How To Swim A Faster 50 Breaststroke

Hi, Brenton Ford here. Welcome to another effortless swimming dot com weekly update in this week’s video I want to talk a bit about breaststroke because on the weekend one of the simmers that I coach Stuart Moffitt He broke the world record for the 50 breaststroke short course in the 50 to 54 years age group So the world record was 30.61 Stu went 30.48 with a great swim And I want to talk about a couple of the things that we did to help him get down to 30.48 Because a few weeks beforehand. We had our state short course here and he went a 31.4 So we had about a second to drop to drop off In a couple of weeks time So these are some of the things that we worked on to help you get down to that 30.48 Now going to more depth and more detail in swimproof.com, which is our online coaching forum So if you remember there you can log in and go and check that out But here’s some of the main things that we did The first one was the dive. So previously Stu was diving and angling out

So he was diving out Forward and then angling his body down a bit too much So with the new starting blocks where you’ve got a track pad you can do more of a start a bit like a runner can the most Efficient way to dive into the water or the fastest way is to dive and pretty much go straight into the water Rather than diving out and then angling down. So the way that we Changed Stu’s start was to move the track pad from level four to level three So it meant his legs were a little bit closer together But this worked for Stu now it might not work for you depends on your flexibility Your height what kind of start you’ve got all those sorts of things But with Stu we move the track pad from four to three and that helped him improve his angle into the water The second thing we want to make sure that his legs were following his body into the water because a few times His legs went following his body all the way in which just meant that he wasn’t

Quite as streamlined as he entered the water which slowed him down And he wasn’t getting the distance off the start that he was aiming for now with the distance off the start we want we’re aiming to get as close to 15 meters as we could and The way we had to do that was to keep a bit more depth After the split pull in order to get that extra length So he was coming up a little bit shallow After his split pull so his body was quite close to the surface after the split pull So he had to keep a little bit of extra depth and the way we did that was by Applying a bit of pressure sort of pushing down with his chest in order to keep that that depth as he did Split pull so if you push down on your chest just a little bit Then that will help you keep a little bit deeper off that split pull and that may that made stew get out to about 13 meters with his dive and meant he was sort of one to one and a half strokes to the 15 meter mark which was

Pretty good for him. So that was about the ideal length off the start that we’re aiming for now with his stroke We needed to get a little bit more height with his put with his body and Because Stu’s a strong guy he can muscle his way through the water But in order to reduce the resistance that his body’s creating we had to get a little bit higher out of the water So he practices a couple of drills some of those drills are in the effortless breaststroke program So if you’ve got that some of the drills are in there But we just had to work on getting a little bit higher out of the water rather than just swim flat and muscling His way through the water and the other thing was to make sure that when he did come up with his pool That his head was in line with his upper body because if you’re looking up and you’re moving your head up and It’s not in line with the upper half of your body Then that’s not going to be as efficient as possible because with breaststroke

You want to keep your head in line with the upper body So he made sure that that was a focus when he was swimming his breaststroke The next thing was the turn so at state short course a couple of weeks beforehand He missed time the turn a bit So he was probably half a stroke out from the wall at his turn So just many had to take an extra little stroke or he had to glide to get to the wall So ideally we want to finish on a full stroke so that we can hit the wall and come straight back out So one of the ways I like to think of doing the turn is when you get to the five meter mark As best as you can get a sense of where you are so that you can shorten or lengthen your strokes So that you hit the wall on a full stroke So use those flags to get a sense of where you are and what you need to do for your stroke Do you need to shorten them or lengthen them in order to finish on a full stroke into the wall? Now with the turn we want to make sure it was a really fast and tight turn

So when you hit the wall, you don’t want to bring your arm all the way around So that it’s swinging around and it’s a slow turn you want to make it fast So once you hit the wall bring one of your arms back close to your ribs Bring the other hand around kind of like you’re answering the phone and you want to make it a really sort of small movement You don’t want to swing your arm around so you want to make it small and tight and that was one of the focuses That was one of the focuses with the we’ve strewn term and then we just wanted to get a good split pull Off that turn and then come home strong. So when you’re doing a 50 You need to nail that start you need to know that turn if it’s short course because it’s such a quick race It’s such a short event that the start and the turn Crucial for a good swim. So that’s that were that some of the main focuses that we had So I have gone into more detail in swimproof.com and talked about some of the extra things that we did

So you can log in there check that check that out But if you’re a breaststroker or you do breaststroke in some of your races Hopefully this has helped with some of the things that you can focus on in your training and you can find Some things to work on to bring your time down You might even be able to bring it down more than a second because Stu’s at the top end of the field bringing it down to second is a Big jump in time and we’re able to do that by focusing on some of the main Parts of his 50 breaststroke. So if you’re currently swimming a 45 few breaststroke You might be able to bring it down even more by focusing on some of these things So I hope you have a great week and I will see you next week