Butterfly has a reputation problem. Ask most swimmers, parents, or even casual pool-goers to name the hardest stroke, and butterfly wins almost every time — not because its underlying mechanics are more complex than the other strokes, but because it's the stroke where timing errors are punished most visibly and most immediately. Get the breath timing wrong in butterfly and the consequence isn't a slightly less efficient stroke; it's a stroke that visibly stalls, a swimmer who looks like...

Backstroke is often the stroke swimmers learn third or fourth, treated as a variation on front crawl performed upside down. In some technical respects that's fair — the arm cycle and kick share real similarities with freestyle. But backstroke has a problem the other strokes don't: the swimmer can't see where they're going, can't see the wall approaching, and can't visually check their own technique against a reference point the way they might glance at another swimmer's stroke in the next...

By Coach Tan Meng Chew (MC), SG Sink or Swim If you are a parent, a swimmer or a coach in Singapore, the haze season brings a serious question: "If I swim while the air is bad, am I putting my lungs at risk?" It is a fair thing to ask. Swimming is exercise, exercise means breathing harder, and haze is something you breathe. Put those together and it is natural to worry. At the same time, I do not want to frighten anyone with claims that go beyond the evidence. So in this article I will do my...