Flip Turns: The Complete Guide

How to Do a Great Approach to a Flip Turn 

When you think of flip turns, you might think of just the turn itself. A flip turn, however, starts well before that. The approach is the first step. 

Focus on three things for an effective turn approach: 

• Maintain your speed going into the wall. Slowing down into a turn is obviously going to reduce your speed, as would slowing down at any point in a race. Don’t do that. Maintaining your speed into your turn makes doing a fast turn a lot easier. The more forward speed you have, the easier it is to transfer that momentum into rotational speed. Flipping fast is much harder if you’re moving slowly.
• End on a full stroke. If your last stroke is too far from the wall, you’re going to have to glide or kick into the turn, which reduces the speed you carry into the wall. If your last stroke is too close to the wall, you’ll have to take a half-stroke. This isn’t an effective stroke and makes transitioning into your flip difficult. The best way to ensure you end on a full stroke is to time your strokes as you approach the wall, which is a skill you can practice in workouts.
• Transition smoothly from your swimming to your turn. You can do this by slightly submerging your body with your last stroke prior to flipping. Just as it’s easier to round a corner at a high speed compared to making a sharp 90-degree turn, slightly submerging yourself can make transitioning into a high-speed turn smoother. 

How to Do a Great Flip in Your Flip Turn 

The goal of the flip portion of your flip turn is to get your feet on the wall as fast as possible. The faster that happens, the sooner you can push off the wall and begin swimming in the opposite direction. Maintain as much speed as you can into the flip and tuck as tightly as possible. 

A common flip turn mistake is to forcibly bring your heels to your hips during your flip. Doing so keeps you from creating the tight ball necessary for rotating fast. Instead, focus on aggressively bringing your knees to your chest. That creates a tight ball and allows your heels to naturally move to your hips. 

Another common mistake is to allow your arms and hands to flail around during the turn instead of keeping them tight and close to your core. You core muscles do the work in a tight turn, not your arms. Flapping your arms creates drag and wastes time. 

We tend to move through the world focused on where our head goes. This serves us well in life but not as well when doing flip turns. Focusing on driving your head down during a flip turn is easy. Although this can be useful, it’s not as powerful as driving your knees forward to your chest to initiate a tight turn. 

Another mistake is looking around when you’re on the wall. Keep your head tucked; you don’t need to see where you’re going when you push off. 

If you’re doing a good job of slightly submerging during your approach, all you need is an aggressive punch of your legs to create a fast flip. Once you do your flip, stay in the tight position as long as necessary, not as long as possible. Once your feet come over the water, exit your flip by pushing off with power.  

Making Contact With the Wall During Your Flip Turn 

As you move through your flip turn, how your feet contact the wall has a major influence on the phases of the turn that follow. Contact the wall in a position that allows you to create a strong, straight push. A strong push allows you to generate as much speed as possible, and a straight push allows you to maintain as much speed as possible. 

If your feet land high on the wall, you’re likely to push yourself down when you push off the wall. If you’re a great underwater kicker, this could be a positive. If you’re not, it could be trouble.  

If your feet land low on the wall, you’re likely to get a weak push that sends you right to the surface. That’s usually not a great outcome.  

The optimal foot placement can be different for each person, but contacting the wall in the middle of the T on the end of the pool is a good start. 

Your feet should land somewhere between hip-width and shoulder-width apart. That allows you to push off the wall with as much force as possible. Placing your feet too wide or too narrow compromises the amount of force you can create with your push-off.  

A final consideration for contacting the wall is how close you are to it when your feet make contact. If your legs are straight when your feet hit the wall or, at the other extreme, if your knees are still by your chest when you hit the wall, a strong push will be difficult.  

To get a good sense of what will be optimal for you, dip down while on land as if you were going to jump as high as possible. That amount of knee bend is a great starting point for your flip turn. 

The Key for a Great Push-Off During Your Flip Turn 

The fastest point in any race is when you leave the block during your start. That happens once. The second fastest point in any race is the moment your feet leave the wall after a turn. That happens every length of the pool.  

The goal of any great turn is to create as much speed as possible coming off the wall. The stronger your push, the more speed you’ll create and the farther you’ll travel. 

A strong push requires both patience and aggression. If you try to just bounce off the wall without taking time to push hard, you’re likely to get off the wall faster, but you’re less likely to create as much speed as possible. You’re also less likely to have enough time to get into a great streamlined position before pushing off. That puts the brakes on whatever speed you do create. Be patient enough to get a strong push off the wall to generate enough force to create a lot of speed. 

But don’t spend too much time on the wall—be aggressive getting into a streamlined position and off the wall. The harder you push, the more speed you’ll create.  

Once you’re in position for a great push-off, think acceleration versus speed. You’ll start a little slower, but you’ll quickly generate speed, which is the best of both worlds. This can be a tough skill to manage, but simple strategies, such as measuring your gliding distance, can provide objective information about how effective your push-offs are.  

Getting Into Streamlined Position After a Flip Turn 

One of the best ways to improve your turns is to improve your streamline off the wall. As much as a great push-off can generate a lot of speed, a bad streamline takes that speed away. You must maintain your speed coming off the wall. 

The straighter you are as you as push off the wall, the better. 

Creating a great streamline is simple: Put everything from the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes in a straight line. Of course, simple isn’t always easy.  

If you flap your head, hands, and arms around to help you turn, you’re creating drag and wasting valuable time. You’re also probably not using your core muscles to make the turn. After your last stroke into the wall, both your arms will be at your sides, hands near your thighs. As you flip and tuck and when your feet hit the wall, you’ll find that your arms are now outstretched in front of your head, in position to clamp them into a tight streamline, ready to leave the wall. 

In both backstroke and freestyle, you’ll likely arch your back as you push off the wall, just as you would do if you were trying to jump as high as possible. This big arch isn’t great for streamlining, however. You must get out of that position as your feet leave the wall. 

A great streamlined position is made more difficult by the challenges specific to freestyle and backstroke. In freestyle, you must maintain your streamline as you rotate from your back to your front. In backstroke, you must maintain your line while pushing off on your back. Controlling your position on your back is typically more difficult than on your front. 

Achieving a great streamline is made more difficult by a simple logistical problem: Most swimmers train in lanes with circle swimming. A great line off the wall is straight. When you’re circle swimming, you’re moving from one side of the pool to the other as you push off. Although you absolutely need to stay safe during a workout, being mindful of this tendency can help you correct it when you’re racing. 

How to Transition to Swimming After a Flip Turn 

The transition to the surface is the last part of your flip turn. Once you push off the wall and you’ve hit your streamlined position, you must transition smoothly to the surface. The goal is to maintain as much speed as possible coming off the wall and transition to the surface while moving through the water at surface-swimming speed or faster. 

There are two key aspects of an effective transition.  

• Your transition should be as smooth as possible. Moving from under the water to the surface should be a relatively gradual process. Think about the difference between a helicopter taking off and an airplane. Be like the airplane. Surfacing too abruptly is going to create a lot more resistance as you move through the water, which slows you down.
• Your breakout at the surface should be as level as possible to ensure that you’re carrying your speed forward rather than up. This also makes moving to surface swimming much easier. If you pop up through the breakout and then come back down, your transition to surface swimming will be more difficult. 

A key component of a successful transition to the surface is pushing off the wall at an appropriate depth. If you push off too shallow, you’ll have to start swimming much sooner than you want to. If you push off too deep, you’ll take too long to get to the surface and because you’re moving vertically, you’ll lose all your speed before you even get there. The goal is to push off at a depth that allows for a gradual transition to the surface and a level breakout. 

What Swimmers Need to Know About the Backstroke Flip Turn 

Backstroke flip turns are simpler than freestyle flip turns because you don’t have to rotate when you come off the wall. You just push off on your back rather than rotating onto your front.  

The big challenge with backstroke flip turns is transitioning from your back to your front to set up your flip turn. Although rolling onto your front isn’t difficult, doing so at the right time can be a challenge, especially because you can’t see where you’re going. 

The goal is to roll onto your front and seamlessly begin your turn. The more seamless your transition, the faster your turn will be. Other than speed, there are two important reasons why you want to get the timing right.  

• If you roll over too late, you’re going to get a very painful reminder that you rolled over too late. Either you’ll crash headfirst into the wall, land your heels on the gutter or deck during your turn, or you’ll have to get into a super tight ball to make the turn work.
• If you roll over too early, you can be disqualified for spending too much time gliding on your front. You must start your flip before your final stroke (which is a freestyle stroke) reaches your hip. 

Backstroke flags provide you with a standardized reminder of when to roll to your front. Count the number of strokes you take from the flags into the wall. When you do a backstroke turn, simply take one or two fewer strokes than you take for your finish and roll over to your front. Getting the timing down just right takes some practice.  

The position of the flags is slightly different in yards and meters pool. They are placed at 5 yards away from the wall in yards pools and 5 meters away from the wall in meters pools. That’s about a 16-inch difference, which can be significant. When you participate in a swim meet, practice your turns in the competition pool during the meet warm-up to make sure you’re using the right count in your races. 

How to Avoid Common Flip Turn Mistakes 

Avoid these common flip turn mistakes.  

• Don’t slow down coming into the wall. The more speed you can carry into the wall, the faster you’ll be able to do the whole turn. The turn is not an opportunity to take a break; think about accelerating into the turn.
• Don’t fail to flip with a tight tuck. Flipping in a tight ball allows you to perform the flip in less time and tends to lead to better foot contact on the wall, which sets up a strong push from the wall. Use your core muscles to complete the turn, not your arms. Avoid flipping in a slow, loose ball, with your head, hands, and arms flailing around. You’ll give up all your speed and compromise the remainder of your turn. Instead, focus on flipping as tightly and as quickly as possible and keeping your arms at your sides as you begin your flip and tuck, allowing them to remain at the surface of the water so that they’re in position to clamp your biceps to your ears for a tight streamline as you prepare to leave the wall.
• Don’t do a weak push off the wall. A strong push-off is key to an effective turn. Do everything you can to avoid rushing the push-off, spending too much time on the wall, or pushing off too passively. The goal is to get as much distance off the wall as possible with as much speed as possible. You must push hard to make that happen. Take the time to do it right.
• Don’t let your streamlined position fall apart. If you have a great turn and a great push-off but a terrible streamline off the wall, you’re losing all the speed you generated. Push off the wall as straight and as tightly as you can. That allows you to carry as much speed as you can to the surface.