Name: New Way to Swim Breaststroke
Uploaded: 2025-04-15T03:20:33.000Z
Duration: 5 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Scott Bett, US Masters swimming coach.

Adverbs of manner

Breaststroke has undergone a lot of change and a lot of them very dramatically very recently.

Here are some ways you might have grown up swimming breaststroke and here's what we do today.

Swimmers are mandated to keep some part of their head above water, sometimes known as the water bug style of breaststroke.

This high head position required by rule often ended up creating extra drag because the head was only partially submerged and some swimmers swam face first.

For the pull, the coaches taught what was called the YMCA method in which the swimmers swept their arms out in front to form a Y, bent their arms at their elbows to pitch down to make an M, and brought their elbows together to form a C, then shot them forward to make an A.

Swimmers and coaches are a creative bunch and experimentation and rule changes followed.

Submerging your head is legal now, allowing for a more flowing wave style of breaststroke that has now evolved.

This uses the same essential pull of sweeping the hands out and pulling backwards and down to create lift for the upper body, but then shooting forward with a kick into a streamlined position with your head submerging and in line with your spine.

The difference maker between then and now is making your arm movements a little less angular.

It's more of an elliptical movement with pressure all the way through with your hands sweeping out and then accelerating them around and down to shoot forward on the kick.

Like everything else, it's subtle yet powerful.

Undulation creates a wave motion of the breaststroke.

If they do, just don't do a downward dolphin kick.

Officials are trained to recognize this difference between the feet falling naturally with undulation and a forceful downward kick.

To prevent this from happening, keep your core very tight and your hips tucked.

Although coaches have tried to teach breaststroke timing the same way to all swimmers, it became apparent that different swimmers and different distances require different stroke timing.

Some swimmers just take to it more naturally than others.

It's evident that swimmers come to the pool with different talents and having only one way to teach breaststroke isn't helpful.

Now there are no more hard and fast rules about swimming breaststroke other than your propulsion comes from both your pull and your kick.

Some people get it from the majority of the kick, other people from the pull.

If you're a strong kicker, you might want to shoot forward a little on the glide.

If you're a strong sculler, you might want to experiment with how wide you pull when you have a stroke and at what tempo.

Other recent modifications is a hybrid between the wave and water bug styles.

The powerful breaststroke kickers make shorter distance like this like it because the faster tempo allows for this hybrid style.

Your stroke is the same, just at a higher tempo.

You can also choose to stay in that streamlined position for only a short period of time between strokes or not at all.

The pullout is a sequence of movements that occur at the start of each wall.

It's the only time in breaststroke in which your arms can move past your hips.

The rules for pullouts were pretty straightforward before 2004.

Until that is, Katsuki Kitajima of Japan added a dolphin kick to his pullout during the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Because there were no underwater cameras at the time to help the officials enforce the rule, the benefit of the doubt went to the swimmer.

The following year, the swimmer's governing body, FINA, now the World Aquatics, changed the rule to allow one dolphin kick during the pullout.

Initially, the dolphin kick could occur only after the pull had been initiated.

Most swimmers use the momentum off the wall and the pull as subsequent natural undulation of the body to place this dolphin kick at the end of their pulldown, but before the kick.

Elite swimmers kept testing the waters and began experimenting with placing the dolphin kick before the pull, and now the rules allow breaststrokers to do one dolphin kick at any point during the pullout prior to the breaststroke kick.

You only get one dolphin kick, so make it count by making it big and making it powerful.

The moment you push off the wall, you're going to start slowing down.

Some swimmers do a big dolphin kick right away before their pulldown.

Some find it faster to do their pulldown first and then do a dolphin kick, and yet some others still add that dolphin kick at the same time as their pulldown.

If you separate your pulldown and your kick, it is important to minimize the pause between movements because they're both propulsive movements.

If you choose to do your dolphin kick during the pulldown, you'll want to get through the rest of the pullout phase quickly to prevent a loss of momentum.

The key is to practice it and find out which dolphin kick works best for you.

One of the most frustrating things in a breaststroke race is if you're really swimming well and fast, you'll be at a very slight lead over a swimmer in the lane next to you, only to get second place because of where you were in the stroke cycle at the end.

No worse way to lose the race than having to glide into the wall or take a short stroke and get outtouched by someone you should have beaten.

The best breaststrokers know their stroke count from wall to wall and how their timing and tempo affect it.

You'll most likely swim a different number of strokes on your first length and each subsequent length.

Figure out your stroke count by training at that pace from time to time, and adjust it if you find yourself gliding into the wall or getting jammed up.

Fast and hard finishes also help you avoid getting disqualified from not having both your hands touch at the same time.

It's what's called a non-simultaneous touch.

Gliding in slower makes it much easier to touch non-simultaneously.

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