What is the best swimming stroke?

Best stroke for survival

In survival situations, the main thing is to do is what feels most comfortable for you. Focus on your breathing and try to remain calm. Float as best as you can and try to not over exert yourself. If you want to remain in the same place, try sculling instead of a ‘doggie paddle’ to keep your head above water and assess your situation. The best stroke to swim as far as possible and conserve energy is survival backstroke. Survival backstroke lets you swim long distance while conserving energy and minimising heat loss by keeping your arms and legs together for as long a possible. Keep streamlined to glide until the momentum slows right down. Then you can repeat your stroke. If you need to help someone who can not swim it is best to pull them along while you do a sidestroke to get to safety.

Best stroke for a workout

The swimming stroke that helps you use the most calories possible is the butterfly stroke. Butterfly stroke engages your core and uses your upper body strength. Tone up your arms, back and stomach muscles all with the butterfly stroke. Make sure you doing it correctly to avoid straining yourself. When done right, the butterfly can help increase flexibility and improve posture.

If you want a more gentle exercise that can help with back pain and posture, try backstroke.  Backstroke helps to lengthen the spine and improve posture. It’s especially great for office workers because it assists in opening up your hips. Backstroke can also target leg, arm and stomach toning.

For a full body workout, freestyle is the best choice. Butterfly stroke does burn more calories but it focuses on the upper body and core. Freestyle is a full aerobic exercise as your legs need to get more involved than in butterfly to power yourself forward. Freestyle also works the best at toning your back muscles out of all of the strokes.

Best stroke for long distance

If you’re wanting to swim lots of laps around the pool, it’s again best to do what you are most comfortable with and make sure to breathe correctly. For most people backstroke, sidestroke or freestyle are the best strokes to use when swimming laps long distance. If you swim your laps in backstroke, try to count the strokes you need to take before you turn so that you don’t hit your head on the edge of the pool.

Best stroke for beginners

Typically breaststroke is the first and easiest stroke that beginners learn. This is mainly because the stroke allows you to keep your head above water at all times so that beginners don’t get stressed trying to figure out how to breathe correctly as well. Additionally, backstroke is very easy for beginners to learn, but it can stress them out by not being able to see where they are going and cause accidents.

Best stroke for speed

This is a tough one to answer, again it depends on the person and what stroke they excel in. Usually, freestyle is known as the fastest swim stroke. Others say sidestroke (although not a competitive stroke) makes them swim the fastest. The butterfly stroke is also very fast but usually not as fast as freestyle. You have to be quite a coordinated swimmer to achieve a fast stroke in butterfly too.

So what is the ‘best’ overall stroke?

In short: whatever stroke works best for you!! Every swimmer has their favourite stroke that they feel most comfortable and confident doing. Try out as many stroke styles as you can and you’ll soon find the stroke that you exceed in. You might even have your own favourite stroke that differs for when you swim laps, want to go fast or just for fun.