Swimming Breaststroke: How to Properly Move and Position Your Head and Body

While swimming breaststroke, it is important to properly position your head and body to avoid neck injuries. It also allows you to swim with good technique and maximum efficiency.

Head position & Movement

I often see occasional swimmers swim with their head above the water all the time. This is fine if you swim seldom, need to orient yourself in open water or don't have swimming goggles at hand.

However, otherwise, you should learn to put your head under the water between inhales for the following reasons:

  • Swimming with your head above the water all the time strains your neck because you typically extend your chin forward to keep water out of your face.
  • If you swim with your head out of the water, the position of your body in the water isn't streamlined at all and you'll either swim more slowly than possible or swim harder than necessary to obtain a correct speed.

Now, let's imagine that you do submerge your head while swiming breaststroke. In that case, another error to avoid is looking at the end of the pool when you are about to inhale or during the inhale.

Again, if you do this, you are most likely extending your chin forward and straining your neck. Now imagine doing this hundreds or thousands of times each week for a few years. Now I hope you see how this can become a problem.

So, ideally, here's what happens to your head during one cycle of swimming breaststroke:

  1. You should always keep your head aligned with the spine.
  2. While your arms pull back then sweep in, your head emerges from the water with your shoulders and chest, but stays aligned with the spine. 
  3. At the highest point out of the water, your head is still aligned, and you are looking down and between two and three feet in front of you. You shouldn't be looking towards the end of the pool.
  4. When your arms extend to the front and your shoulders and chest drop back into the water, your head simply follows along.
  5. You then look straight down during the subsequent breaststroke kick and glide phases.

Body position & movement

While swimming breaststroke, if you do put your head in the water between inhales, your body will always alternate between two positions:

  1. A long phase where your body is horizontal and as streamlined as possible.
  2. A short phase where you inhale and your body is more oblique. This creates more drag.

Part of becoming efficient in breaststroke is finding the right trade-off between the time spent in each position. You should try to get into the streamline position as fast as possible after the inhale and then keep that horizontal position for as long as possible, but not for so long that you come to a halt.

Now that this has been explained, here's how your body should be positioned during the breaststroke's cycle:

  1. Your body is flat in the water while you glide and while you start to pull with your arms.
  2. Your shoulders and chest rise and your hips drop when your arms sweep in and are brought back together. That's also when you recover your legs and breathe in.
  3. Your shoulders and chest drop back in the water and your hips rise to the surface while you extend your arms to the front. That's also when your legs start to kick out and backwards.
  4. Your body is again completely horizontal, your legs continue to extend and after this the glide phase starts again.

This alternation between a horizontal position and a more oblique position is not unlike the kind of body movement you can observe during the body undulation of the butterfly stroke.

Conclusion

We have now have seen how you should position your head and body while swimming breaststroke. If you don't do it already, get into the habit of submerging your head after the inhale.

And make sure you get a pair of swim goggles and maybe a nose clip if you want to avoid water getting into your eyes and nose. Those are really inexpensive items and will last for a long time.

Have fun!

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