Breaststroke rewards patience more than power
Breaststroke is the stroke where brute force costs you the most. Because both arms and both legs recover at the same time, there is a moment in every cycle where you are doing almost nothing propulsive — and that moment is where races and pool lengths are won or lost. Swimmers who try harder usually just create more drag during the recovery. The fix is timing and body line, not effort.
Here is the sequence that fast breaststrokers actually swim, and the four things that are slowing you down.
The cycle, in the right order
Every efficient breaststroke cycle follows the same four beats:
- Glide — arms extended, legs together, body as long and narrow as possible.
- Pull — hands sweep out and down, elbows stay high, chest lifts slightly.
- Breathe and recover the legs — head rises as the heels draw toward the hips.
- Kick — the feet whip out and snap together while the hands shoot forward.
The critical detail: the kick happens while the hands are recovering forward, not before and not after. If you kick and then glide with your hands still under your chest, you have created a brake. If you kick while your hands are still sweeping out, you have wasted the propulsion. The hands and feet should finish their propulsive phases at almost the same moment.
Problem 1: Your hips are low
Low hips are the number one cause of "I'm working hard and going nowhere" in breaststroke. They come from lifting the head to breathe. When the chin lifts, the chest rises, the hips drop, and you are now swimming uphill with a parachute behind you.
The correction is counter-intuitive: press your chest down and let your hips rise. Keep your head in line with your spine and look at the water in front of you, not at the wall. Your eyes should be down at roughly 45 degrees at the glide and level for the single moment of the breath. The breath comes from the chest lifting slightly, not the neck craning.
Problem 2: The kick is too wide and too slow
A wide "frog kick" feels powerful and is mostly drag. The knees should stay close together — no wider than hip width — while the heels draw up toward your backside. Then the feet turn out (dorsiflexed, toes pointing out and slightly up), and the soles sweep outward and around in a whip before snapping together.
Three cues that fix most kicks:
- Heels to your butt, not knees to your chest. The recovery is a fold, not a squat.
- Show the soles of your feet to the wall behind you. If you can't, your ankles aren't dorsiflexed and you are pushing water with the top of your foot.
- Finish with your legs straight and together, toes pointed. The snap is where the propulsion is, and it also sets up the glide.
Ankle flexibility is a genuine limiter here. If you cannot sit on your heels or point your toes flat, five minutes of ankle mobility work a day will add more speed than a month of extra laps.
Problem 3: You pull too wide and too far back
The breaststroke pull is not a rowing motion. Hands start together, sweep out to about shoulder width, then turn in and accelerate under the chest with the elbows staying high and close. Pulling wide out to the sides and all the way back to your hips gives you a big feel of power and pushes water backwards past your body instead of forwards past your hands.
Think of it as scooping water toward your chest, then shooting your hands forward like an arrow. The in-sweep should be the fastest part of the pull, and the hands should leave the chest already accelerating forward.
Problem 4: You glide too long — or not at all
Both errors exist and they look nothing alike.
No glide (the "eggbeater" breaststroker): constant motion, high stroke rate, heart rate through the roof, and a speed that drops every time the legs recover. These swimmers usually add a glide of about half a second and immediately swim faster for the same effort.
Too much glide (the "dead stop" breaststroker): a long pause at full extension where speed bleeds to nearly zero, then a big surge, then another stall. Speed is not constant — it oscillates between 1.6 m/s and 0.4 m/s. Shorten the glide until you're leaving for the next pull just as you feel deceleration begin.
A practical rule: the glide should be long enough to feel streamlined and short enough that you never feel a complete stop. For most recreational swimmers at 2:00/100 m that is a count of one, not three.
Drills that transfer
- 2 kicks, 1 pull: two whip kicks per arm cycle. Builds the kick-first timing and a feel for the glide.
- Kick on your back, arms at your sides: the clearest feedback for knee width and ankle position. 4 × 25 m.
- Sculling with a pull buoy: 4 × 25 m focusing only on the in-sweep, no kick at all.
- Vertical kick in deep water: 3 × 30 seconds, hands on the wall, to build the snap.
- 3 strokes + glide drill: swim three fast cycles, then glide to a full stop. Teaches you where your speed actually dies.
A four-week block to test it
| Week | Focus | Main set |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kick timing | 6 × 50 m kick on back + 6 × 50 m breaststroke counting kicks per length |
| 2 | Body line | 8 × 25 m glide drill + 4 × 100 m breaststroke, eyes down, hips high |
| 3 | Timing | 6 × 100 m: 25 m 2-kick-1-pull, 50 m full stroke, 25 m easy |
| 4 | Test | Warm up, then 200 m for time. Compare with week 1. |
Count your strokes per length every session. Reducing strokes per length at the same speed is the clearest sign that your technique — not your fitness — is improving. Log the count alongside your splits so you can see the trend; a simple lap-and-stroke log is enough, and SwimLog records stroke count and SWOLF automatically if you'd rather not count in your head.
When you are ready to put a number on your progress, check your times against the pace chart by level, and use the pace calculator to convert your splits into a per-100 m figure.