What's going on swim fans welcome to whiteboard wednesday and in today's episode i'm sharing with you how to swim breaststroke with perfect technique in this video i'm going to break down all the elements of the stroke including body position the pull the kick streamline underwater pull outs and by the end of the video i'm going to share with you a few different drills so you can apply some of these technique elements we talk about so you can swim faster and smarter breaststroke than ever before now in this video it's really designed to help all breaststrokers so if you're trying to learn the stroke and you're just getting started or if you're a more advanced swimmer and you're looking to take a couple tenths of a second off your 100 or 200 breath stroke you've come to the right place if you guys are new to the channel welcome my name is ferris betty i'm the co-founder and ceo of my swim pro and we help swimmers all over the world improve their performance and health both in and out of the water so if you guys are looking to take your swimming to the next level and swim faster and smarter than ever before you've come to the right place so make sure you subscribe to the channel like this video and let me know in the comments what you think about breaststroke now before we get into the fundamentals and talk about body position and how we should really be developing this stroke i want to first just dispel some of the myths and talk about why breaststroke is a little bit different than some of the other strokes you know some people pick up breaststroke pretty naturally and others struggle with it and we want to make sure that everyone consume breaststroke and really get the benefits out of this fantastic stroke now there's three main differences between breaststroke and the other strokes the first is that it is a short axis stroke just like butterfly meaning you know in freestyle and backstroke if you divide your body with a laser and you kind of cut through the middle you're actually rotating along that axis those are long axis strokes breaststroke is different it's like butterfly if you think about it you're sort of pivoting your body up and down your upper body and your lower body are pivoting separately from a rotation so that's a key difference and that's why we train a little bit differently the total body timing is so fundamental that's the second reason in breaststroke just like butterfly you have to use your upper body and your lower body and they have to be coordinated with the proper timing in freestyle and backstroke you can essentially just not kick at all and you can go pretty fast in breaststroke the kick and the pull are both huge and then the kick specifically the third element that differentiates breaststroke from the other strokes is the kick in breaststroke you have a frog kick and so you know unlike freestyle backstroke and butterfly your toes are pointed and so in the kick and breaststroke you have to flex your feet we'll get into that in more details in just a minute let's talk about body position so breaststroke is unique in the sense that every stroke starts and ends in streamline if you're not familiar streamline is the fundamental body position it's where your body has the least amount of resistance moving through the water your hands are together from your fingertips all the way through your toes this is what you do every time you push off the wall regardless of what stroke you do whether it's fly back breasts or free and you really want to leverage the speed of the wall and this is the fundamental body position for all of the strokes but in breaststroke you actually start and finish every single stroke in this position and the more quickly you can get to a streamlined position we'll talk about the timing the more efficient your strokes gonna be and the faster you're gonna move through the water now streamline is actually two parts when we're talking about body position there's head position and hip position and so if you lift your head up to take a breath in breaststroke or butterfly and the short axis strokes what's going to happen is your hips are going to sink your legs are just going to drag in the water and you're going to move really really slow if you look at the best swimmers in the world and breaststroke or any of the strokes they do an amazing job keeping their hips really really high in the water even when they're taking a breath so the upper body comes out of the water and the hip position remains really really high uh if you guys are interested i did an awesome breakdown of two world record holders you know lily king on the woman's side and adam pd on the men's i broke down with the swimming equation how they swim those world record swims so for the advanced swimmers and the beginner swimmers if you want to see how the pros do it and how they swim so fast make sure you check out those videos i'll link them in the description below let's talk about the actual mechanics of the strokes when we're talking about the pull really it's we're going to break it down we're going to simplify it so it starts and ends in streamline and what you're doing is you're actually creating a triangle of space with your hands it actually starts with your pinkies and so your pinkies when your hands you know you're in streamline and when your hands start to separate it's your pinkies that are on the top and as you sweep out just past your shoulders you want to curl your fingertips down and you want to be able to catch the water and you want to get your hands your palms your forearms really in a vertical position kind of like a freestyle stroke it's not going to be as dramatic as freestyle and as you curl those fingers out when you go just past your shoulders you're going to make this triangle you're going to bring your hands in that's when you take the breath so your bed is down as you start the out sweep and as you curl those hands back in and your thumbs start to come back together you don't bring your elbows in necessarily but you start to really pull that water and you bring your thumbs together at that point you're still breathing and you need to explode your hands back to streamline it's got to be really really fast and so your hand drive is really what sends your body forward you got to lunge with your whole body and you've got to send your hands where you know you can have your hands you know at the surface level of the water just above the water just below the water everyone's a little bit different but really you want to cut through the water as quickly as possible because this is the path of the highest resistance you're actually if you think about it you're pushing yourself backwards when you push your hands forward so you have to make that as short of a time as possible because that's actually the slowest part of the stroke and you want to send your hands forward you don't want to dive your hands down you're trying to move forward remember you're trying to get to the other side of the pool as quickly as possible so you send your hands forward and this really times in well with the kick and we talked about the kick being a little bit different it's a frog kick and the timing of the kick if you're just learning it you've got to flex your feet meaning instead of pointing your toes you're actually going to flex your feet out and you're going to think to yourself up out around and together this is really engaging your hamstring when you pull your heel up to your butt you actually engage your hamstring the most and the faster you can snap your heels back to your to your butt basically and you really activate your hamstrings that is again the highest point of resistance in the kick and so think up out around and together and you want to really sweep out and you want to keep your knees relatively narrow you don't want your kick to be massive because if you open up your legs you're going to create more resistance than you're actually going to benefit from having a bigger kick so the right balance is about knees at shoulder width so your knees really aren't separating that much maybe only half a meter some people are even less than that in terms of how far your knees are actually apart and a great drill you can do with that is if you just kick streamline on your back and think about keeping your knees underneath the surface of the water as you're kicking and focusing on bringing your heels to your butt and heel speed is the key variable of tempo so if you're trying to get faster at breaststroke and you're more advanced swimmer think about how can you get your heel to bring up your hamstring to bring up that first part of the kick more quickly because that's the thing that's slowing you down if you can increase that heel speed you're going to be able to increase your tempo and maintain efficiency in the stroke now the timing this is maybe the most important part i should have circled this i want you to think to yourself you're a beginner swimmer even a more advanced swimmer pull kick glide there's three phases in the timing of breaststroke it's pull we talked about the pull that's when you get your breath kick glide so when you send your hands forward and you launch your body forward the kick is assisting in that part and then you're going to glide what position are you going to be in you're going to glide in streamline it's our fundamental body position you're shooting for max distance per stroke on every single stroke the duration of which you hold the glide really depends on if you're swimming you know 25 meters of breath stroke you know five one hundreds of breaststroke you know 200 meter breaststroke in a race that really depends how long you're going to hold that glide but every single stroke you're shooting for max distance per stroke you're trying to get as far as possible take as few strokes as possible in the length maintaining speed and maintaining efficiency now obviously in the 50 you're going to have a faster tempo if you're trying to race 50 meters you're not going to hold the glide as long but the best swimmers in the world are still sending their hands forward and trying to maximize you know basically getting to streamline which is the path of least resistance as quickly as possible and then maintaining that for just a split second as you increase the distance to the 100 and 200 then we're going to hold that glide just a little bit longer and the best swimmers in the world in the 200 long course specifically we'll talk about the difference between short course and long course but they actually change the tempo within the 200 itself so that's a little bit fancier big key for all these points is to remember that water is 800 times more resistive than air so when you're swimming breaststroke it is the slowest stroke because your body is sitting lowest in the water you have the most drag and that's why it's so important that when you take the breath and you're pulling you know you don't lift your head up too high you don't dive up and down you maintain a high body position because the water is slowing you down you want to swim smarter now let's talk about the pull out when you jump off the diving block or you push off the wall you get one pull out per length so the way it works is you're in streamline and you can hold this for two or three full seconds and after you feel yourself slowing down you're gonna do one big arm pull and you're really gonna pull the water in a straight line and you're gonna send your body forward then you're allowed to take one kick underneath the water to bring your hands back to streamline we'll have some great b-roll showing you how this is done you are allowed to do one dolphin kick at any point before or after your arms pull down so this is a little bit more advanced skill and you get one dolphin kick a lot of the best swimmers they'll do this before they even separate leverage the streamlined position and really you want to maintain integrity of streamline if you have a really really massive dolphin kick yes you're going to pull more water with your legs but you're going to create more resistance and disrupt that body line so oftentimes the dolphin kick is really more of a middle sized dolphin kick and the more you practice and the more you train the more you race you'll get better at determining how big of a dolphin kick it should be that's a more advanced skill you don't have to worry about that if you're just getting started and if you're doing more you know 200 this becomes a much more critical component especially in short course swimming and when it comes to training i really strongly believe that it's all about technique and race specificity you know in the short acts of strokes whether it's butterfly or breaststroke if you want to be good at the 200 breaststroke you don't just swim 200's breaststroke right because you're not able to maintain the technique and race pace that you're able to do and as a result you're going to be training your body to move through the water in a lower position so you're training your body to move slower and for these short axis strokes you really have to teach your body how to swim high in the water so train the body position that you want to have in a race that means you need to train either at race pace above race pace but i also really factor in race stroke count so if you know if you're more advanced form and you know how many strokes you need to take whether it's short course or long course you need to train your body to take that many strokes try and hit a certain pace and maintain a high body position i mentioned short course versus long course if you guys are beginners you know no problem short course basically means a 25 yard or 25 meter pool when we're talking long course we're talking the olympic 50 meter pool obviously it's a lot more difficult to swim with high stroke integrity and really fast for a continuous 50 meters you know and in breaststroke for sure you swim a lot faster when you get that push off the wall and it allows you to maintain uh distance per stroke and tempo a lot easier in a short course pool if you look at you know some of these guys going 148 in the 200 breaststroke in short course yards that's a pretty good example of how few strokes they're taking and then in long course because you have less momentum by the time you get to the end of the 50 you've taken so many more strokes you know some of these guys are taking five to ten strokes per length in a 25 yarder meter pool and when you get to long course you have to doesn't matter who you are you're going to take 20 plus strokes to get to the other end of the pool therefore you can change your tempo and increasing your tempo by the end of the 50 allows you to maintain that higher body position and keep your stroke integrity alive so if you'll see really advanced swimmers if they're racing 200 meters they'll actually increase their tempo gradually and actually pretty significantly by the end of the race to try and maintain that consistent pacing all the way through the last 150 meters of the race now the moment you've been waiting for if you're looking for some drills to apply some of these things i have four written out here the first one is streamline kick on your back i mentioned it when it comes to defining your kick mechanics this is a fantastic way to refine how you kick it doesn't matter how good of a breaststroke swimmer you are and it doesn't matter how fast you are in any of the other strokes because this is something that every swimmer in the world can improve upon you can always make your kick more efficient whether it's you know getting your heel speed faster we talked about hamstring reflexes catching more water on the outside making sure that you're not too narrow not too wide having the right body position really focus on if you're on your back keep your knees under the surface of the water and have really fast heel speed you can also do this streamline on your front you can put your hands underneath your bum and you can focus on bringing your heels all the way up so that you tag your hands called heel tag that's two drills in one for you guys another great drill that works on timing is two kicks one pull so you're gonna be in streamline you're gonna do two full kicks then you're gonna take a full breaststroke pull so by adding in an additional kick you're really forcing your stroke to stretch out and emphasize we talked about pull kick glide instead now with another kick you're gonna go pull kick kick glide and another pull kick kick glide try and have those kicks underneath the surface of the water just under the surface to really get that rhythm going uh the third drill is a little bit more power focused is freestyle kick with a breaststroke pull this is a really aggressive drill where you're focusing on driving your hands forward this is not a slow drill it's really not about rhythm it's about power speed and tempo having fast hands really accelerating you know through the catch and then driving your body forward instead of riding up and down if you wear fins it'll make this drill significantly more efficient for most swimmers and you should really only do shorter bursts of that you know 25 meters at a time at the most now the fourth drill is actually one of my favorites and i am a breaststroker so i love this drill at any point in the season especially before taper it's called breaststroke countdown now the way this works is you do 825 so you got you know 25 meter pool or 25 yard pool and you start out your first 25 is just a cruise you do a pull out and you should you know if you're more advanced swimmer you know exactly how many strokes you're going to take and so for me i take five strokes in a 25-yard pool if i'm cruising and and i'll explain if you know whatever number that you have the next 25 you're gonna take one last stroke so you're counting down so for me i take four strokes then the third 25 you're going to take three strokes and then two strokes and after you do four 25s and you took off a couple of strokes uh three three or four strokes ideally then you're in a really efficient uh timing so to get down one stroke you're gonna have to hold max distance per stroke you have to stretch out the pull out you're gonna have to be more efficient and really more aggressive on the extension with your hands getting back to a streamlined position and then once you've done 425s on the fifth 25 you're gonna count your way back up so you go five four three two and then starting at number five you're gonna go two strokes then three strokes then four strokes then five strokes and by the time you count your way back up and you're back where you started it should actually maybe feel too difficult to go back to where you started because you're so efficient and you've gotten used to taking less strokes you can do this with 825s you just with 1025s um if you if you can't take five strokes you know you take as many as you can so let's say you start out with 12 strokes then you go 12 11 10 9 and then if you can go down to eight go down to eight stretch it out but you don't want to get stretched out to the point where you completely stop moving that's not what we're doing you're maintaining a little bit of speed then you build your way back up 9 10 11 12 and that 12 should feel a lot easier than the first 25 that you did this is really working on timing max distance per stroke if you're a 200 breast stroker you should be able to do this drill all the time and you should really be confident in how many strokes that you're taking if you guys are looking for more drills like that make sure you subscribe to the my swim pro channel on youtube and all of our social media we also have hundreds of different dry land training exercises and swim drills in the my swim pro app available for iphone and android and finally if you guys are looking for a community of swimmers who are focused on swimming faster and smarter than ever before make sure you join the my swim pro facebook group linked in the description below we have thousands of swimmers from over 100 different countries from beginners triathletes and former olympians everyone's in there focused on encouraging each other so if you're interested in that make sure you check it out link in description below and also let me know in the comments if you guys have any questions about breaststroke or any other strokes or swimming in general i wish you guys the best and happy swimming you