Breaststroke Pull: The Complete Guide

The Breaststroke Pull

Although the pull plays a slightly smaller role in breaststroke than it does in other strokes, it's still critical. Your pull generates roughly 30% of your speed, so any shortcoming will have a negative impact on your speed.

One reason your breaststroke pull is important is because your arms and legs work independently. Your arms produce propulsion, then your legs produce propulsion. If your pull isn't getting the job done, there can be a big drop-off in speed between your kicks. This slows you down and fatigues you quickly because speeding up and then slowing down takes a lot of energy.

To get the most out of each stroke, power your pull with the strongest muscles of your upper body: your latissimus dorsi (lats) and pectorals (pecs). Using these muscles helps you generate a lot of propulsion. And because these muscles are so strong, they also tend to be able to work well over longer periods of time, improving your endurance.

Of course, all your other upper body muscles are still important.

Your shoulder muscles help with the movements of your arms to ensure they're precise and controlled. Your forearm muscles are responsible for ensuring your wrists remain stable when you apply pressure onto the water. And your main arm muscles, your biceps and triceps, are key for controlling the movement of your elbows. These muscles all support your lats and pecs, leading to a more effective pull.

What Your Arms Are Trying to Accomplish in Breaststroke

Understanding the challenges you must overcome for an effective breaststroke pull are key to understanding how fast swimmers create a lot of speed.

Here are the challenges you'll face:

• Getting a good catch. Your goal should be to create as much propulsion as possible with your pull. To do so, you must push backward against the water by positioning your hands and arms so that they face backward.

In the other strokes, your arms enter the water about shoulder-width apart or slightly wider, which facilitates repositioning your arms backward against the water. In breaststroke, however, you recover your arms into a somewhat streamlined position to set up the out-sweep for your next stroke.

• Underwater recovery. Becauseyou must recover your arms underwater in breaststroke (though your hands can break the surface), you'll face a lot of resistance bringing your arms forward.
• Arms recovering together. As with its sister stroke of butterfly, breaststroke requires you to recover your arms together, meaning you must do a lot more work to reposition them to create a great pull.
• Stop and go. Breaststroke is a stop-and-go stroke. You take a pull and then a kick, and then repeat. Going from a streamlined position, in which your arms aren't moving, into a powerful stroke can be challenging.

How to Start Your Breaststroke Pull

Pulls for every stroke share some similarities. You start with your arms pointed forward, and your goal is to push backward against the water as much as possible. To achieve that goal, your hands and forearms need to face backward. So, you need to get your arms from pointing straight ahead to facing backward efficiently and effectively.

To get your arms facing backward in breaststroke, you'll need to slide your arms out to the side at the beginning of your stroke. When your hands are sliding out, somewhere around shoulder-width apart, start pressing down with your hand and let your elbows start to point upward. That's the key movement that gets your arms facing backward. When your fingertips start pointing down and elbows point up, you'll be in position to push backward against the water as efficiently and effectively as you can.

This motion is particularly challenging in breaststroke because your arms are together after the recovery, whereas your arms tend to be shoulder-width apart or wider in the other strokes. That means your arms must travel much farther to end up in the right position in breaststroke. Although your arms are often thought of as sculling out in breaststroke, they're just sliding out so that they can get into the right position.

How long your hands take to move out can feel like a really long time, especially when compared to the other strokes. You might want to rush the process or start pulling early. If you're not patient enough to get into a great catch position, however, you're going to miss out on a great pull because your arms aren't in position yet. Be patient, reposition your arms, and set yourself up for a powerful pull.

Keys to Maximizing Your Breaststroke Pull

There are three key concepts that'll help you maximize your breaststroke pull and create as much propulsion as possible.

• Be patient in starting your pull.
• Think squeeze rather than pull.
• Use your forearm and hand to pull, not just your hands.

Your arms need to face backward to push backward against the water for a good pull. This means you need to set up your stroke properly. While doing so, you need to be patient and wait to apply a lot of force until your arms are in position. If you rush it, you'll need more energy and be less effective. Once you do start applying pressure, build the pressure to ensure you continue to hold water.

Once you've set up a great stroke and started your pull, don't think pull. Remember that your arms don't pull all the way down to your hip. (In fact, you'd be disqualified for doing so.) Although most breaststrokers don't make that extreme of a mistake, they can pull too far back by mistake. By thinking squeeze rather than pull, you'll bring your elbows to your side without letting them travel too far back. You might feel like you're not getting a full pull, but by squeezing your arms into your body, you're going to get everything you can while still setting yourself up for a smooth recovery.

A key aspect of this squeeze is that your hands and forearms are moving toward your body together. If you move your hands in faster than your elbows, or you only move your hands in, you'll remove much of the backward component of the pull. That's the component that creates all the speed. This mistake is like letting your elbow drop in freestyle. Instead, focus on moving your elbow and hand in as a unit.

Transitioning to Your Breaststroke Recovery

After you complete your pull, transition to the beginning of your recovery. This can be challenging because it's performed in a completely different way than this transition in freestyle, backstroke, and butterfly. In those strokes, your arms pull straight back and then swing over the surface of the water. This relatively linear aspect is simple to understand and accomplish.

In contrast, your arms recover underwater in breaststroke. That means you can't pull all the way down and then recover your arms. You must begin to transition to the recovery as part of the pull itself.

This is why thinking squeeze during your pull rather than pull is so important. Not only does it help you perform a great pull, but you're preventing yourself from pulling your hands too far back. By squeezing, you're keeping your elbows behind your hands, which makes recovering your hands forward a lot easier. All you must do is move your arms forward. If your hands pull back, you're going to have to drag your arms back up your body, creating a lot of resistance and wasting a lot of time.

Another key mistake in the pull is leading with your hands instead of your elbows. Doing this compromises your pull and has a negative effect on your arm recovery. If your hands move in and your elbows stay out wide, moving your hands up and forward for the recovery will be a lot harder.

This is another example in swimming of how each piece of the stroke is related and why you want to use strategies that allow you to successfully complete each aspect of the stroke. These two skills maximize your pull and set you up for an effective arm recovery.

Aggressive Arm Recoveries and Recovery Height

Once you've done a great pull and set yourself up for a great recovery, recover your arms and get them back in position for another great pull. There are two key words to keep in mind for your pull: aggressive and direct.

Here's why that approach is so important. When you recover your arms, you move your hands through the water, which causes a lot of resistance. And because you're breathing, your head is up and your hips are slightly lower in the water. The resistance caused by these positions slows you down. Being aggressive and direct with your recovery is how you can get out of these positions quickly and get ready for another great pull.

Breaststrokers recover their arms completely underwater or partially out of the water. To avoid being disqualified, some part of your arms, even if it's just the tips of your elbows, must be underwater.

When determining how far your arms should come out of the water, remember your goal of being aggressive and direct with your recovery. You must get yourself in position to take another stroke as soon as possible. Use the recovery height that allows you to accomplish that goal, which might be a different height than for another swimmer. Play with higher and lower recoveries to determine what allows you to recover your arms quickly.

As a starting point, recovering your hands slightly above the surface of the water can work well for most people. You can be direct and aggressive, and the surface provides an easily apparent height to reach.

Common Breaststroke Mistakes

Here are some common breaststroke pull mistakes to avoid.

• Rushing your stroke. Although you might feel as though you're making more progress and moving fast when you're going through your stroke quickly, you'll ultimately compromise the most effective part of your pull if you move through the initial stages too quickly.
• Focusing on only your hands. Breaststrokers sometimes focus on their hands rather than their hands and forearms together. By using your forearms and hands to push against the water, you'll have a bigger surface to pull with. You're also much more likely to pull your arms to your torso with the strongest muscles of your upper body, your lats and pecs.
• Slow recovery. Performing a slow recovery means you'll spend more time in the least effective part of your stroke. Your recovery is the part of your stroke that creates the most resistance and no propulsion. Recover aggressively so that you can get back to a more streamlined position and take another stroke, which allows you to create more propulsion.
• Pulling too far back. When you pull your arms farther back than you should, you'll create slightly more propulsion but at a very high cost. Pulling too far back causes you to have a longer recovery and face even more resistance. This will also cause you to take longer between the pull that provide propulsion.