Breaststroke Technique Question--What to do with the Hands

if you can't swim breastroke perhaps the best thing to do with your hands is pray especially if you are swimming an IM copy what the best does www.youtube.com/results actually drop by http://www.breaststroke.info and you'll find many answers Hi all, I'm new back into swimming after taking the last 14 or so years "off". When I was last swimming, the wave style breastroke was really just coming into its own and I never fully got it down. I'm trying to train it now but I have a question--are people still pulling their hands out of the water with each stroke? These seems like a terrible waste of effort if you're just going to push back down into a streamline... Thanks for your thoughts! Keith

if you can't swim breastroke perhaps the best thing to do with your hands is pray especially if you are swimming an IM copy what the best does www.youtube.com/results actually drop by http://www.breaststroke.info and you'll find many answers Uh.... Thanks? I CAN swim breaststroke. I want to know what the current views are on technique. I've been to both sites and still can't really tell (the camera's too far away and the video quality is too poor).

I didn't think you could bring your hands out of the water on ***, but maybe I'm mistaken?

Let's not forget Allen Stark and Jim Clemmons! Seems like I see Hansen with his hands skimming above the water on the recovery. I'd be interested in what the breaststrokers have to say about the motion of the underwater pull, as well. I feel like my hands are slipping water.

Let's not forget Allen Stark and Jim Clemmons! Seems like I see Hansen with his hands skimming above the water on the recovery. I'd be interested in what the breaststrokers have to say about the motion of the underwater pull, as well. I feel like my hands are slipping water. Hard to argue with the world record holder, but it seems to me like skimming the water would create resistance... Why not keep them just below the surface? What am I missing? Thanks for all of the responses so far!

Talk to Jeff Commings. He is the *** guru around here. I suspect he will chime in before too long.

You can on the recovery. From what I've seen, it doesn't seem like many people are bringing their arms all the way out of the water. What does seem to be happening is that a combination of the position of the arms and the lunge creates a situation in which the arms are above the water, and then as a resulting of lunging forward/down the arms naturally start to go under the water about halfway through the recovery. SCY said though, Jeff Commings is the true guru

Allen, Nadine, Knelson and Jeff--thanks very much for your thoughts! I think I need to spend some time doing dolphin kick breaststroke to get the wave motion down. I'll probably end up more like Jeff and stay mostly below the water but it'll be a worthwhile experiment. Also, I agree with Jeff that watching the best and trying to copy them (especially in breaststroke) is not necessarily a good idea. They may have quirks that work for them (or their body type) that aren't universal. And of the four strokes, breaststroke definitely seems to be the one with the most variety in technique.

Just for the record, it's breaststroke, not breastroke. I hate to be the spelling police, but I think we should at least get the spellings of the four strokes correct :)

Just for the record, it's breaststroke, not breastroke. I hate to be the spelling police, but I think we should at least get the spellings of the four strokes correct :) I just swim it--I don't spell it! Thanks for correcting me! :p (I went back and fixed all of my posts too!)