Swimming Styles Times Seven

Swimming Styles Times Seven

Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California. Photo above shows Dean Jarvis, a dog paddler who swam 25.7 km in 18 hours [read his story in the Wall Street Journal here].

While most swimmers use freestyle to train, race and swim in open bodies of water, there are much smaller percentages of swimmers who use other strokes for their wild swims, stage swims, marathon swims, channel swims, circumnavigation swims, high-altitude swims, winter swims, and ice swims. Ranked below in terms of general global popularity, there are 7 major swimming styles:

  1. freestyle
  2. breaststroke
  3. butterfly
  4. backstroke
  5. combat side stroke / sidestroke
  6. dog paddle
  7. mermaid swimming
Lexie Kelly and Steven Munatones swimming across the Cayman Brac Channel
Winter swimmers doing breaststroke
Brenton Williams swimming butterfly in his native South Africa.
Tina Neill doing one of her record-setting backstroke channel swims.
Combat side stroke by Kelly Gneiting across the Anacapa Channel in 2014. For his later unprecedented crossing of Navajo Lake, Gneiting was nominated for the 2015 World Open Water Swimming Performance of the Year.

Copyright © 2008 – 2021 by World Open Water Swimming Association