5 BREASTSTROKES MISTAKES You're Probably Making (and how to fix them!)

In this video, I'm going to share with you the five biggest mistakes that swimmers make in breaststroke. Now, let's go ahead and get started here. The first mistake is the timing. This is really the most important thing with breaststroke. When you swim breaststroke, you need to have pull, kick, glide. You need to repeat that in your head. It doesn't matter how fast you are. It's pull, kick, glide. Now, the big mistake that a lot of swimmers make is not the order in which they do that. It's the timing of when you pause. Oftentimes, swimmers will pause when they're breathing. You don't want to pause when you breathe because when you take the breath, and your body is up high, and your legs start to sink, that is the slowest point of the entire stroke cycle. If you stop there, you're basically coming to a halt, and then you re-begin the next stroke cycle, and then you get a nice jolt forward, and then you stop because you take a breath. Instead, the longest part of the stroke is when you're in streamline. I want you to think in your head. The next time you go swimming, it's pull, kick, glide. Do not pause when you take the breath when you're pulling. It's a continuous motion. Boom. Hit the streamline. Hold the streamline. Now, here's an actual drill that you can apply for this. It's two kicks, one pull. If you've been swimming a while, you've probably done this a number of times. You do two kicks in the streamline position, and then you take one full arm stroke on top of the water, and then you go back down under. Make sure you don't dive down too much. We'll talk about amplitude of the stroke in the next mistake that a lot of swimmers make, but you want to make sure you're focusing on gliding in streamline. That is mistake number one. Mistake number two is having too wide of a kick. Now, you might be thinking, well, I want to have a bigger kick so I can have more power. The wider your legs go, the more water you're going to grab like a frog. That's not exactly true. So you might be able to pull more water, but by having a wider kick, you're actually going to increase the amount of resistance that your legs have. So you don't want to actually kick like a frog, but you want to have a narrow kick so that way your knees and your legs stay within your body line. So the widest part of your body is your shoulders and your chest. And so your knees should never really go that much wider than your shoulders, the width of your shoulders. Now, of course, your heels and your feet will stick out. So if you're thinking about the kick, it's up, out, around, and together. You bring your heels together, but the widest point should be narrower than your body line. Now, here's a great drill to focus on this. It's called SLOB, streamline on back. This is where you kick breaststroke on your back. So you can be in streamline, you can have your hands underneath your bum, but when you kick on your back on the surface of the water, you've got to make sure that your knees stay underneath the surface of the water. And you want to have like a straight line from your knees through your hips and then up through your shoulders. And really focus on bringing your heels back underneath the surface of the water. This is something that you should do all the time because the kick in breaststroke is a majority of the power of the stroke. If you have a magnificent kick in breaststroke, you're going to be pretty fast. If you have a magnificent pull and a terrible kick, that's going to hold you back and you're never going to be that good at breaststroke until you can nail the kick. Now, mistake number three is the amplitude of the overall stroke. When you swim breaststroke, if that wave is too tall, meaning the amplitude is too wide, that's not good because what goes up must come down. So, anytime you're out of the water and you're getting a breath, if you go too high, that means your legs are going to sink. Now, you may have seen some of the best swimmers in the world, it looks like their whole body is out of the water. And that might be true, but they're also probably moving really, really fast and their upper body is out of the water for a split second while they're taking the breath. And then they lunge forward to get to streamline as quickly as possible. So, you're really not out of the water that long because if you are above the water and you're too high and you have too big of an amplitude, your legs are just going to sink like a rock and you're barely going to go anywhere. But also on the recovery, when you send your hands forward into streamline, if your hands come too high out of the water, then your legs are going to sink. So really, ideally, you want to be at the surface level of the water when your hands are coming forward. Whether they go through the water or just above the water, that actually doesn't matter that much. It's key that if you ever watch your stroke from the side profile in slow motion, if you see that your hands are dramatically above the surface of the water, which a lot of swimmers don't realize, here's an interesting drill that you can focus on. So this drill is called streamline on front, sloth. Now when you're doing streamline kick breaststroke, just like you do on your back, you want to have a tight streamline, you want to make sure your knees are narrow and you bring your heels all the way back. Now what you do is you actually do this on the surface of the water, not underneath the water, and you train your body what it's like to float on top of the water. When you need a breath, all you have to do is lift your head up and time it as if you were doing the full on breaststroke, just don't use your arms to take a full stroke. Now the fourth biggest mistake that swimmers make is dropping the elbows. Now this is something that's a little bit more difficult to fine tune, in my opinion. What we're talking about is that early vertical forearm catch. This is really true in freestyle, butterfly, all the strokes, you want to make sure you're pulling the water with not just the surface area of your hand, but you're pulling the water with your forearm as well. That's really important because your forearm and your hand and the rest of your arm can hold a lot more water and you can engage a lot more muscles like on your back to pull yourself a lot faster through the water. So here's a great drill to focus on not dropping your elbows and actually pulling the water with these high elbow catch. The first one is called front skull. This is where you're literally flat on top of the water and you're going to have your face looking down and you're actually going to start to skull kind of like you're putting icing on a cake. Now a great way to actually start doing the front skull is when you're treading water. You're basically teaching your hands how to connect and build that feel of the water with your pinkies leading the out sweep and then your thumbs coming back together, applying pressure at all angles and that's sort of what the breaststroke pull is like. Now a more complicated drill is where you actually add resistance and you focus on your pull. So you can add resistance with a parachute, with a bungee cord, a power tower. This is definitely for the more advanced swimmers who have access to this type of equipment. But if you're really trying to focus on your pull specifically and this is one area of my breaststroke that I personally struggle with and I find it for me personally, I get the most value when I train with resistance and I can basically slow things down and really apply pressure on that part of the pull and I can really focus on improving my technique in that way. Now the fifth mistake that swimmers are making is swimming slow. Yeah, I know that sounds ridiculous. Well, how do I go faster, coach? I'm going to tell you how to go faster. The reason why you don't want to swim breaststroke slow, unlike freestyle, when you swim butterfly or breaststroke and it's a short axis stroke, it's a lot more inefficient if the timing isn't on point. When you do freestyle long axis, you can just slow everything down and the mechanics don't really break down that much. In breaststroke, on the other hand, because it's the most inefficient stroke and you ride lowest in the water, you don't want to train your body with those poor mechanics swimming slow. Whether or not you want to go compete and you just want to swim breaststroke for leisure, you actually get a better aerobic workout, believe it or not, when you train at a higher intensity because it's a lot harder actually to have these mechanics. A drill that's specific to swimming breaststroke fast and with power, intensity, and tension is freestyle kick with a breaststroke pull. You actually do a flutter kick and you really work on having an explosive high tempo catch out in front. I recommend wearing fins for this. I feel really gassed if I do this without fins. With fins, I also feel really tired, but I'm able to get a little bit more propulsion to make sure for these drills, all of them, you're well rested and you can execute on them in the best way possible. Now, my favorite swimming set that focuses on pretty much everything that we talked about is called countdown drill. You're going to count how many strokes you take. Now, you can do this with a pull out or you can just push off the wall and just swim breaststroke. Whatever you do, do the same thing on all eight 25. We're going to pretend we have a 25 meter pool. When I do this drill, I like to assume the first 25, all natural, I'm going a good neutral swimming pace. Your number might be seven, it might be 12, it might be 15. Now, on the second 25, you're going to reduce that by one. On the third 25, you're going to reduce it again. Then the fourth 25, you're going to reduce it by one stroke again. If you're following along, after four 25s, you will have reduced your stroke count from five to two or 12 to eight. Whatever it is, you have to reduce by at least one and then you're going to pause, you're going to reflect, and then you're going to build back up. As you build back up, you should be able to swim faster and it should be easier to think about your timing pull kick glide. It seems pretty dramatic and it is. The reason is you have to focus on your timing, the power of the stroke. This countdown drill is really focused on increasing your distance per stroke, increasing your efficiency and your power per stroke. I often like to do this before I do any type of a breaststroke main set. The more experienced you are as a breaststroke swimmer, you should have a pretty good idea how many strokes you take in breaststroke. If you don't, this is a perfect opportunity to start. If you've made it this far in the video, it means you're serious about improving your swimming and leveling up your skills. If you want to work with myself and our team, you can apply at the link below. We can show you exactly which drills to do, when, where, analyze your technique and everything that you need to swim faster. If you've really enjoyed this video, I know you're going to love this one right over here. Check it out. I'll see you over there and happy swimming.