Backstroke Swimming: The Complete Guide

What Is Backstroke?

As its name implies, backstroke is the only competitive stroke swum on your back. You alternate which arm takes a stroke, and your arms are straight when you’re recovering over the water and bent when you’re pulling under the water. To facilitate your arm movement, rotate your body from side to side. Your legs move in an alternating manner as well, with relatively small ranges of motion but a high rate, in what’s called flutter kick. Most swimmers perform three kicks for every stroke. 

Backstroke was first contested in the Olympics in 1900 but the stroke didn’t reach its present-day form until at least the 1930s. At one point, backstrokers used an alternating or simultaneous breaststroke kick instead of a flutter kick, bent arms while recovering over the water, and straight arms during the pull. Slowly, the stroke evolved into its modern version as swimmers and coaches sought the most effective ways to create speed.

Backstroke races occur over 50, 100, and 200 yards or meters. The 50 is a sprint requiring pure speed, whereas the 200 requires a blend of endurance and speed. The 100 is somewhere in between, depending on how long it takes you to complete. 

Backstroke is the second stroke swum in an individual medley, and the first stroke swum in a medley relay.

How to Swim Backstroke for Beginners

Backstroke consists of several key elements, all of which you need to perform well to swim fast and efficiently: pull, kick, body position, body rotation, and timing.

To swim fast, you need to create propulsion with your arms and legs.

Your pull is the most important source of propulsion. To do it effectively, press backward against the water with your hand and forearm. The most effective strategy for doing so is to get your hand and forearm facing backward as early as possible, then pull straight back. Your kick provides less propulsion, but it is not less important. Your legs should move in a tight flutter kick with slightly bent knees and floppy ankles.

Maintaining great a body position as you swim is also important. You want your body to rest on the surface of the water, moving in one line, with your head, hips, and feet all resting on the surface. This reduces the resistance you create as you move through the water.

The rotation of your body is critical because it allows you to more effectively recover your arms over the surface of the water and execute great arm pulls. Your body will rotate down toward your pulling arm and away from your recovering arm.

All these elements must be performed at appropriate times relative to each other for backstroke to be most effective. Within one complete cycle of backstroke, each of your arms should complete one stroke and each of your legs should kick three times.

The Impacts of Backstroke on Your Body

Swimming backstroke is a terrific form of exercise because it uses many of your body’s muscles. 

The strongest muscles of your upper body, your lats and pecs, provide the power for your pull, and your biceps and triceps contribute some too. Your shoulder muscles are responsible for recovering your arms and repositioning them throughout your stroke.

The strongest muscles of your legs, your quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes, provide the engine for a strong kick. And the muscles that stabilize your spine work throughout your stroke to make sure you’re staying firm. These muscles include your abs, obliques, and spinal erectors. 

Common Backstroke Mistakes

There are several common backstroke mistakes to watch out for. 

• Head position. Many swimmers are uncomfortable with water running over their face, so they raise their head out of the water. Avoid this because when you lift your head, your hips will sink, which will create drag and slow you down.
• Pull. Mistakes with the pull tend to be at one of two extremes. Swimmers will either pull with completely straight arms or they will bend their arms excessively during their pull. In both cases, they won’t be able to push against the water as efficiently and powerfully as they could. When pulling with a straight arm, you won’t produce as much power on your pull, and by pulling with an excessively bent arm, you won’t have as large of a surface area to push against the water.\
• Kick. The biggest kick mistake swimmers make is kicking from their knees. Often, the swimmers’ knees will come out of the water when they’re doing this. Although your knees should bend to some degree, your kick should start from your hips. Failing to do so will lead to a less effective kick and more drag.
• Body rotation. When it comes to body rotation, the typical mistake swimmers make is failing to rotate enough, resulting in a flat backstroke. This makes effective recovery of your arms over the water much more difficult. Your shoulders only have so much range of motion available. By rotating your body you can move your arms through a greater range of motion, allowing you to use your shoulders a lot more effectively.

How to Build Endurance in Backstroke

To build endurance in backstroke, you need to swim backstroke for progressively longer periods of time.

Because swimming longer builds endurance, patiently and progressively swim more backstroke. It’s not about doing as much as possible; it’s about doing slightly more over time.

You don’t necessarily have to increase how much you swim overall; just start switching out some of your freestyle for backstroke. Over time, this change alone can be sufficient for building your endurance in backstroke.

One of the most important aspects of building endurance is controlling your intensity so you can be consistent with your speed during workouts. You don’t want to work too hard at the beginning of a set only to slow down because you’re fatigued. If you do that, you’re practicing slowing down, which is the opposite of what you want.
It’s important to work hard, but it’s more important to work optimally.

Endurance is best built when you’re able to finish your workouts and sets as fast, or faster, than when you started. Avoid sets where you get progressively more fatigued and swim slower and slower. Although this may feel like you’re working hard (and you are!), it’s not optimal for building endurance. Endurance is about sustaining a given level of performance, and that’s what you want to practice consistently.

Swimming more backstroke also allows you to work on the specific skills backstroke requires, making you more efficient and building your endurance.

How to Train for a Faster Backstroke

Building speed in backstroke comes down to one simple concept: practicing swimming fast. Swimming fast is a skill, and to build that skill, you must practice it.

Although swimming smoothly and developing your technique is a key part of building speed, you’ll never optimize your speed without practicing fast swimming. And the more practice you get, the faster you’ll go. 

Some swimmers think that swimming hard is the same thing as swimming fast, but swimming fast is about more than just swimming hard. It’s more about minimizing fatigue in workouts so you can go fast.

To optimize your speed, you must set up your workouts in the right way so that you can minimize fatigue. This will allow you to get in the practice you need to build your speed.

How do you do that? There are three simple ways to construct sets that minimize fatigue and let you swim fast. 

• Keep the distances short. To swim fast, you need short distances. Swimming 25s works best, with the occasional 50 thrown in. By keeping the distances short, you can go fast, and each repetition will be over before you get fatigued.
• Take plenty of rest between repetitions. This ensures you recover and are prepared to swim fast again. It’s not about going fast once; you need to practice going fast over and over. Thus, it’s important to get enough rest so you can keep your speed up.
• Don’t try to swim fast when you’re tired. Limit the total number of repetitions to the amount you can do well. Less is more because reducing your quality to increase quantity never works and can contribute to injury as your technique degrades.

Modifications to the Stroke

Although there are some basic principles that apply to swimming fast backstroke, there’s also room for flexibility and variation in how you swim backstroke. 
If you haven’t noticed, swimmers come in all shapes and sizes, and that has a direct influence on how they swim backstroke. As a result, you’ll see different variations of backstroke, and no one variation is better or worse—just more or less appropriate for a given individual.

Because people have different ranges of motion and strength in their upper body, you’ll see different types of arm pulls. Some swimmers use very bent elbows and some have straighter elbows. Some will keep their hands close to their body and some will have their arms farther away. The most important idea is to stick with what’s comfortable for you and what allows you to push with as much surface area as possible against the water with power. 

The amount of rotation swimmers use depends on their mobility. Some may need to rotate a little more to get their arms in the right position and some might need to rotate a little less. By experimenting with different amounts of rotation, you’re likely to find the best solution for you.

You’ll also see variations in backstroke depending on the race distance. In shorter distances, you’re likely to see more underwater kicking, high-intensity flutter kick, and faster turnover (the rate your arms move). These strategies are all effective at creating more speed, which is why they’re used over shorter distances.

They also require a lot of energy, so they tend to be used less frequently in longer races. It’s simply too difficult for most swimmers to sustain them. It’s important for you to experiment in practice and in races to learn what strategies work best for you.

What Are Backstroke Flags and How to Use Them

Backstroke flags serve one simple purpose: to keep you safe. 

You can’t see where you’re going when you swim backstroke. Sure, you could tilt your head back and look toward the wall, but that’s incredibly disorienting and would slow you down. The flags tell you when you’re getting close to a wall.

The flags are 5 yards away from the wall in a short course yards pool and 5 meters away from the wall in a short course meters or long course meters pool. They’re strung over the pool about 6 to 9 feet above the surface of the water.

When learning to use the flags, you must establish a stroke count, which is how many strokes it takes from when you pass under the flags until you reach the wall. When performing a flip turn, you can begin to roll over for your turn one less stroke than it takes to get to the wall. (Here’s a primer on improving your backstroke flip turn.) The challenge is that this number can change slightly depending on how fast you’re swimming, leaving you closer to or farther from the wall than expected. As you gain experience, you can rely less on stroke count and more on simply “knowing” where the wall is based on visual cues. You’ll come to know when you need to roll over for a flip turn or when you need to reach for the finish. This intuition comes with practice, and over time, it becomes automatic.

Breathing During Backstroke

You might think that you don’t need to focus on breathing while swimming backstroke because your face is out of the water the whole time, but that’s not the case.

Breathing in the other strokes is regulated because you can only breathe at certain times in the stroke, but breathing in backstroke can occur at any time, which can cause problems. In the other strokes, breathing challenges are typically characterized by not getting enough air. Backstroke breathing problems are often characteriz ed by getting too much air.

Because you can breathe whenever you want, you might breathe too often. Especially when you start to get tired, the temptation is to breathe constantly. This can cause you to hyperventilate and make you feel like you’re not gett ing enough air, which causes stress and disrupts your rhythm.

Establishing a backstroke breathing pattern is an effective way to prevent over breathing . Try tying your breathing to your arm recoveries. For instance, breathe every time your right arm recove rs or your left arm recovers, or every other time. Just as with freestyle, you can experiment with breathing every second or third or fourth stroke. The specific pattern is less important than finding a pattern that works for you and sticking to it.

How Do My Backstroke Times Compare to Others?

Many people who embark on an athletic journey want to know where they stand in comparison to other athletes. Because swimming is so quantifiable, it particularly lends itself to those comparisons.

To help you get a better understanding of how your times compare to others, here are several levels of performance. By seeing a range, you can determine how you want to define how you're progressing.

USMS Event Results

Finally, you can search for up to the top 500 times in your age group by year to see where you might stand. This helps you see the true range of ability levels for those who compete.

Event Results

USMS Top 10

Here you can search for the top 10 times for your age group by year to see what it would take to be in the top 10. The top 10 swimmers represent the pinnacle of what members of U.S. Masters Swimming can do.

Top Ten

USMS Records

Here you can find the times for the fastest U.S. Masters Swimming members ever. Again, these are aspirational times to help you get an understanding of what’s possible. Just search based upon your sex and age and the desired course.

USMS Records

World Records

It starts at the top with the fastest performances of all time from across the world. These are the best swims in history. This gives you a great sense of what’s possible.

Long Course Meters

Short Course Meters