Swimming Basics - How to swim breaststroke: Timing, breathing and full stroke

Hello, so in this video we are talking about the full breaststroke stroke. So I want to talk to you about seven things now, I'm gonna have to remember this myself, but we're talking about the timing, the body position, the technique, the breathing, the speed and power, the glide, and any common problems, and that's seven, that you might have when you're swimming breaststroke. Let's get straight into it. So I strongly recommend you go back and you watch the videos in this playlist, so it would be the breaststroke arms video and the breaststroke legs. Watch the breaststroke legs one first, then the arms, and then come back to this video and you'll have a full idea of the components of this stroke. We're going to use three words today, that is in, out, and together. I'm going to use those three words because that will help me time this stroke. Now, the actions do look like those words. The arms, as I spoke about in the video, there's one that's kind of like a pull, so we can think about this. In, out, and snap. In, out, and pull. But we're going to use the word together because it helps us time this stroke. I'm going to show you a couple videos now of it from overhead, it from underwater, and how it looks when we just swim breaststroke. This will help you gauge what you are doing and I'm going to break it down very slowly. Body position is really important in this stroke. This is a glide component stroke, so for part of this stroke you're actually gliding through the water. This is a really good stroke for engaging a lot of your upper body muscles as well. If you are using this stroke to exercise, or you're just learning it, what I suggest is you go for a swim and you alternate between front crawl and breaststroke. That will let you engage your entire body's muscle groups and have a full body workout. Body position in this stroke is quite important. Some people like to swim with their head out of the water. This is a really good stroke for that because unlike front crawl where you kind of have to swim with your head in, you can actually swim this stroke fully with your head out and that's absolutely fine if you're uncomfortable putting your face in. You could use this stroke to build up to putting your face in and we can talk about that in a separate video, but just briefly you could try and practice blowing some bubbles and then you could get yourself some goggles. You could put your goggles on and see what it looks like underwater. We never ever ever ever want to hold our breath when we're swimming underwater. This is a no-go. You always want to either be breathing in or blowing out. So if you're aiming to put your face in, body position, you want to be on as flat on top of the water as possible. We don't want to see this with your legs sunken to the floor. We want to be about 25 degrees in the water. Your legs will be slightly lower than your head and the rest of your body, that's absolutely fine because you are breathing so often. The body position in this stroke allows you to come up, take your breath and then go straight back in and carry on swimming. I'll demonstrate for you now and I'll show you the breathing component but we'll talk about that separately. We've got the idea of body position in our mind at the moment so that's what I'm going to be talking about. When we're swimming we want to be quite high in the water. I'm going to put my face in and I'll show you underwater as well. Those key words in, out, together and then with my legs in, out, together. Those two we can use for the timing. I'm actually going to get a float now and I'm going to show you how they look one after the other. You'll have to bear with me on this one because I'm going to use this to help me float. This isn't part of the stroke but obviously I need to talk to you so I need to be able to float. Those three words, those key words in, out, together will help us time this stroke. Let me show you now when we're in the in phase of the stroke. Our hands are in and our legs are in. When we push out our arms are fully extended. We want a full extension on the arms and we want a full extension on the leg. The leg is going to snap and the arms are going to pull. So we're going to use the word together but snap and pull can also be used. So as I do this I snap my legs together and I pull around in my circle. I'll show you now in, out, together. In, out and together. In, out and together. With the breathing it helps to use that pull to lift your head out of the water. I'll show you now. Let me keep this float underneath me. So face him and up and up. Hopefully you can see on the video that when I put my face in I'm breathing bubbles. I like to breathe bubbles out of my nose if I'm swimming front crawl. Sometimes I do it out of my mouth because I just like to get that air out but I'm breathing all of my air out every single time I put my face in. So when I come up all I'm doing is breathing in. I'm not making it last for two strokes, every single stroke, every one. The breathing component of the stroke is quite important if you're putting your face in. When you lift your head up take your breath in but make sure you're not lifting your head up too high. We don't want to lift out of the water naturally because your top of your body is connected to your bottom. If you lift your head out too high your legs are going to sink quite low in the water and essentially you're putting the brakes on and you're going to stop gliding. We don't want to kill that glide, we want to carry on. So I'll put my face in and I'll show you how high I lift my head out. Face in and up. Stop. My chin is still in the water. This is quite important, as I said, not to ruin that glide so we can carry on floating through the water and gain as much efficiency as we possibly can. So some of the common problems you can have with breaststroke arms is that you're not pulling round as much as you possibly should. We basically want full extension of the arm. So when you're pushing your arms out you kind of want your elbows straight. Some people just do this, you're not going to get very far with that so make sure with the idea in mind that you're pulling as much water behind you as possible that you fully extend your arms when you're in the out phase of the stroke. Another problem is some people pull too hard and you can really get the water moving and you'll lift yourself out the water. Pull reasonably round and then return back. We don't want to pull behind us. If you pull behind your shoulder line you're gonna have to bring your arms back to their starting position. Let me do that again and have a look at which way the water goes. It goes in front of me. That's the opposite of where we want it. We want it behind us. So make sure that you're pulling that water round and then you cut the water there. Very little returns back in front of me the way that we do it. Hopefully we've covered all seven topics that I wanted to talk about. This stroke is really good for people with shoulder injuries. If you're swimming front crawl you've got loads of rotations as I mentioned in the arms video and that over a course of your swimming exercise can put stress on your shoulder. When you do the pull you're not rotating your shoulder too much and you can put in as much power as you would like. So it's very good to not strain those muscles in your upper shoulder and inside. You're engaging your pectoral muscles in this as well. It's really good for a whole body workout. If you've got any questions or you need to know some more please leave a comment below and I'll respond to you personally and we can talk and we can chat about how things are going. Thank you very much for watching today's video. If you like this video please consider subscribing to our channel because it really helps us keep making these videos in these lovely locations and give free swimming education hopefully to the world. See you in the next one!