Quote Originally Posted by mickchick View Post
Any tips? Any drills I could do to get me more comfortable on the left? Or should I suck it up and hire a swim teacher once the "indoor season" starts?
Here are some of the things I picked up from the TI DVDs and my instructor. Please bear in mind that I am very new to all of this and I have had six whole swimming lessons so far! I am swimming and breathing bilaterally, so these drills did work for me and maybe they will help you, too.

I realize that some of these things might be far too basic for you, but I'll just toss them out there.

1. If you have standing depth water, bend at the waist and put your face in the water with one arm in front. Then, rotate your head as though you are swimming/breathing. Pay attention to what you see when you are in the breathing position.

2. Swim and rotate to the left side, but do not try to breathe. Just repeatedly swim and move your head as though you were going to breathe. Either stand up, or roll over, or breathe to your strong side when you need air. When you have rotated your head, take note of your position. Is one goggle still in the water? Can you take a mental snapshot of what you see when you breathe to your strong side and then recreate that picture on the other side?

3. When you are ready to try to breathe to your left side, pay attention to how it feels as compared to your right side. If it doesn't feel as good, can you pinpoint why? It's good that you do so well on your right side because you know how it's supposed to feel when you do it correctly. If you can figure out what you are doing differently, it should be easy to correct. For me, I am more comfortable breathing to my left, so I've been doing laps of just breathing to my right. When I compared the two sensations, I realized that I was not leaving my front arm out and high when I was trying to breathe to the right. It was as though I was trying to push down in the water with my left arm to raise myself more to the surface. Once I figured out what I was doing wrong, I had lots of improvement on the right side. After my OWS last weekend, I really wanted to make sure I got bilateral breathing down because the waves were such that if you could only breathe to one side, you were done for.

Alex