Basics of Swimming

For those of you who have zero idea on what competitive swimming is, this post should supply you with some knowledge on it.

First of all, there are four basic strokes: freestyle (otherwise known as front crawl), backstroke, breaststroke (you kind of kick like a frog while using both arms mostly underwater..bad explanation), and butterfly (both arms come out of the water; aslo known as the stroke that Michael Phelps swims). In some events all of these strokes are combined. For instance, the medley relay consists of four people each doing one stroke in the order of back, breast, fly, and free. The IM is the individual medly which means only one person does all four of those stroke but in the order of fly, back, breast, free.

The events that high school swim teams compete in can range anywhere from 50 yards to 500 yards. 50 yards would be down and back in a high school sized pool. Each length of the pool is 25 yards.

Each meet consists of all the same events. in order they are: 200 medley relay, 200 freestyle, 200 IM, 50 free, diving (divers get the whole pool to dive which lets the swimmers have a break), 100 butterfly, 100 freestyle, 500 freestyle, 200 freestyle relay, 100 backstroke, 100 breaststroke, and 400 free relay. High school meets generally last anywhere from 2 to 3 hours.

A dual meet means only two teams compete. This would be a normal Tuesday meet for Kennedy. An invite means 4 or more teams compete. Those meets are swam on Saturdays because they usually take about 5 to 7 hours.

Relays, by the way, means that 4 people are in that race. So the first person dives in and does their swim, then the next, until all four have gone.

In meets, our goal isn't necesarily to win each of our races, but to beat our previous time in our events. Good times for a 50 free are anywhere from 24-27 seconds for women while men's is usually 20-25 seconds. Men are usually faster than women because they're already born with more muscle and have the capability of gaining more muscle than women.

For women, a good 100 free time would be from 56 seconds to 1:00. In butterfly good times would be 1:02-1:07. I'm not sure on the other strokes because I only swim butterfly and freestyle.

I think I explained most of the questions that I get asked. Any I didn't answer though, feel free to ask me.