Swim class: Breast stroke

Today, we learned the breast stroke. The teacher broke it down into stages. First was the legs.

We used a kickboard and did legs only. The motion is up, out, and in. Your legs are together with your toes pointed. Bend your knees up and out with your feet together and your feet flexed and facing out. It's like you're pigeon-toed in the water, your feet should face away from each other. Then you kick out in a wide circular motion, keeping the feet flexed. You want to whip your legs as hard as you can. You end up with your legs straight and your toes pointed again.

For the arms, we used pull-bouys between out legs to take them out of the picture. The arm motion is up, out, and together. She made the analogy of drawing a pizza and cutting it in half. Your arms go out in front of you with your face down in the water (this is the "glide"), then you move your arms out in a circle, but not so wide that they go past your belly-button. Near the end of the stroke, you pull your elbows in. Your hands meet, then your arms meet as you move them up to the glide again.

For both the arm part and the leg part, she had us do a two-second glide. So it was kick-glide or stroke-glide. The idea is that when the two parts go together, one half of your body is working at a time. She said "stroke-breath, kick-glide" So while you're doing your stroke, you breathe (not kicking), when you hit the top of the stroke with your arms out in front and your face-down, that's when you kick. So it's really stroke, kick, stroke, kick, not both at once.