How Not Breathing Into the Walls Improves Turn and Swim Speed

Not breathing into the walls is one of the fundamental skills developing swimmers are taught. Here is how powerful a no-breath approach is for turn and swim speed.

Strong training habits are something swimmers hear a lot about from their earliest days of their competitive swimming careers.

The greatest hits include:

• Holding a tight streamline when diving in and pushing off
• Not pulling on the lane rope during backstroke
• Preferably not taking nine pulls into the wall when kicking with a kickboard

And holding breath counts and patterns.

One such training habit that coaches try to instill from an early age is to not breath on the last stroke when approaching the wall to perform a first class, AAA-rated flip turn.

Swimmers will often—and no judgment here, I was/am frequently this swimmer on occasion—slurp down air on back-to-back single strokes as they charge into the wall and end up decelerating and over-rotating the flippy part of the flip turn.

A little study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living with age groupers looked at the turn performance when swimmers approached the wall breathing or not breathing to see if it made a difference

Here’s what they learned.

Breathe Less, Turn and Swim Faster

The study was super straightforward: 34 young age group swimmers (~10 years old) swam fast into the wall and did a flip turn and pushed off, either breathing into the turn or not.

Swimmers were timed from the backstroke flags on both sides of the turn (when the hip joint passed the 5m mark). Each swimmer did turns in both conditions to compare performance evenly with both approaches.

For the no-breath condition, swimmers only held their breath from one stroke leading into the turn. It wasn’t “no breaths from the flags” or even multiple strokes.

As you can probably surmise from the title of the article, when swimmers didn’t breathe into the approach, flip turn performance improved.

And in some significant ways:

• Higher approach speed. Not breathing into the turn led to faster approach speeds (1.04m/s versus 0.93m/s).
• Rotated faster during the turn. The faster approach speed and optimized body position meant swimmers rotated quicker during the flip turn when they didn’t breathe (2.42s vs 3.03s).
• More explosive push-off. Interestingly, the no-breath condition also saw markedly higher velocities when leaving the wall (2.42m/s vs 2.14m/s).
• Extended breakouts. That increased speed on the push-off had a run-off effect of extending the distance swimmers glided in the streamline by a large margin (1.79m vs 1.18m).
• Faster overall turn times. When swimmers didn’t breathe into the wall, they clocked times that were a full second faster (!!!).

So why did the swimmers hit higher velocities in the approach, turn, and push-off?

• Not breathing the final stroke allowed swimmers to maintain a cleaner body line and better hydrodynamic position as they approached the wall.
• Because there was no last second turn of the head for a breath, the head, shoulders, hips, and feet were more aligned and better positioned to rotate crisply into the flip turn.
• The no-breath group also had a shorter rotation time, meaning they spent less time tumbling and more time planting the feet for a rocket launch off the wall
• The greater push-off speed resulted in a longer streamline and breakout

How to Improve and Train the No-Breath Approach

Okay, that all sounds gravy. Less breaths, more excellence.

But where should swimmers start with improving no-breath approaches?

• “Attack the walls.” Use an attack the walls mindset to promote more speed and intentionality when approaching the walls. Swimmers all-too-often coast or float into the wall/turn. Be more aggressive with your approach and attack each wall in training. With time and repetition, this mindset and increased velocity will become habitual.
• Start with warm-up. Start no-breath approaches in your warm-up and other low intensity sets. As you get more proficient with the not breathing into the walls, and you build tolerance to the discomfort of holding your breath, start using in your main sets.
• Train the lungs. Use breath counts, breathing patterns, and even consider using a respiratory training device during dryland. Stronger inspiratory muscles can be trained and will lead to being better able to breath hold during your turns. Inspiratory muscle fatigue negatively impacts breath-holding ability, leading to earlier surfacing and sloppy turns (Moravec et al., 2023), so hit the proverbial gym with your respiratory muscles!
• Breath count 50s. I loathed hypoxic training sets (e.g. “Lungbuster” swim and pull sets like 8×200 breathing 3/5/7/9 by 50) during my age grouper days. But breath count sets, for whatever reason, were more my bag. And doing these types of sets (e.g. 16×50 freestyle swim, 4 breaths per 50) naturally promoted less breathing into the walls.

But “insert swimmer here” breathes into the wall?

Skipping the last breath before the turn can have some benefits in turns, err, terms of faster turnarounds at the wall. But like anything in the pool, there are plenty of examples and circumstances that run counter to this study.

Sun Yang, for example, the world record holder in the 1500m freestyle, triple breathed into the walls.

The no-breath approach is best used as a tool for teaching swimmers the value and importance of not decelerating into the wall, keeping a good body position, rotating quickly, and exploding off the wall.

In the words of Russell Mark, Performance Advisor to ASCA and formerly USA Swimming’s High-Performance Manager:

“The biggest thing on a turn is trying to maintain speed in and out of the wall.”

If a swimmer can maintain speed into the walls while breathing, so be it. More breaths (and oxygen) will benefit them. Especially distance swimmers.

But for others who stall out during the approach, turn, and push-off, they can use the no-breath approach to learn the critical mindset of attacking the walls.

Happy swimming!

More Breath Training Guides and Articles

How to Breathe When Swimming (Timing, Tips, and Sample Sets for a Stronger Breath). Conquer the pool by conquering your breath. Here is the ultimate guide to how to breathe when swimming, including how to time the breath and some sets to improve your breathing.

How Bilateral Breathing Will Make You a Faster Freestyler. Bilateral breathing is a key concept for developing and experienced swimmers for a variety of reasons, including balancing out your stroke, reducing injury risk, increased aerobic conditioning, and more.