The breaststroke is a highly effective swimming technique for building your core strength, improving endurance, and power. It’s a short-axis swimming stroke, which means you have to bend your body properly around the short axis in order to avoid injury and preserve as much energy as you can.
This guide will help you learn how to improve your breaststroke and do this safely and properly. There are a few efficient techniques you can practice every day that will help you improve the stroke and build more strength.
Having said all that, let’s get learning.
Top 5 Exercises to Improve Breaststroke
These exercises and techniques will focus on improving the main phases of a proper and efficient breaststroke technique: timing, speed, and a powerful kick. However, never forget to warm up before swimming, especially before an intense training session.
How to Improve Breaststroke Time (Stroke Timing)
As you may already be aware, timing is a crucial factor when it comes to most swimming techniques. If your timing is off, you will still move through the water but it will be inefficient, it will waste too much energy, and will risk various injuries. As a result, here is how to ensure perfect timing with your breaststroke.
You already know the basic movements and phases to do a proper breaststroke. However, it takes more than just knowing how to perform each stroke, as the timing of each needs to be perfect and in order. Here is how you should perform each phase of the breaststroke in order.
Pull → Kick → Glide
⚠ Warning: Do not pull and kick at the same time!
How to Improve Breaststroke Speed
The speed of your breaststroke technique will depend mostly on the power of your kick and the recovery time when you complete the full stroke. This means that you have to get back to starting position as quickly as you can after you’ve done all phases of the breaststroke. Keep in mind to wear swimming goggles to avoid water getting into your eyes and ruining your balance and swimming tempo.
If you want to improve your breaststroke speed, make sure to keep your knees only slightly separated and don’t make them too wide apart when you kick. Also, you need to rotate your feet out when you kick, making sure you gain momentum fast and burst forward with more speed.
How to Improve Breaststroke Kick
I’ve found that these two drills many of the best swimmers at Olympic games take advantage of to improve their breaststroke have been the most effective. These two drills are specifically intended for improving the kicking phase of the breaststroke.
Drill 1: Speed Bump Breaststroke Kick
This drill is easy to master and is designed to put the most focus on your kick. Instead of doing a normal breaststroke with all the phases, you eliminate the pull phase. So, you keep your arms back next to your torso and just kick with the legs, go up for air, dive and kick with your legs again as you were doing a normal breaststroke.
This will make sure you get the balance and sync that you need to master the kick phase of a good breaststroke. Once you’ve perfected this and gotten the strength in your legs, you will become faster and faster.
Drill 2: 2 Down, 2 Up Breaststroke Drill
If you’re a bit more advanced with this technique and you’re looking for something to further improve your results, this drill is designed specifically for that. With 2 Down, 2 Up you can significantly improve your strength, stamina, and race tempo.
All you have to do here is go up twice in a row while kicking and then stay underwater for 2 whole kicks. Repeat this if you want to increase the difficulty level and improve each phase of the breaststroke.
Top 5 Tips to Improve Breaststroke
If you already know the basics of the breaststroke, you’ve probably realized that most of the power comes from the kick. However, this doesn’t mean you should only focus on improving your breaststroke kick, as moving your arms properly, breathing properly, and utilizing your core muscles the right way at the right time are just as important.
Here are 5 astonishingly effective tips to practice for a powerful breaststroke:
- As you enter the pull phase with your arms, keep your head and shoulders relaxed
- Your speed will depend highly on your kick technique. The stronger your legs and the better your technique kick is, the faster and more powerful you will move through the water
- Don’t pull and kick at the same time. The correct order of each of these phases is to pull first, kick second, and then glide
- Don’t spend too much time with your head above the water. Instead, take really short breaths and exhale underwater. This is fairly easy to do as you inhale on every stroke, unlike the butterfly stroke
- For proper breaststroke form, make sure to often exercise the following areas: core strength, spine flexibility, loose hip flexors, and explosive hamstrings
Conclusion
Breaststroke is one of the most satisfying swimming techniques one can master. Keep in mind to practice these techniques and remember the tips for improving your breaststroke. Most important of all, never forget your warmups if you want to avoid any injuries that can set you way back, such as swimmers shoulder, muscle tears, neck and back pain, and more.