How To Swim Using Backstroke

Hi I'm Paul, this is Theo from SwimmingLessonsLondon.co.uk.


We're going to give you a few tips on swimming today. You're more than welcome to contact us for any more information or to book a session. Thank you.

And today we're going to look at backstroke technique. First I'm going to show you some good techniques followed by some teaching points and drills that you can do to improve your own. Now with the backstroke the leg kick is almost identical to the front crawl, up and down from the hip.

You'll see that similarity between the two strokes, the major difference being, were now lying back in the water instead of face down. Meaning, the breathing is a lot easier for beginners. Notice how the arms pass the ear.

It's the little finger that enters the water first. So have a look at that now in the arms. You'll see brushing the ear with the bicep each time.

Entering the little finger, the thumb exits the water at the hip. Another key thing to remember when you're doing backstroke is to make sure your arm is slightly bent at the elbow when pulling to the hip. A common mistake is that people use a straight arm pull.

So brush the ear, slightly bent arm, coming out thumb first at the hips. Leg kick and relax just like front crawl. So here we see Theo doing leg kick drill only.

His hands by his hips, he keeps his stomach up, his hips high, and he tries to make just a little bit of white water at the surface of the water. You don't want the feet coming too far out. On the way back you can do a slightly different version of that drill with his arms stretched out above his head in glide position.

This is slightly more advanced. It'll give you a good idea of the full range of the arms. So now were doing the leg kick drill with arms catching up at hip.

Meaning that you do one arm at a time, full rotation to the hip before the other arm goes. This makes it easier to focus on each individual arm quality. On the next length the arms are gonna be working a bit more independently, almost in opposites.

And in this way we achieve more speed. And so there were some techniques from Theo on the backstroke and a couple of drills to improve your technique.

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