breaststroke

Vacation time is in full swing in the northern hemisphere. For many of us, being beachside or poolside gets us yearning for a dip, a splash, and a swim. And I’m guessing that many of us have been mesmerized and inspired by watching the Olympic pool athletes in action. 

Swimming can be fun for all ages and abilities—and healthy posture keeps it back pain free. Image from Unsplash

In this blog post we’ll discuss breaststroke, which happens to be my favorite way of swimming, and how healthy posture enables you to swim breaststroke better, and avoid the neck and back aches that some people experience after. 

Swimming starts with the inner corset

Have you ever wondered why some swimmers manage to move so well through the water? Here are some things they are likely doing: 

• They are activating their inner corset strongly. This enables the trunk and spine to maintain its alignment in an aquadynamic position, reducing drag.
• Their limb movements originate from the large trunk muscles of the back, chest, psoas, and gluteal muscles, which produce the most power. 
• These two things enable an efficient, coordinated, smooth technique that avoids “flailing” in various directions and dissipating energy. 

There are many preferred variations with arm and leg angles, hand and finger positions, cadence, and so on. But these are details compared with the all-important strong inner corset. Once your torso has lost its structural integrity, any movement you generate will work partially against you, rather than contribute to propulsion.

We need our inner corset in many activities to prevent distortions of the spine. Maintaining a straight course walking in the pool takes a strongly activated inner corset and is excellent prep for swimming.

The clue’s in the name

The name “breaststroke” is a good descriptor for the chest-opening benefits of this stroke. Done well, breaststroke can be a great antidote to many aspects of modern life that encourage us into stooped posture, rounding our shoulders, collapsing our chest, and breathing into our belly. As the hands and arms pull back, most of the muscle power behind that action comes from the upper back and rhomboids contracting to draw the shoulders back. We simultaneously open the ribcage and chest to fill the lungs.

How to breathe in but not sway your back

Breaststroke has an advantage over crawl in that breathing in is relatively easy while your head is well above the waterline. If, however, the lifting of the upper body happens in the upper lumbar spine rather than at L5-S1, the result is likely to be an achy neck and/or low back. 

Professional or elite breaststroke swimmers have the strength and thrust to heave a large part of their upper body up out of the water, bending back exclusively at L5-S1; the upper lumbar spine and neck then have minimal need to extend back, if at all.

Olympic Gold Medalist Adam Peaty maintains a largely straight spine throughout most of his stroke. Image from Wikimedia

Cecily Frederick, a teacher of the Gokhale Method for many years, does a back dive with a healthy L5-S1 backbend—her upper lumbar area through to her head remains aligned straight. 

Whatever your level of swimming, it is important when swimming breaststroke to counter any habit of lifting and swaying from the upper lumbar spine. The solution to this habit is to learn to engage the rib anchor muscles very strongly; with your rib anchor in place, you can learn to cultivate a healthy J-shaped spine rather than an S-shaped spine. You can learn more about spine shape here.

The posture benefits of the exhale phase

During the exhale phase the body settles horizontally into the water. This brings the great advantage of being able to rest, recover, and prepare the limbs for the next stroke. Part of this will include gliding through the water, which is conducive to recruiting the inner corset to steady and slenderize you. It offers a solid platform from which to launch the next stroke.

Practice floating or gliding through the water in a face-down, horizontal position. Then apply this to your stroke. Image from Pexels

If you don’t have the confidence to swim with your head in the water, consider gradually building familiarity with this skill with a friend or sympathetic swimming coach. Most people find it well worth mastering and, approached in the right way, much more enjoyable and comfortable. Wear goggles so that you can still see. Snorkels and full-face snorkels can be a useful measure for getting used to being face down in the water and experiencing the advantages of swimming in a horizontal position. 

Snorkeling is a great way to get used to swimming in a face-down position with a long, more relaxed neck. Image from Unsplash

Hips and kicks

If your hips are very stiff, then you will benefit from breaststroke’s built-in opportunity to gradually increase your range of motion and muscular strength without loading the hip joint. 

While it’s impressive to watch someone kicking wide with strong, flexible hips, it is not necessary, or even optimal, to go very wide with the legs. Watching a bird’s eye view of modern Olympic breaststrokers, you may be surprised by the narrowness of their kick. A narrower kick turns out to be more explosive and minimizes drag. Adam Peaty, the fastest breaststroker on the planet, estimates that up to 70% of his speed is generated by this narrow kick.  

A narrow kick also makes breaststroke more accessible, especially for people with a limited range of motion in one or both hips. To narrow your kick, hold a pull buoy or two between the thighs as you swim. This leg arrangement also helps you to pattern healthy external rotation in your hips, legs, and feet, so you have a carry-over benefit for your land-based posture too!

A narrowed breaststroke kick has the advantages of speed, power, and developing external rotation in the legs. These young swimmers are training with a pull buoy.

If you have a pelvic rotation and/or SI joint instability, you may be prone to difficulties when attempting a wider kick; you are more likely to kick asymmetrically (called a screw kick), which is inefficient, and possibly risks injury. A narrow kick reduces these complications.

Legs externally rotated, a J-shaped spine, shoulders posterior, and an anchored rib cage, are not just tips for swimmers. These healthy posture principles are taught in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, and our Gokhale Exercise program. Our students often report how much their swimming improves simply by applying these techniques.

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, in and out of the pool, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

August is peak holiday time across the northern hemisphere, and many of us who live here will find ourselves poolside, or even better, in it!

Being in water has the natural advantage of lifting weight off the joints while providing gentle resistance training. Aching backs or knees can find relief from compression in the natural buoyancy that water provides. This has made pool exercises a popular prescription with physical therapists over many years, especially for post-operative or post-injury rehabilitation. 

On land, to relieve pain and compression, people usually use elaborate measures like inversion tables, traction units, or going to outer space! In the Gokhale Method we provide decompression for the lower back relatively simply with the Stretchsit® Cushion or the nubs on our Gokhale™Pain-Free Chair. But stepping into water is the simplest of all, giving you freedom of movement and the ability to strengthen yourself simultaneously.

Pool exercise also provides a fun and refreshing environment for exercise in summer heat waves! Wikimedia

This blog post gives you three ways to harness the unique benefits of being in water to practice and develop healthier posture. These exercises are challenging enough to do as a stand-alone workout or as a way to prime your swim session.

Healthy posture habits honed in water will benefit your daily life on land, as well as giving you greater stability and power for your swimming or other sports. 

For safety and best results, I recommend that you progress the session in the order given here, starting with Exercise 1 and, once you are familiar with it, move on to Exercise 2 and finally add Exercise 3. 

1. Stabilize your spine by using your inner corset

You will use a natural brace of muscles as you walk across the pool. It will give you the stability you need to cut through the resistance of the water without wobbling and threatening the alignment of your spine. 

Imagine you are getting into ice cold water. Feel how all the muscles around your middle can contract and make you more slender. You want to work hard enough to feel this from deep in the pelvis all the way up to your rib cage. You want to feel the muscular engagement all the way around your mid torso, like a tightly laced corset. 

The muscles of the inner corset include the deep intrinsic back muscles, the abdominis transversus, and the obliques. 

Gokhale Method teacher Eric Fernandez shows how engaging the inner corset draws the abdomen in and makes the torso slender.

This is one way of recruiting your “inner corset," which will help stabilize your spine as you walk and is key to swimming with a more streamlined, efficient stroke. We teach this technique and others in more detail in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, plus our Gokhale Exercise program. You can read more about your inner corset here.

2. Headload to lengthen your neck and to find deep spinal support

In industrialized cultures we have an epidemic of forward head carriage, putting enormous strain on the neck and structures throughout the back. Finding healthy alignment through your neck, combined with the inner corset, helps your whole spine to support itself well. Resting even a modest additional weight on the head can help us to find our vertical axis and stand tall. This is the reason I developed the Gokhale™ Head Cushion. 

Headloading encourages recruitment of the deepest muscles of the inner corset and the neck, especially the longus colli at the front of the spine. 

In the pool I suggest you use what you have at hand—your hands! Rest them on your head and push up against them with your head. Keep your nose and chin angled downward. Proceed very gently if you have neck issues. You can gradually build up the intensity over a number of sessions. 

Gokhale Method teacher Clare Chapman headloading in the pool using the weight of hands and arms. Create space between your shoulders and your ears—keep your shoulders down as your neck grows tall. 

Establishing healthy length in your neck will help you to retain a straighter, more spacious alignment while swimming, especially in breaststroke where people tend to crane their necks to hold their heads above water. Consider training to swim with your head in the water, if you do not do this already, which will enable a much healthier alignment of your torso, neck, and head.

Especially when you raise your arms, you may need to use your rib anchor muscles to prevent your back from swaying.

3. Power up your walking using your feet and glutes

Many of us compromise our walking by overusing our quads and hip flexors (psoas muscle) and underusing our glutes. We predominantly reach our front leg forward in our strides, instead of generating propulsion from the rear leg with our glutes and foot muscles. 

Our ancestors and many people living in more traditional or nonindustrialized societies—where joint and back pain are rare—walk using their glute and foot muscles more than we typically do.

As you walk in the pool, make each step a rep. Each step wants to progress through a pose that includes a straight back leg and a bent front knee. As each leg goes back behind you in turn, squeeze your buttock muscles on that side. Engage the upper outer quadrant of your glute pack. This is not the kind of glute squeeze that clenches your lower butt cheeks together and tucks your pelvis. 

Gokhale Method Alumna Christine Andrew working hard to achieve healthy walking form in the buoyancy and resistance of water.

Grab the floor of the pool with the whole sole of your foot, and then push off from your toes. Focus on maintaining the convex foot shape as you do this. Propel to glide forward, not bounce upward.

Eric actively grabs the floor of the pool with each foot to pull the body forward and then push back.

Putting it all together: Aim to keep healthy form and walk as smoothly as you can through the water. This develops both healthy length and muscle power in the right places.

If you notice your back arches back as you walk, take smaller steps and lean more forward until you master the art of keeping your spine stable with the rib anchor and inner corset techniques. Enjoy!

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like to know which posture changes will help you be pain-free and functional, schedule an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .