Career Transition Assistance. As you raise each arm, rotate your shoulder upwards. Kick off with your legs as you squeeze your arms to your ears and make a "point" with your hands. Most people have a hard time getting their hips to float on the surface of the water, so they sink down a little below the surface. Count your strokes from the flags. When your hand is under the water pulling you forward, rotate it so your palm is facing your feet. Backstroke technique isn’t too hard to master and can be learned relatively quickly. If you find it hard to remain buoyant enough to float easily on your back then use a light kick to help stabilize you. That’s because it helps develop your feel for the water, and also adds some variety into your training. It was the second stroke to be swum in competitions after the front crawl. Ready to swim your best backstroke ever? Stay flat out. Kick. Think of your legs as battle ropes, moving fluidly up and down. During this phase, the whole arm moves backward, upward and inward as a unit. Elements of Perfect Backstroke. To do this, keep your legs together and kick with both at once. The easiest, and arguably most practical stroke to introduce into your daily swim routine is the backstroke. Like all competitive strokes, the start is the fastest part of a swimmer’s race, which requires the swimmer to explode off the block with great technique and power. Reply. Help for parents with kids under 6. A great first step in learning how to do backstroke is to just learn to float on your back to get comfortable with the body position. Like breaststroke, the survival backstroke experiences considerable frontal resistance due to the kicking action. When your arm hits the water, bring it down and scull outward to propel yourself forward. This motion might feel a bit awkward at first, but keep practising it, and it will soon feel natural. Push off the Wall Before doing a complete backstroke start, begin by pushing off the wall. When you're doing the backstroke, you want your body to lay as flat on the surface of the water as possible. Since earning her first professional title in 2011, Lidbury has become a podium regular on the IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 circuits, with a collection of IRONMAN 70.3 wins and two top-ten finishes in the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship. 3 Backstroke Sets with Olympic Champion Lenny Krayzelburg. To that end, it’s essentially freestyle on your back, as it involves the same flutter kick and also a long axis stroke, meaning you rotate your body along the long axis of your spine. The feet should stay in the shadow of the swimmer’s body and the knees should not break the water surface. I can’t guarantee how long it will last. When you pass the flags that are towards the end of the pool you can turn onto your stomach and start swimming the front crawl. But your backstroke flutter kick should go farther up and down than your freestyle flutter kick. This part of the start is one of the most important aspects. We know ads can be annoying, but they’re what allow us to make all of wikiHow available for free. Here are three backstroke sets that Krayzelburg did on his way to becoming a backstroke legend. If you don’t have a good push-off, everything else will fall apart. ", https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/backstroke-swimming.html, https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/backstroke.html, http://www.swimming.org/masters/improving-your-backstroke-technique/, https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/swimming-backstroke.html, https://www.enjoy-swimming.com/swimming-backstroke-breathing-technique.html, http://swimswam.com/how-to-do-a-perfect-backstroke-start-video/, consider supporting our work with a contribution to wikiHow. With practice, it can propel you about . Share How to do 6 Kick 3 Stroke Backstroke Drill on LinkedIn Courtesy of Gary Hall Sr., 10-time World Record Holder, 3-time Olympian, 1976 Olympic Games US Flagbearer and The Race Club co-founder. If there are clouds out, you can keep the clouds oriented the same way to travel in a straight line. {"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/c\/c9\/Swim-Backstroke-Perfectly-Step-1-Version-6.jpg\/v4-460px-Swim-Backstroke-Perfectly-Step-1-Version-6.jpg","bigUrl":"\/images\/thumb\/c\/c9\/Swim-Backstroke-Perfectly-Step-1-Version-6.jpg\/aid80910-v4-728px-Swim-Backstroke-Perfectly-Step-1-Version-6.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":"728","bigHeight":"546","licensing":"