You may have noticed but I’ve become obsessed with Bing chat and chat GPT AI text generations. I find that they are incredibly useful for supplementing existing knowledge but not quite matching the nuance and details of a true experience journeyman or master of a subject.

I asked it to use this website as a source and describe the progression for breaststroke. It is surprisingly effective and detailed but there is one crucial mistake that you should not do when teaching breaststroke. I’ll paste the text here and see if you can find it. There is a spoiler underneath the text so if you want to skip ahead to the line that separates the AI generated text you can see what I’m referring to.

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Here is a short article on the breaststroke swimming progression with pictures and detailed descriptions of the arm motion and kick:

Breaststroke is a unique and challenging stroke that requires proper timing, coordination, and technique. It is often considered to be the most relaxing stroke of the four competitive swim strokes, but this is only true if you can master the timing of it.

Here are some tips and drills to help you learn how to swim breaststroke with perfect technique.

The most fundamental aspect of breaststroke is to understand and learn the timing of its basic elements. If you can remember one key mantra — pull, breathe, kick, glide — then you’ll be off to a great start. The breaststroke is unique in that it is the only one of the four competitive swim strokes where the recovery (that is, the non-propulsive setup part of the stroke) takes place underwater. As a result of this, it creates more drag than any of the other strokes and is the slowest of them — and can be the most unforgiving in terms of technique. This is why it’s so important to learn how to swim the breaststroke and understand how to do the stroke with proper form.

At a basic level, there are 3 phases to breaststroke:

• – Pull: You start with your pull. You take your breath here.
• – Kick: As you begin to drive your hands forward, kick to enhance your momentum.
• – Glide: Gliding in a proper streamline helps you maximize distance per stroke. The duration of your glide depends on the event you’re swimming.

The following pictures and descriptions will explain each phase in more detail.

Pull

The breaststroke arm pull has four parts: glide, outsweep, insweep, recovery.

– Glide: Start with your arms fully extended in front of your body with your palms pointing down and fingertips pointing forward (the sides of your thumbs should be touching). Your face should be in the water and your body should be in a straight line.

– Outsweep: Turn your palms slightly outward (so your thumbs point slightly downward) and, keeping your arms straight, sweep your arms out to your sides until they form a “Y” shape with your body.

– Insweep: Bend your elbows and move your forearms down and back as you pull your hands together in front of your chest in a praying position. This is the all-important phase of the breaststroke pull, as it serves as the power that pulls your body forward. This is also the phase where you lift your head out of the water to take a breath.

– Recovery: Extend your arms forward just below the surface to enter the glide phase, and begin the cycle again.


Kick

Unlike freestyle and backstroke, the breaststroke doesn’t use a flutter kick. Instead, it mimics a frog kick:

• – Start with your legs straight and together.
• – Bend your knees so they point out to the sides while keeping your feet together.
• – Snap your feet outward and backward as you squeeze your legs together in a whipping motion. Your feet should be pointed at the end of the kick.
• – Return to the starting position with your legs straight and together.


Glide

The glide is the beginning and ending position of the stroke cycle and is the foundation of breaststroke swimming: your body is in a straight line with your legs and arms extended, your face is in the water, and your body is prone. The glide helps you reduce drag and maintain speed between each stroke. The length of your glide depends on how fast you are swimming and how much momentum you have. Generally, faster swimmers will have shorter glides than slower swimmers.


Drills

To improve your breaststroke technique, you can practice some drills that focus on different aspects of the stroke. Here are some examples:

• – Separation drill: This drill helps you work on separating your pull from your kick. You start by doing one arm pull with no kick, then one kick with no pull, then one full stroke with both pull and kick. Repeat this sequence for 25 or 50 meters.
• – 2 kicks/1 pull drill: This drill helps you work on extending your glide and improving your streamline. You do two kicks for

Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/4/2023(1) Swimming Ideas: Fun and Effective Instruction. https://swimminglessonsideas.com/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (2) Swimming Ideas Fun and effective instruction Swimming Games. https://swimminglessonsideas.com/games/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (3) Swimming Ideas Fun and effective instruction Free Swimming Lesson Plans. https://swimminglessonsideas.com/free-swimming-lesson-plans/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (4) Swimming Ideas Fun and effective instruction Resources. https://swimminglessonsideas.com/resources/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (5) How To Swim Breaststroke With Perfect Technique. https://bing.com/search?q=breaststroke+swimming+progression Accessed 4/4/2023. (6) How to Master the Breaststroke Technique – The Beachbody Blog. https://www.beachbodyondemand.com/blog/how-to-do-breaststroke Accessed 4/4/2023. (7) Breaststroke Timing Progression Drill in 5 Easy Steps!. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GADP9PhrWE Accessed 4/4/2023. (8) Swim Drill Of The Week: Breaststroke Timing Progression. https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/swim-drill-of-the-week-breaststroke-timing-progression/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (9) Swim Drill Of The Week: Breaststroke Tempo Progression. https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/swim-drill-of-the-week-breaststroke-tempo-progression/ Accessed 4/4/2023. (10) How To Swim Breaststroke With Perfect Technique. https://blog.myswimpro.com/2020/09/25/how-to-swim-breaststroke-with-perfect-technique/ Accessed 4/4/2023.

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Spoiler alert! The error is in the breaststroke kick where it describes it like doing a frog kick. You do not want to bend your knees and aim them outwards while keeping the feet together. This is incorrect. Instead, you should keep your knees together while bending your knees to raise your heels behind your thighs and flaring them outwards in a whip like motion, circular, so that they push the water with the insides of your feet.

It’s still a strong article that bring some interesting questions. Will you be using AI in your text generation? Will you use AI to produce practice plans? How will you write your swim practices now? Will you use a tool like generative ai?