Breaststroke Body Position: The Complete Guide

Introduction to Breaststroke Body Position

Body position is one of the most important skills to perfect in breaststroke, and it's also one of the most underappreciated. The pull and kick rightfully get plenty of attention because they create the propulsion that powers you down the pool, but your body position determines how fast you'll swim.

Breaststroke is the slowest of the four competitive strokes because of the resistance you create. Your arms and legs both recover forward under the water, creating a lot of drag. If your body position is off, you'll create significantly more resistance, which leads to significantly slower swimming. Small mistakes in your body position can lead to major losses of speed.

That may seem like bad news, but the opposite is true as well. Small improvements in your body position can lead to big improvements in speed. If you don't have an amazing pull or kick, you can still have success in breaststroke if you learn how to move through the water with as little resistance as possible. The best way to do that is to optimize your body position.

Achieving and maintaining a great body position is all about the muscles that control your spine. Your abdominal muscles—the rectus abdominis and the oblique muscles—ensure that your hips and shoulders stay connected and that there's no unnecessary arching or rounding of your spine. You should return to a completely straight position in the water after your breath, and your abdominals help you do that. Your spinal muscles help you lift to breathe in a way that allows your hips to stay at the surface.

The Impact of Breaststroke Rule Changes

More than any other stroke, breaststroke has been subject to rule changes that have made a significant impact on how the stroke is swum.

The most significant change related to body position was the removal of the rule in 1987 that required swimmers to always keep their head above the water.

No matter what stroke you're swimming, when you lift one end of your body out of the water, the opposite end of your body tends to sink. Breaststroke is no different. When you lift your head to breathe, your hips drop. Skilled swimmers may be able to keep their hips at the surface but they have to work hard to do that, which costs them a lot of energy and slows them down.

Once swimmers could submerge their head after the rule change, breaststroke began to change. Although the basic skills of fast breaststroke remained the same in terms of the pull, kick, and timing, submerging the head made achieving a much better body position possible. Because swimmers could achieve and maintain a great body position, breaststrokers began to glide more, taking advantage of the free speed. The improvements after this rule change demonstrate the importance of body position and how it's affected by the breath.

The Role of Undulation in Breaststroke

An optimal body position in breaststroke, just as with the other strokes, is one in which your body can move straight through the surface of the water. That position minimizes the amount of resistance you create, allowing you to go as fast as possible with as little effort as possible. Although that position is ideal, you'll have to deviate from it to create propulsion with your arms and legs.

That's where undulation comes in. Undulation is also required to breathe, which is pretty important as well.

Undulation is the rise and fall of your head and chest, which is followed by the rise and fall of your hips. (Just think how your body goes up and down in a wave in butterfly.) Optimizing your undulation is all about managing trade-offs. If your undulation is too big, you'll create too much resistance. If your undulation is too small, you won't create much speed. The goal is to find the sweet spot.

When your upper body comes up during your pull, your arms are in a much stronger position to pull, and creating propulsion with your arms is easier. When your upper body comes back into the water, this downward motion can help move your body forward, which makes executing a more powerful kick easier.

Some degree of undulation can reduce the resistance you create because undulating allows for more streamlined arm and leg recoveries.

Recovering your arms completely underwater without lifting your chest would create a ton of drag. Lifting your chest and recovering your arms higher in the water reduces the distance that your arms need to be recovered and the resistance they create as they move forward.

Similarly, bringing your legs forward during your kick recovery creates a lot of resistance. By recovering your legs when your body is at an incline, your knees aren't brought as directly forward, which reduces resistance.

Minimizing Loss of Breaststroke Body Position

How much you undulate is important, but how you perform that movement is critical as well. Done properly, you can create more speed; performed improperly, undulating can make your body position worse.

What's the difference? A key aspect of effective undulation is that when your head and chest rise in the water, your hips stay at or close to the surface of the water. As much as possible, keep your hips at the surface. Doing so reduces the amount of resistance you create. The key to doing so is improving how you lift your upper body.

If you lift your upper body straight up as a rigid unit, just like a seesaw, the upward movement of your shoulders presses your hips downward. Rather than thinking about lifting up, think about lifting forward. This gives you a better chance to keep your hips in a position that creates speed.

Another effective strategy for maintaining hip and body position is to think about arching up with your upper body rather than lifting. When your spine arches up, your upper body can be lifted without pressing your hips down.

Swimmers who struggle with this skill don't have an up-and-down motion in their hips. Instead, their hips just go down. Their hips are driven down when their upper body rises, and they only return to the surface after each stroke, if at all.

Whenever your hips are low in the water, you create a lot more resistance as you move through the water. This makes an already challenging stroke extremely difficult. Minimizing any deficits in body position during the elevation of your upper body is critical.

Reestablishing Breaststroke Body Position

Although it may not always look like it, getting back into great alignment is a critical skill, even during sprint breaststroke. The fastest breaststrokers in the world find their way back to a horizontal position on the surface of the water between stroke cycles. They may only be there for an instant, but they get there every time.

The easiest way to reestablish a great body position is by aggressively getting your head back down into the water after breathing. This is important for two reasons:

• When your upper body lifts in the water, even if you've done a great job of maintaining your body position, there's going to be some compromise in position. As a result, you want to spend as little time as possible in this position, particularly because you've already completed your pull. Get out of poor body positions as fast as possible.
• An aggressive recovery of your upper body following a breath is important because it can help reestablish a great hip position on the surface of the water. Think about a seesaw. If you quickly press down hard on one side of the seesaw (your head and chest in this metaphor), the opposite side (your hips) quickly pops up to the surface. This is one way that sprinters can get back into alignment, even at very high speeds. By throwing their head forward and down, they can quickly pop their hips back up to the surface, allowing them to move into their next stroke quickly.

Breaststroke Breath Height and Breath Timing

Because you need to breathe and lifting your head to breathe can influence your body position, how you breathe and when you breathe are critical.

Your breath position should be high enough to take advantage of undulation, but low enough to unnecessarily disrupt your body position. An unnecessarily high breath will also take too much time and slow your stroke rate, providing no benefit.

The optimal breathing height differs between swimmers. Determining exactly how high you should breathe can be difficult. You must experiment to find what works best for you. Just remember the principles when trying to figure it out: You want to breathe high enough to get an effective pull but low enough to avoid compromising the position of your hips.

The best way to time your breath is to sync your breath with what your arms are doing. As your arms slide out to set up your pull, keep your head at the surface of the water. Once you start to move your hands down and back, start your breath. As soon as you start to press on the water, breathe. As you continue to pull, you'll continue to rise.

When it comes to bringing your head back underwater, just follow your arms. As soon as your arms start moving forward, so too should your head. Your breath should follow your arms so that everything returns to the water as a unit and you end up with a great streamlined position, ready for your next stroke. This timing of your breath allows you to get a great pull and a great breath without either interfering with the other.

The Importance of Breaststroke Arm Recoveries

Aggressively returning your head into the water after your breath is an important part of reestablishing great body position, but it's not the only thing you need to do.

Being aggressive with recovering your arms is critical for reestablishing a great body position. If your arms are slow to recover, they can hold up the recovery of your head and chest, and you can get stuck with your arms under your chest. Just as with poor breathing, this means you're going to be in a poor position for longer periods.

The timing of your breath is linked with the timing of your arms, so if your arms are slow to recover, so too will your head after a breath. Recovering your arms aggressively and directly is critical.

The simplest way to think about a recovery path that's both fast and direct is to try to slice your arms through the surface of the water. Doing so ensures that your arms recover up and straight forward. If they're deep, they create more drag; if they're up and down, they'll take longer to get back into position.

An effective arm recovery starts with an effective pull. Compared to the other strokes, breaststroke should not be pulled back very far; it doesn't create much additional propulsion, and it requires a much longer recovery path. This delays the recovery of your arms, which delays the recovery of your head and upper body. That delay means a worse body position and more time spent in poor body positions. The faster your arms can recover, the sooner you can reestablish an effective body position.