Which stroke easiest to learn, which easiest to swim WELL?

I predict that everyone will answer with their favorite stroke. :angel:

I prefer the breaststroke, but I was very surprised how easy it was to learn the backstroke.It took me a lot longer to learn the correct breaststroke technique, but now that I know what to do I feel it takes more effort to swim back.

2fish&1whale, you are almost the exact opposite of me!:chug:

Don't pigeon hole yourself. I've been back 3 years and am a breaststroker before any other stroke, but I do Free events and Fly too...though they're not as good. Nawww, I'm just pigeon hole-ing myself for this year and hope to add fly into the mix next year. I say "hope", because I'm being cautious with my shoulders after a nasty case of bilateral thoracic outlet syndrome and major surgery on my left shoulder (work injury before I got back into swimming). If my shoulders hold up, I would also like to swim IM. For now, though, my 100IM in practice is slower than my 100 breaststroke! :afraid:

I am a breaststroker, but I think that for the majority, freestyle is the easiest to learn. Even through breaststroke comes easy to me, when I taught summer league swimming to the youngest age group as a high schooler, I found that the easiest stroke for me was the hardest to teach, at least to young children. I think the easiest for people to learn is freestyle.

I am a breaststroker, but I think that for the majority, freestyle is the easiest to learn. Even through breaststroke comes easy to me, when I taught summer league swimming to the youngest age group as a high schooler, I found that the easiest stroke for me was the hardest to teach, at least to young children. I think the easiest for people to learn is freestyle. Same here. As a kid, I was one of those breaststrokers who snuck breaststroke kicks in to my freestyle kicking whenever the coach wasn't looking. My summer league team has a group of about 50 7-10 yr. old beginners right now. Our introduction to breaststroke has proven to be the most challenging. We recently had 4 coaches in the water turning feet outward and two on deck explaining at practice. Only a few kids could actually do a legal kick by the end of practice. There's just something about turning your feet outward and kicking back and together at the same time that takes a looong time for some kids to get right. Add not pulling down past your waist and timing everything correctly and you have a very difficult stroke to teach to many.

I didn't start competing until high school, but as soon as my coach saw my breaststroke, I was assigned to the breaststroke lane. :bliss:She was so desperate to fill the breaststroke spots at the meets, she never even looked at my other strokes during try-outs! Now, 31 years later, I'm back into competitive swimming and only enterend in breaststroke events. :D

Do you agree that the stroke that was the easiest (or first) for you to learn may well not be the stroke that you eventually swim the best? Backstroke is my best stroke now but when I first started swimming I was quite poor at it, my dad said it looked like I was swimming while sitting in a chair. It took a couple years before it clicked. Butterfly came very easily to me, even in my first summer-league season as a child and it was love at first stroke. My summer-league coach had to tell me to stop swimming only fly during the warmup. I remained a butterflyer (and backstroker) through college.

I've had kids that are naturals at all of strokes - some free, some fly, some back and some ***. *** is the hardest to teach to those for whom it is not a natural easy stroke. I learned all the strokes in swimming lessons and was strongest at free and *** when starting swim team. I learned fly fairly quickly and some argue that I have never learned back.

Do you agree that the stroke that was the easiest (or first) for you to learn may well not be the stroke that you eventually swim the best? So which stroke was the easiest for you learn? Which do you find easiest to swim to near perfection? I learned breaststroke the first but have never worked on improving it--unlike the other strokes, it doesn't seem to be so complicated. Freestyle seems to have infinite room for improvement? My experience is similar. As a 9-10 age-grouper, I learned breaststroke most easily and was most competitive in it, probably because so few of the other kids could do it legally. At junior-high age, my breaststroke was less strong in comparison to the other kids my age, but was still good enough to make my IM competitive. By the time I got to HS, however, my breaststroke had slipped even more. Today is it by far my least competitive stroke. This may be a body structure issue. I am naturally very thin and don't seem to easily grow the kind of bulky fast-twitch muscle that seems to be a prerequisite for a competitive breaststroke. That doesn't matter for a boy at 10 years old, but it sure does after puberty.