Breaststroke Timing: The Complete Guide

Why Timing Is Important in Breaststroke

Proper timing is critical for swimming breaststroke well. A perfect pull and a perfect kick can't overcome bad timing.

Swimming breaststroke with proper timing can be difficult, but it's quite simple. If you can time your arms and legs well, the stroke tends to fall into place nicely. What makes that difficult to do is that you must alternate your arms and legs, and alternate fast and slow movements with your arms and legs.

One of the challenges is that although your body position, pull, and kick don't necessarily change when you go faster, your timing absolutely does. If you try to swim a 50 breaststroke with the timing you use for a 200 breaststroke, you're not going to swim as fast as you otherwise could. And if you try to swim a 200 breaststroke like a 50 breaststroke, you're going to get very tired very fast. Great timing is difficult to perfect because it changes based upon how fast and how long you're swimming.

Swimming with proper timing also requires your entire body. A bad pull, kick, or body position affects your timing. All your muscles must work at full capacity to swim with great timing.

The Key to Breaststroke Timing

Breaststroke is a unique stroke because the recoveries of your arms and legs create a lot of drag. In the other strokes, your arms recover over the surface of the water, where there is little resistance. In breaststroke, your arms recover under or through the water. That creates a ton of resistance and a ton of drag, which slows you down big time. The same thing happens with your legs. By recovering your legs forward, you create a lot of resistance with the fronts of your thighs.

Swimming fast isn't just about how you perform your pull and kick; when you take your pull and kick is important. Taking your pull while recovering your legs slows you down when you're trying to speed up. The same thing happens when you take your kick while recovering your arms.

Instead, pull while your legs are in streamlined position right after your kick and right before you start to recover your legs, and kick right after you recover your arms and right before your pull. This allows you to create as much propulsion as possible while facing as little resistance as possible. And if you recover your arms and legs fast, you can minimize the amount of time you spend not creating propulsion.

The Role Your Arms Play in Breaststroke Timing

Many breaststrokers create a lot of their speed with their kick. If you're a breaststroker, you know how important your kick is.

Because the kick is so important, do everything possible to maximize the effectiveness of your kick. The first step is to do everything you can to ensure that your kick is strong and powerful. The second is to focus on when you kick and what you're doing with your arms when you kick.

Your kick creates a lot of propulsion, but the amount of propulsion and resistance you create determines how fast you go. If you have a powerful kick but do it when your body isn't in streamline, you won't get as much speed as you could because of the resistance you create with your body. Ideally, you'll bring your legs to your hips as your arms recover forward so that the instant your arms get back into streamlined position, you're in the perfect position to kick hard. This ensures that your kick creates as much speed as possible.

Recovering your arms quickly not only reduces the amount of time you spend in poorly aligned positions but also allows you to get into a position in which your kick generates a lot more speed. The quicker you can get back into alignment, the sooner you can deliver a powerful kick that helps you go fast.

The Role Your Legs Play in Breaststroke Timing

During your pull, your lower body should be as streamlined as possible. This ensures that you're creating as much speed as possible with each pull. As soon as your arms finish their pull, recover your legs.

Recovering your legs by bringing them up fast is critical for effective timing. The faster you can move your legs up into the set-up of your kick, the longer you can leave them in streamlined position behind your body while you pull without disrupting your timing. That means you can get more out of each pull because your body is still streamlined. That means more speed for the same effort.

If you're not a strong breaststroke kicker, you need to get as much out of your pull as possible. The more you can keep your legs streamlined, the better. And the faster you can move your legs through your kick, the sooner you can execute it and get back to your next pull.

More so than with your arms, your kick should have periods of very fast movement followed by periods of relaxed patience. During your pull, your legs are waiting, ready to spring into action with a fast recovery and powerful kick. This combination of patience and recovery is key for effective timing, so be patient and aggressive at the right times.

The Importance of Fast Arm and Leg Recoveries for Your Breaststroke Timing

Proper and speedy arm and leg recoveries are important because they minimize the amount of resistance swimmers experience. Recoveries create a lot of drag because your limbs are moving forward underwater. The less time that takes, the better.

Fast recoveries are also key for effective timing. If your recoveries are slow, you'll experience one of two outcomes, both of which lead to slow swimming:

• You'll have to start your next pull or kick when your body is still poorly aligned. That means you'll get a lot less speed than you wanted.
• You'll have to wait longer to start your next kick or pull. Although this prevents the first problem, your whole stroke now takes more time, which means slower swimming.

By recovering your limbs fast, you can time your stroke effectively, getting the most out of each pull and kick. You also allow yourself to swim at the high stroke rates that generate a lot of speed. If your recoveries aren't aggressive, you may find yourself unable to execute one or both skills, leading to slower swimming.

Different aspects of breaststroke allow each part of the stroke to be more effective but also work together to improve performance. In this case, not only do faster arm and leg recoveries make your pull and kick more effective, but they allow your whole stroke to flow seamlessly.

This is one reason breaststroke can be so difficult. Everything must work, or nothing seems to work!

How Breaststroke Timing Changes While Swimming Fast

You've likely seen some fast breaststrokers swim with really high stroke rates when they're trying to sprint. And you may have tried to replicate their skills with less than spectacular results.

If so, you've learned that the trick is not just to move your limbs fast but to continue to do so with excellent timing—that's the key skill. And although the principles of effective breaststroke timing don't change at high speeds, how you perform these skills changes.

When you swim slowly, you can be more patient between pulls and kicks. Your stroke rate slows down, which means you have more time to position your arms and legs without creating unnecessary resistance. In contrast, the reason breaststroke can be challenging to swim at high stroke rates is that there's very little room for error. Begin your pull as soon as you complete your kick and kick once your arms and head (after you take your breath) have recovered.

You also must recover your arms and legs very quickly to be in the right position. What's hard enough when you're fresh becomes even harder when you start to get tired.

If your timing is too slow, you waste precious time. If your timing is too aggressive, you'll start overlapping your arms and legs, which is like putting on the brakes. You must get it just right, which is hard to do when your limbs are moving fast. By understanding the challenges you face, you're much better prepared to get it right and to troubleshoot it if you get it wrong.

Common Breaststroke Timing Mistakes

There are three key breaststroke timing mistakes:

• Kicking too early. Many swimmers start to bring their legs forward during their pull. This is like trying to stop and go at the same time. It makes your pull a lot less effective. To make matters worse, when you try to kick, you're recovering your arms forward, which is also like trying to stop and go at the same time. This error can resemble the playing of an accordion—your arms and legs are coming into your body and then moving away from your body.
• Pulling immediately. Swimmers sometimes begin to pull as soon as their hands extend forward and prior to when they finish their kick. When this happens, they expose themselves to more resistance, especially if they start to rise at all before their kick is completed. While you're kicking, you want to be as streamlined as possible with your upper body.
• Slow arm and leg recoveries. If you can avoid slow arm and legs recoveries, you're less likely to make either of the two previous mistakes. If you recover your arms and legs slowly, you'll have less time to patiently wait for your kick and pull to be performed, respectively. Alternatively, you may find that you must rush the set-up of your pull or kick, resulting in less propulsion. Both outcomes slow you down.