I know their are many factors why some people are freestylers or breastrokers or flyers or backstrokers. Body type is one factor and interest is another. I wonder about the influence of first coaches as a kid, my first coach ran a swim school and she was on the Dutch National team in the early 1940's. She was a breastroker and seem to emphisized the kick in the stroke.So she practice the kick with me and of course breastroke was one of my beststrokes during the age group period and in masters its my best stroke as an adult when I returned in my 40's. So does anyone else agree that first coaches in either age-group or novice swimming or masters swimming influences the strokes we tend to be better at.
Former Member
Early coaching and instruction can have a major influence on what strokes you're best at, though it is certainly possible to overcome that influence.
The first thing every swimmer needs to learn is proper stroke technique. All the training and conditioning in the world is never, ultimately, going to overcome an inefficient stroke. The trouble is that the more training and conditioning you do with bad technique, the more engrained that bad technique is going to become, and the harder it will be to replace it with good, efficient stroke technique. Also, when you succeed in replacing bad technique with good technique, you may find that you're suddenly having to rely on muscles that you've never developed before, so you end up, in some degree, starting all over with your conditioning.
So if you have a coach who's a champion breaststroker, you're likely to have a head start over another swimmer whose coach never quite got the hang of breaststroke. The other swimmer can eventually overcome his handicap if he gets hooked up with a coach who can teach him good breaststroke technique--and if he's willing to put in a lot of hours of training on a stroke at which he isn't really excelling, and put up with a lot of discouragement!
This is why I got really incensed awhile back when a woman who is a professional swim instructor said that she teaches kids stroke technique that she knows to be faulty and inefficient because "it's easier for them to learn", adding that they can learn proper stroke technique later if they decide to swim competitively. She seemed to have no comprehension of how many hours of hard, discouraging training her students were going to have to endure to unlearn the faulty techniques she was teaching them!
Bob
