How to Swim: Advanced Breaststroke

Olympic athlete Dan Kutler provides tips for improving breaststroke swimming techniques.

Dan Kutler: Hi! My name is Dan Kutler and I am going to show you how to swim: Advanced Breaststroke. Male Speaker: So I think the most important concept to keep in mind will really for any stroke, but in particular for breaststroke is the idea of streamlining. So much of the stroke happens under water. The only part of your body that comes out, it really is your head to breathe. So when those arm shoot forward streamline that, keep them like straight and as an arrow. When you finish your kicks, snap those legs together and keep those legs tight. Think of yourself as an arrow that shooting through the water, glide forwards, snap those legs together. Keep your body as aerodynamic as possible, fluid dynamic, whatever the proper term is. And streamlining that is even more important and the pull-down face of your stroke. A pulldown is basically, when you push off the wall in the breaststroke, it's the pushing of the wall that is done completely underwater and it's actually where a lot of swimmers, lot of competitive swimmers gain their edge, because you're most efficient underwater that's what least amount of drag is and if you do a pulldown properly, you are giving yourself an advantage. And you can see right here, how important streamlining actually is, obviously the tighter I make my body, the faster I will go. So let's take a look at the pulldown here, first we push off the wall in a nice streamline position, nice and tight. Give one giant pull from in underneath down to your hips. Slide your hands up underneath your body and bring them forward and then we kick ourselves to the surface. It's a nice glide before we take our first breath. And as you can see by the black line on the bottom of the pool, it's perpendicular to the lane lines, I am already half way across the pool. So there are two ways to increase the efficiency of your stroke and they both happened really close to one another. The first is called the squeeze. This is basically as you are pulling out water in towards your chest, you are really trying to squeeze those forearms together to pulled on to a nice chunk of water. The second part is called the hunch. And as you can see, it's right off -- this gives me my shoulders come up, what you want to try to do is shoot those shoulders up towards ceiling when you finish the squeeze part inside. You can see my shoulders making enough or to kind of pop-up, you can do even better than I am doing there, and really try to shoot those shoulders up, right after the squeeze. Now believe or not, 50% of the power of your kick happens in the last 6 inches of the breaststroke kick, so when you see my legs come together, boom, right there at the end. That little six inches is where you get 50% of your kicks and you have to make sure you finish the kick, of course it requires a little bit more effort but once you get over that hump and get your body used to it, it's going to provide the majority of the power of your kick. So to advance your breaststroke, you got to do it. Dan Kutler: Alright. So now that we know how to swim breaststroke right from Olympian, let's move on to the Backstroke.