Breaststroke Checklist and Drills
By Coach Doug Garcia
Over the past 6 months, I’ve been providing a checklist for each of the competitive strokes. As you’ll see at the bottom with the breaststroke with dolphin kick drill, rolling the hips forward is a critical part of breaststroke. Working breaststroke and butterfly together is a great way to become efficient with both of these short axis strokes.
- Hands – Stop and start in streamline position, pinkies up on out sweep
- Elbows – Locked on out sweep and above the head on the catch
- Shoulders – Press overhead on the glide, shrug during in-sweep to narrow your body and move forward
- Head – Motionless on the breath, tucked under on the glide. Do not lift at any point in the stroke. You should not be able to see the end of the pool until you are within the flags.
- Neck – Do not crane back to get a breath
- Chest – Press chest into the water during out sweep to stop an early lift, and move more forward than up during the breath to recovery
- Hips – High point on the glide, low point on the breath
- Knees – Facing inward (heals out) to start the kick, at hip width during initial press back
- Feet – Flex on the out sweep, point on the glide
Two breaststroke drills include:
Miniature, or many, breaststroke. The focus of this drill is the catch phase and getting the hands in the most optimal position to catch the water. This drill is not a full stroke, but just the start of the stroke. Therefore, the strokes are smaller in size and require many of them to move down the pool. This is not a sculling drill, just a small stroke drill.
Breaststroke with dolphin kick. Too many people when swimming breaststroke do not roll their hips forward. This drill, swimming breaststroke arms with a dolphin kick gives you the feel of the hips rolling forward to help the stroke momentum stroke go forward.