed by, “You’re crossing over!” The more I reached the more I would cross over. Why? Because I wasn’t rotating about the long axis. I was bending at the waist, or curling my torso, every time I breathed, causing my legs to splay. The more I reached the greater the crossover. (Crossover is when your hand crosses the centerline of your body during the catch.) I never did understand what my coach was saying while she was my coach; and she never considered how she might explain herself better.

One more thing I'll mention and then I’ll let you be. I’m unsure about whether body rotation fully includes the legs. Imagine wringing the water out of a kitchen hand towel, twisting the ends of the towel in opposite directions. There is no bend in the body during freestyle. No bend at the waist. You remain linear along that long axis. But when you rotate from side to side, is there a twist at all, where the body from – say – the hips to the shoulders engage in that full 45° rotation to the left and then to the right, while the legs down to your feet don’t rotation quite that much? Do the legs remain a little more planar? Do the feet rotate across that full 90° span?

I don’t know. I never hear or read anything about this when I investigate what other coaches say about rotation. My personal discipline: I swim better when I try to both engage in that full rotation, but I also focus on keeping my toes pointed toward the bottom when I kick. I don’t know whether there is any twist in my body along my long axis or not. I will let the better swim coaches opine on this.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
The High Elbows of Good Swimmers; Workouts for Week 4
Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies; Workouts for Week 5
Swimming Isn’t Intuitive; Workouts for Week 6
Debunked Swim Mythology; Workouts for Week 7
Every Swim Workout is a Race... Not! Workouts for Week 8
Visualization, Relaxation, Emulation; Workouts for Week 9
What is Body Rotation in Freestyle? Workouts for Week 10