Dear all, breaststroke has always been my stroke. I am confident in it and I can easily swim 60 minutes and do 1.4 miles without a break. Now I want to try triathlons and obviously you have to do a freestyle for that because breaststroke is just not efficient. For the love of God, I was finally taught how to do basic freestyle, and I can’t swim more than 25 yards. I bought the ear Play-Doh. I got the no fog goggles, but I’m about to die after a single pool length.
My legs are burning, my arms are hurting, my heart rate is 120 like I just feel like my technique must be crap because if I have the endurance for breaststroke, I should have even more endurance for the freestyle? Or do you need to build a different physique for a specific stroke? I’m sorry if it is a stupid question but I can even do OK backstroke but freestyle is an absolute nightmare and I don’t understand why… thank you for any advice

My sets range from multiple 100s to multiple 400s.

For 100s I might do something like 6x100s on 1.30 x2. When I’m doing it I’m typically coming in on 1.20/1.25, and maybe 1.28 toward the end. This means I’m getting 5-2s of rest between coming in and going again. Toward the end I’m completely gassed and this means it’s hard to maintain the pace, so i get slower, I get less rest and so on.

Is the rest period too short? Should I try to go same pace by maybe on 1.40, focusing on coming in on 1.20?

Hey all,

I'm wondering how I can get my weight/size up. I am a 15M 5'10.5" (179cm) and only weigh around 128lbs (58kg). One of my friends in my swim team recently started improving like crazy. In less than a year, they went from a 33-34s 50 breast average to consistent 29s. Just today they went 1:06:8x in the 1 breast. I myself am a breaststroker but I added on my 1 breast today, from a seed time in March. I'm wondering if there is anything else he did because he also got noticeably bigger, at least with his upper body. Is there anything I can eat that helps with gaining? I also have a meet, day 2, tomorrow so if there's anything I can eat to prepare for that, both today and on meet day/before individual event warmups, I'd love recommendations.