This week, our entire focus is on the brushstroke line. My opinion, there's no more important thing that especially a young swimmer, or a swimmer, like myself that swam in a different style when I competed can learn than the line, you've got to learn the line. And if you want to know the complexity of the line, push off the wall, everybody pushes off in streamliner, everybody should push off and streamline that's as close as he gets to the line, pointed front end, head down, body straight, pointed back end. And so the part that people leave the most room for improvement is is first the front, the arms are bent or bracing against the water, not straight. So a streamline your hands would be like this, the line your hands are like that the arms are absolutely straight, they're not bent in any way. And the big thing is the feet. So if you look at both ends, you'll get the spectrum from the, from the hands to the feet, just think about the hands and just think about the feet, you're probably gonna have a pretty good line, as long as you don't leave the head up. So So what I'm going to show is, again, the front is going to be as straight as possible without being in streamline the head bow below the eyes are below the biceps. So we should see the head below the arms. Not entirely below, but half of the head is below the arms, half of it is behind. So again, the arms bisect the head, and then we're gonna move all the way back to the feet. And we're going to focus on a complete point of the toe. So the toes are together, mine do something really funky, I've done it for my entire career, my one foot overlaps my other foot. And I've always thought that if I come to a point in the back, I begin to be more streamline. So it's just something that I do, I can't help doing it. So it may be a little different, that doesn't mean that you should do it. But you're always just thinking about pointing the toes. So first, front end, hands very close together, and everything is straight and head is below the arms.

Second, we'll be the feet, pointing the toes as hard as you can to make sure that there's a rigid line from the hips down, so the entire body line is as straight as possible.

One of the other things that are really important to understand about the line is that we're going to escape surface tension by being under the water. So a good illustration for this is to swim freestyle, switch to breaststroke, and watch how, if you do the line, right, there's very little degradation of speed. So in here, it's really easy for me to experiment with because I'm not a good free seller, but I'm a good breaststroker so the speed is pretty much the same between the two because when I go breaststroke and underwater when I'm swimming freestyle, there's more surface tension. When I switch to breaststroke, especially the first stroke there's very little change in speed because I'm going to escape surface tension get underwater and get into the line.

Also, don't forget the line is the beginning and the ending point in every struggle brushstroke. So if you don't get to the line, you're not doing a complete stroke of breaststroke. Go get 'em!

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Breaststroke - The Line!