How To Swim BACKSTROKE Like the BEST in the World

Backstroke may be considered the boring resting stroke by some, but it's one of the most challenging ones, especially because you can't even see where you're going. And because backstroke's so different, it breaks a lot of stereotypes. So let's see what the best backstrokers in the world are doing and how that can help you improve your own stroke. So let's dive in. I want to start underneath the water. He's doing a lot of things right. He's swinging a lot of power. Let's go ahead and break this down. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to get to the right point of the stroke. I'm going to zoom in. And what I really want to do is I want to show you guys a couple things. Firstly, we're going to look at his body line. It cuts through the middle of your body. And, you know, this angle is a little tough to see, but basically you want to be swimming in a straight line. And that starts with your head position. If you look at his head, his eyes are looking at the ceiling. When we look above the water, we're going to see the same thing. Let's look at his hand entry. I'm going to use an arrow to describe that. His arms are entering the water at shoulder width. That's 11 and 1 o'clock if you're using the arms of a clock. This is super important because if you take a look at how his hand is positioned to catch the water, he's basically already setting up a pinky first entry and that is allowing him to initiate that early vertical forearm, which yes, early vertical forearm applies in the backstroke as well. And if we just move a couple of frames over, we can see what that early vertical forearm looks like. He's going to bend the elbow and power. I think we're actually going to see it in this side a little bit easier. Yeah, so you can see right there what he's doing with his hand. His forearm is like a paddle and he is just pulling the water. He's got a relatively short fast kick. He's pointing his toes in the direction he's trying to go. So this is the amplitude of his kick. It's relatively small. You want to keep that amplitude small because if you increase your kick too much and let's say his legs were to go outside of those blue lines, then it would actually increase your propulsion but also increase your drag and you don't want to do that. Take a look at that backstroke technique. Yep, and you can see how he's engaging the water rotating side to side and he's pulling with that paddle from your fingertips all the way to the elbow. It's pretty much a straight line. That's why it's so important to hit the water with your pinky first. I'm going to go ahead and clear the screen and let's pause right here. I want to zoom in on that pull position. Now, it does look like his wrist is kind of at an angle. You guys can see that right there. So ideally you want to be positioned in a way that from your middle finger all the way through your elbow is a straight line. If you look his opposite shoulder is actually coming out of the water. That's why you rotate side to side. So you kind of pop that shoulder out of the water and then you want your arm to come out straight out of the water and it looks like he is positioning this arm to do exactly that. This is actually a really good freeze frame to see that body line I'm talking about because what you can see is the total amplitude of his kick is really small. It's inside of his body line. One thing I really want to show you guys is the head position. So he is looking up, right? He's looking at the sky, but in fact his head position is actually not that flat. He's really powering through the water. He would actually benefit if he looked more up because right now it looks like he has an angle. I think we see it in the next shot. You can see what I'm talking about. Yeah, right here. All right. I know there's a lot of waves kind of bear with me. Let's look at the angle of his head. So if you look at his eyes, his eyes are actually looking would you guys agree that's a fair arrow of where his eyes are looking? Let's put an angle to his head position relative to the water, right? That's the line and there we go. Now, I know it looks like 90 degrees. That's 90 degrees to his face, but the water line is actually more like that. So maybe he's 65 degrees or yeah, 66 degrees. So remember the body line is right here. This is the body line. Now, I know it's not perfect. There's the angle and everything. But if he were to lift his eyes a little bit more up and look at the sky, look at the ceiling, basically his entire head instead of that's his head position. His head needs to be in that line. What's going to happen is his hips are going to go higher. Now again, Ryan Murphy is a very strong swimmer. So he's really powering through the water on top of the water. If you're not Ryan Murphy, which you're not because you're watching this video and if he is watching this video, awesome. What's up, Ryan? You want to make sure that you're lifting your hips up as much as you can and your head position is how you control that. This is the number one mistake that beginner and advanced swimmers quite frankly make in backstroke. It's not having a good head position. You want to be able to balance a cup right on your forehead and you can still actually have too high of a body position. Most of your cap should be underneath the water. Look at the head position. You want to get most of your cap underneath the water. You want to rest back, pop your belly button up even with that rotation. It looks like he's not even trying. All right, let's get into the backstroke. Now, there's the underwater dolphin kick. Now, when you're looking at his backstroke, he's doing a lot of things right. Let me move the screen over there. You can see he's got a great body position. I'm going to pause it. There's the head. Eyes are looking at the ceiling. Good pointing the toes. Legs are almost straight, very minimal knee bend. A lot of mistakes swimmers make is they bend their knees too much. He's doing this really well. We're also going to talk about some things he's not doing so well. Now, backstroke is arguably his weakest stroke. If there is such a thing when you go 402 in the IM and you're the greatest swimmer of all time, not of all time, in 2023 you're the greatest swimmer. Correction, Michael Phelps is the greatest swimmer of all time. How dare I say that? Let me know what you guys think down below in the comments. But when you notice his backstroke, he's entering the water a little bit narrow on the catch. Do you see that? So there's this invisible line that cuts through the middle of your body and you don't want to cross that midsection. He's a little bit narrow on the entry. You can see it here in slow motion and he doesn't get into the catch as quickly as some of his competitors. Now when he is in the water, hard to see here. He has the early vertical forearm and yes, that does apply in backstroke as well as freestyle. If you think about backstroke, it's kind of like freestyle but on your side. These long axis strokes, you're rotating. So let's clear that. Pay attention to where the hand entry is now. So you can see that I'm going to draw the midsection right here cutting through his back. That red line is that invisible line freestyle backstroke long axis stroke. You cannot pass that. That's your spine rotating across that axis. Now he is a little bit narrow if you look at where the hand is. It's very minor. You know, I'm guilty of being way more narrow than that. But definitely right here, this entry is a little narrow. It would probably benefit entering maybe not that far, but just a little bit further out because you get into the catch and you can get a deeper catch more quickly. That's something that Michael Phelps has been able to master and why Michael Phelps actually out splits Marshawn on the backstroke in the IM. So I'm going to clear the drawing. Let's go ahead and watch this in slow motion. You can see where that hand is entering, especially that one by the lane line. You can see he's a little bit too narrow. Long axis stroke. He's very tall, very skinny moving through the water. He's very long in the water. I should say there are definitely swimmers taller, but you want to feel like you're swimming long. You want to have an increased distance per stroke head position. Amazing hip rotation. Very good. When we look at the underwater dolphin kick, if you missed her there she is right there. And so she's actually got a lot of undulation meaning the amplitude of her kick is really well. It's not that it's not that squiggly, but so one thing I want you guys to notice is just how she uses her entire body on that dolphin kick. The second thing is that it looks like she kind of has a 45 degree angle to her side. You know, you are actually fastest when you kick on your back underwater. However, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be fastest on the breakout. Now she does a top arm breakout and I'm going to show a slow motion version from another angle above the water. It's going to be very easy to see what that looks like, but keep an eye on the breakout stroke, meaning the first stroke that she takes. She's right here. Remember we talked about that underwater dolphin motion. She's at like a 45 degree angle to her side and she's actually going to break out with her top arm rather than pulling underneath the water. She's going to pull right above her chest, her diaphragm surface. So go ahead and watch right here. Watch what she does on the breakout. Boom. Do you see that top arm breakout? That is not very common. Some of the best backstrokers in the world do a top arm breakout. It's not very common. It's relatively new in the last five or ten years. Top swimmers have been doing that. Coming into the turn, I mean the feet are over very fast. We're watching this in slow motion right now, but heck, this feels faster than what most people do in real motion. And again, we're at a 45 degree angle to the side and then where's that top arm breakout? Right there. I also want to note, look at where she is breaking out relative to the pool, right? This is where she is roughly breaking out. The 15 meter line, let's draw that again. The 15 meter line is right there. Now, if you guys are looking, each of these represent one full meter. So she's breaking out at about 12.5 meters, I would say. Now, if you remember in backstroke and butterfly and freestyle, you can actually underwater dolphin kick all the way to 15 meters. Now, let's go ahead and continue watching this race. There's a breakout about three strokes until 15 meters. Great head position. She is looking at the ceiling, right? That's where you go. Keep your hips up. Body line is relatively flat. And into the wall, she nails the finish. Now, we're going to watch it again. Here we go. Keep an eye on her. Right there. Boom. Here we go. Watch it again. Top arm breakout. This is a great view to look at his hand entry. So I'm going to point out a few things. Right now, let's take a look at his hand. So if you look at this hand down here, before it enters recovery phase, finishing the stroke, you're going to enter or exit the water with your thumb. Another thing I want you to look at is the hand positioning. And you want to think of this as the arms of the clock. You want to enter at 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock. There is the midsection of the body. And you don't want to enter at that midsection. You want to basically enter in the line of your shoulder. And that's what you can see represented by those yellow lines. The final thing I want to look at before changing frames is his feet and his toes. His toes are pointed. And that's really important to increase your propulsion, but also decreasing your drag. So that's his backstroke from the top. And now we're going to look at it from an underwater perspective in slow motion. And you can see there his head position. I'm just going to go ahead and draw a line. So this is the line that intersects through his spine. Now you can see his head position. Only half of his head is under the water. If you swim with poor head position and you're looking at your toes and you're not looking backwards at the sky, then your whole head is going to be out of water. And you're actually not going to be able to see any of the swim cap. So it's actually really good that you can see part of the swim cap. His eyes are looking up at the sky. We notice he's pointing his toes. That's all really good. And you can see here he's got a high elbow catch underneath the water. You can see just like in freestyle, backstroke is a long axis stroke. And the benefit of having this high elbow catch, especially in freestyle and backstroke, is you pull the most water. What you're looking for is an EVF. That's an acronym that's short for early vertical forearm. And you can see that established really early in the stroke. So I'm going to go ahead and clear the screen so you can see this without anything on it. There's the pinky entering the water first. And you can see that high elbow catch. I'm going to pause it right there. That's a great shot to see exactly what I'm talking about. It looks a little awkward actually because you might think, how do I bend my arm like that? There we go. Draw it a little bit better. It's almost like a right angle. So that's like a 90 degree angle. Right now it says 118, but you get what I'm saying. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to increase that surface area of your forearm. There's another sky view. You can see the head position, good body rotation. You can see the hips are rotating to get into that early vertical forearm. So I want you to pay attention to his hips. Look at his hips as I scale back and forth on this video. You can see his hips are rotating. That rotation is critical in order to get into that high elbow catch. If you swim flat like right here, you can see his body is flat. Look at his hips. That is flat. Now look at that same yellow line as I play forward. It no longer applies. It's hard to see it that way, but you can basically see that there is some level of rotation that starts with the hips and the shoulders are rotating as well. You can see it from this angle. I think a little bit better. Let's watch it right here underwater. You can see the hip rotation, high elbow catch, deeper catch, and that's really necessary. As you can see, video analysis is really important to swimming fast. So if you've never seen yourself swim, you got to make sure you start filming yourself at different speeds and angles. If you want our team of coaches to analyze your stroke, we do this every single week in our Swimming Academy. So go to the link in the description and join us if you want to take your swimming to the next level.