Is breast stroke the hardest stroke?

I always found front crawl the hardest and I was a squad swimmer. Even now if I take a break it takes me a while to get back into front crawl. It's spacing the breathing and the arm movement I find tricky, then it clicks.

DD really struggled with breaststroke, because she is very hypermobile in her hips. I remember two swimming instructors watching her together and debating the problem - her kick wasn't constrained in the same way as other kids', and it wasn't clear how to correct it. Apparently hypermobile children often find it hard.

When she had ticks for everything she needed to move up to the next class except breaststroke, I did point out that if they were going to wait for that, she might be stuck in that class for ever.

There is breaststroke and then there is what DD’s swim coach used to refer to as my “holiday swimmer” breaststroke (we were friends, and I’d never had lessons).

Having watched children compete for a decade, it is fair to say that the beautiful fly strokes came from the young gymnasts (my daughter relied more on brute strength). I don’t know whether it was hypermobility but a fair few would get injuries (back or shoulder), but my observations are a fairly small sample size.

Proper breaststroke timing is tricky!

I'm the parent of a competitive breaststroker who consistently tells me breaststroke is the most technically difficult stroke. He would much rather do any other stroke in training. Not sure if that’s just because he’s not as strong at the others so can get away with less precision. Plus of course breaststroke is the slowest stroke so sets take longer 😂

Which strokes come more easily to you depends on your build. So some people will swim breaststroke easily and others will struggle.

It not always the easiest to do well, though. Lots of people have screw kicks or other forms of poor technique.

Mind you, that can be true of other strokes. I was watching a bloke doing lengths of front crawl last week, and he'd probably be more efficient if his hand sliced into the water rather than slapping down with the heel of his hand.

Butterfly is a gazillion times harder

Breaststroke is the easiest of them all

My daughter loves breaststroke and it was apparent from about level 5 she had a knack for it. It's faster than her fly. But I think she's a bit of an anomaly.

It's also hardest to learn to teach.

There are basically 4 steps to breaststroke - pull (arms); breathe; kick; glide. It can be (mentally) complicated to coordinate it. Turning your knees and feet out as you kick is harder than kicking in other strokes, which is just point your toes and kick from the hip.

Some of it is just a personal thing. We all get blocks on learning things, but we don't all get the same blocks.

My two are the exact opposite of each other on this. One took to breaststroke really quickly and was always strongest on that especially as it was weak for lots of others but looks like a flailing duck doing butterfly. My youngest has taken to butterfly surprisingly easily given she’s quite tiny. She can’t sustain it yet but she can go like a rocket for a short distance. Breaststroke is taking her longer and she seems to be spending a lot of time at the moment on the wall with the teacher trying to sort out feet.

When learning butterfly is definitely harder but my competitive swimmer now does find breaststroke harder than butterfly as it's a very technical stroke to swim quickly and competitive breaststroke looks very different to "normal" breaststroke seen in the slow lane of the local pool.

Butterfly looks hard. I have tried it and failed. Once.

How ridiculous. Of course not. I'm every saying that if you cam swim fast enough and for a certain distance, i don't see why learning a 4th silly stroke should hold you back when you can do the others perfectly well.

I assume you don't bother getting your DC to do any sport then because nobody needs to be able to kick a ball or swing a racquet or jump really high or do the splits. And lets not get into the total waste of time that is playing an instrument or performing in a play or painting a picture.

Just because you can't see a practical purpose for an activity doesn't mean it's worthless. And butterfly was invented as a faster version of breaststroke so perfectly reasonable to escape from a shark.

I really don't understand why they need to learn butterfly. No one would ever use it for long distances, or to escape quickly from a shark. And I was definitely more likely to drown trying it than any other stroke. Completely unnecessary.

Yes, but with DS it used to be to another degree! He'd go from being 1st to almost last!

To be fair, breaststroke is the slowest stroke, followed by back, so that's quite normal!

Swim parent here. Some find fly harder, some breast, and rare is the swimmer who naturally takes to both. Young kids who are good at fly seem to have an element of hypermobility in my experience (the bendy kids who are also good at gymnastics).

DS used to hate breaststroke. He mastered butterfly pretty quickly and achieved the 200m county time the first time he raced it! Breaststroke gradually clicked with him, but the only time he does it is in IMs. He shoots off with the butterfly and gradually slows down during the breast and back lengths, then speeds up again with the free! I must say though that 200Fly still looks incredibly painful no matter how good they are at it!

If you've never tried butterfly how can you say that breast stroke was harder than it?

Butterfly is generally considered much harder than breaststroke, although breaststroke is more technical initially. Fly requires much more strength, energy and coordination, you need a really strong core. I swam with several teams when I was younger and it was always much harder to find people to swim the individual fly than the individual breaststroke.

Breaststroke is probably the most technical, and there are a lot of things that if they aren’t correct the swimmer will be DQed. With fly, it’s more a case of nailing the timing.

breast stroke was harder for me. Never tried butterfly

DS was a breaststroker and never really nailed fly, DD nailed fly but struggled with breaststroke. I find fly easier than breaststroke, my timing has always been slightly out (same as DD). I think it depends on the swimmer TBH.

You have to be somewhat competent in all four strokes to progress to the next stage if you're on the Swim England programme.