The flip turn is where adult swimmers lose the most time while thinking about it the least. Stroke technique gets the attention, because you can feel a bad catch. A bad turn just feels like the wall arrived.
I spent my career in the 200 individual medley and swam it at two Olympic Games. In short course that race is seven walls. You learn quickly that the wall is not a pause in the race, it is part of it.
How much of a short course race is actually the turn?
Close to half of it, at least in short course medley racing, where I can point you at real measurement. An analysis of start, turn and swim sections in individual medley at the 2019 European Short-Course Championships found that the contribution to race time was highest for "turn (45.1-55.0%) followed by lower contribution for swim (42.5-44.1%) and start sections (2.5-11.2%)."
Read the definition before the number. There, "total turn time was determined from 5 m before wall contact (5 m in) until 10 m after wall contact (10 m out)", so a turn means 15 m of pool, not the somersault alone. That is the honest version, and it still left the authors concluding "Turn time had the largest effect on race time, followed by swim velocity over all race distances for male and female swimmers."
Use that same window on yourself. The flip is not the skill. Everything between the flags and your first stroke on the far side is.
How do I do a flip turn in swimming?
You keep your speed into the wall, tuck hard without reaching for it, plant both feet, push off on your side, and rotate to your front while you are already gliding. In order:
- Take your last breath before the flags. From there in, your head does not turn again.
- Keep stroking at full speed to the wall. Do not glide in and do not lift your head to look.
- Leave one arm at your hip and start the flip as the other finishes its pull, so you fold from an already streamlined shape.
- Drive chin and knees toward your chest together. It is a tuck, not a dive. Fast and small beats big and graceful.
- Both feet land about shoulder width, toes up or slightly to one side.
- Push straight back, not up, arms already locked overhead. You will leave the wall on your side.
- Rotate onto your chest during the glide, kick, and break out without lifting your head to breathe.
The fault I see most on deck is number four: a slow, wide somersault that leaves the hips so far out the swimmer has to reach with their feet. Steps one and seven come next, and they are why people arrive at the far end gasping. A turn is a breath hold stacked on a breath hold, so the fix is a faster flip and an earlier breakout, not bigger lungs. My post on freestyle breathing is the groundwork.
How close to the wall should my hips be when I tuck?
Closer than most people think, and you can measure it on yourself. A study on improving tumble turn performance in swimming tested eighteen Dutch national level swimmers turning at three distances from the wall and reported that "The best overall turning performance was achieved with a Tuck Index of 0.7."
The useful part is the definition: "The minimal distance of the hip from the wall expressed as a percentage of the trochanter major height." That is a ratio of your own leg length, not a fixed number of centimetres. Find the bony point at the top of your thigh at the side of your hip, measure its height from the floor standing, and seventy per cent of that is roughly where your hips belong at the deepest point of the tuck. That is arithmetic from their definition applied to you, not a second finding of theirs.
They were careful, and so am I. The authors found no straightforward relationship in isolation and wrote only that "Some of the participating swimmers could benefit from adapting their distance to the wall while turning." If your feet land without reaching, leave it alone.
How long should my feet stay on the wall?
Long enough to actually push, longer than the instinct to be quick suggests. The same study had swimmers turn with contact times twenty five per cent shorter and longer than their preferred one, and concluded that "The WCT should be sufficiently long to generate a high push-off force at the end of wall contact when the body is in a streamlined position."
That is two instructions, not one. The contact has to last long enough to build force, and you have to be streamlined already when that force arrives. Snapping off the wall with your arms still sorting themselves out gets you the worst of both: a small push, aimed badly.
How deep should I push off after a flip turn?
Deep enough to clear the surface turbulence, and there is a point past which deeper stops paying. A computational fluid dynamics study on the effect of depth on drag during the streamlined glide modelled a swimmer from the surface down to 1.0 m and found that "Hydrodynamic drag decreased with depth, although after 0.75m values remained almost constant." Its conclusion was that "possibly performing the underwater gliding more than 0.75 m depth could not be to the benefit of the swimmer."
Note the limit: it is drag on a gliding body, not the cost of diving deep and climbing back up, which you also pay for. Take enough depth to clear the churn, then hold a flat line to the breakout, which is where the underwater dolphin kick earns its keep.
What drills actually fix a flip turn?
A turn set worth repeating weekly:
- 8 x 25 with a fast flip at the 12.5 m mark, no wall, purely for the speed and shape of the tuck
- 10 turns from a push, a partner checking that the feet stay on long enough and that you finish in streamline
- 6 x 50 with one rule: no breath from the flags in, no breath on the first stroke out
- 8 push-offs in streamline, no kick, marking where you stop, holding a flatter line each time instead of sinking and climbing
How do I know whether my flip turn is costing me time?
Time the turn, not the length, because the length hides it. Have someone start a watch as your head passes the 5 m mark going in and stop it as you pass 5 m coming out. Do that six times, take the fastest three, then change one thing and run it again. The swim pace calculator shows what those tenths are worth over your race distance, and my post on how to pace a 200 IM covers what turns do to a multi stroke race.
The real problem with turns is that you cannot see your own. You feel that something was scrappy without knowing whether the hips were too far out, the feet left too early, or the streamline came apart. A coach on deck reads that in one repetition, and most adult swimmers do not have one.
Outside the current supported analysis: turns. SwimRead is a swimming video review app, currently in beta. It supports short, side-view freestyle recordings, shows which automatic measurements are available, and keeps a history and chosen training focus for each swimmer. It does not grade technique or establish that a specific error was detected. Video stays on the phone; technical measurements and body-landmark coordinates are sent as described in the Privacy Policy. Join the beta waitlist for an invitation as places open.