What Convinced Me to Breathe Bilaterally after 28 Years?

In August 1972, in the first 10 minutes of the first workout I ever coached, I noticed that every swimmer on the team I’d just begun coaching had asymmetrical strokes. To varying degrees, everyone who breathed to the left twisted noticeably in that direction; right breathers did the same to the other side.

While I had no formal knowledge of stroke mechanics at the time, instinct told me that these excessive sideways motions probably hurt efficiency. When I instructed the team to breathe to the ‘wrong’ side the next day, their lack of symmetry disappeared. Before long I made it a standard requirement for the swimmers I coached to breathe bilaterally during practice.

A primary reason breathing in freestyle is such a frequent occasion for stroke errors is the difficulty of keeping the body aligned, stable and traveling forward when 8 percent of body mass repeatedly moves to the side. When we move that 8% only to one side, it’s inevitable that, over time, the body reacts to these uneven forces in various ways—most of which hurt efficiency.

Though I required my swimmers to breathe bilaterally as early as the 1970s, when I got serious about improving my own efficiency in the early 1990s, I was still a one-sided breather. I always breathed to the left, just as I’d done since I got serious about swimming by pursuing the Red Cross 50-Mile Swim badge in the summer of 1964.

Twenty-eight years later, on a day in March 1992, I decided to breathe to the right while swimming with a local Masters group in Los Banos del Mar, a 50-meter pool in Santa Barbara. That day something prompted me to breathe on my ‘wrong’ side every other lap for the 400-meter warmup. I breathed to my right on the odd lengths and to my left on the even.

I was already in the habit of counting my strokes. It certainly got my attention that I took 39 strokes to traverse 50-meters while breathing to my unfamiliar right side, and 41 strokes while breathing to my habitual left side. Though breathing to the right felt awkward, that measurable improvement in efficiency motivated me to continue. For several months, I breathed more to the right than to the left, which helped me adapt more quickly. I’ve been a bilateral breather ever since.

Breathing to my Right—my ‘non-natural’ but more efficient side

In the past few years–while working on our Effortless Endurance and Freestyle Mastery Self-Coaching Courses, I carefully examined my own breathing technique and found much to improve–but most of the improvement opportunities were on my left side. My non-natural breathing side had indisputably better technique. It was also noticeably more comfortable—most likely because I hadn’t had 28 years of pre-TI bad habits to unlearn on my left side. 

If you’ve always breathed to one side, it will feel awkward for a time to introduce the other side. There will be a learning curve. But if you apply the same Focal Points—such as Chin follows Shoulder to Air—to breathing on your weak side, you’ll soon feel much more comfortable.

My left-side breathing is far better today—because I also breathe to the right.

Don’t be surprised if  your awkward side eventually feels smoother and more comfortable than your natural side. That’s been true for me for over 10 years.  And because of insights and awareness gained from my more-efficient right side, my natural left side is dramatically more efficient today than it was when I only breathed one way.

Your primary goal is to make your left and right sides identical in every regard. I guarantee that the effort to do so will make you a far more efficient swimmer.

The images above are video screen shots from Chapter 11 Seamless Breathing of the ebook for our 1.0 Effortless Endurance Freestyle Self-Coaching Course, in which Lesson 4 is devoted to learning to breathe by the same method I employed in improving my own technique.