I think it’s the hardest stroke. I think it’s a hard stroke because it requires some of the most unnatural movements of your body. The Breaststroke kick, a prime example, got to have a lot of ankle flexion. You also need to be able to rotate your knees, which your knees are a hinge joint, so they move up and down, supposedly in a vertical plane, but there is some give with tendons and ligaments that allow our joints to move side to side if need be if something won’t happen. So when you’re doing Breaststroke, you’re also rotating through your knees which don’t have a lot of knee rotation, to begin with, as humans, so we’re forcing a movement that’s not natural or maybe not naturally supposed to happen. The Breaststroke itself is also anaerobically based. That means that you’re spending more time producing lactate than you are not producing lactate. So with that, you have to be good at training at your lactate threshold, and also being able to shuttle out lactate, so that way you can consistently train right below that threshold. There’s a ton of hypoxic training required with Breaststroke hypoxic training that forces lactate production. When you swim Breaststroke, you’re holding your breath, you’re doing long pull-outs of every single wall, you’re not getting nearly the same amount of oxygen that you have the opportunity to choose in Freestyle and Backstroke, and Butterfly. So, all aids into the fact that I think it’s just the hardest strip swim when you swim it well.
