Six Inches of Water

My father-in-law, Coach Eroh, recently mentioned that six inches of water moves with you while you swim. This six inches of water is very important when you consider the arm recovery in the breaststroke pullout.

It seems like every conversation with Coach Eroh will bring out a new piece of information about swimming that I have never heard before. This particular statement is one that I have never thought about. The topic came up as we were reviewing the video for our Conference Championship meet. We focused on the breaststroke since I was a breaststroker, and we discovered something very interesting. While watching the video in slow motion, we noticed that my breaststroker's forward movement stopped completely during his hand recovery in the pullout. The reason was very simple: he had moved his hands outside of the six inches of water surrounding his body.

Make sure that your breaststrokers are recovering their arms within that six inches of water surrounding their body. Any easy method to evaluate their forward movement is to compare their position to the lane lines.