Why Improve Your Backstroke (insert worst stroke)If You Never Swim It?

At first glance, this feels like a practical question.

Why should I try to improve my backstroke if I never race it? If I’m not a backstroker, why spend time on it at all?

But if you sit with the question a little longer, it becomes something much deeper. It stops being about backstroke and starts being about why we pursue improvement in the first place—why we train, why we compete, and why sport matters beyond medals and times.

This question gets to the heart of growth.

Improvement Is Not Just About Preference

Most athletes enjoy working on the things they’re already good at. That’s natural. Progress comes faster, confidence stays high, and feedback feels rewarding. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But the deeper levels of improvement don’t truly happen where things are easy.

The skills required to improve a stroke you dislike—or one you don’t see immediate value in—are the same skills required to maximize your potential in the strokes you do love. In fact, they are often harder to develop when there’s no instant payoff.

Those skills include:

• Mental discipline: showing up with intention even when motivation is low

• Emotional regulation: staying patient through frustration and slow progress

• Neurological adaptability: learning unfamiliar movement patterns

• Physical awareness: developing coordination, balance, and control in new ways

Backstroke just happens to be the classroom.

The Process Is the Point

Improving your weakest stroke forces you to confront the process of learning head-on. You can’t rely on talent alone. You can’t hide behind what already works. You have to slow down, pay attention, and engage fully.

That process—struggle, adjustment, repetition, refinement—is the same process required to improve anything:

• another stroke

• a new skill

• a higher level of competition

• or even something outside of sport entirely

The work is often harder precisely because you don’t enjoy it as much. And because it’s harder, it’s more meaningful. It demands more from you.

Neurological, Emotional, Physical Growth

When you work on a stroke you rarely swim, you’re not just training muscles—you’re training systems.

Neurologically, you’re building new movement maps and expanding your ability to learn unfamiliar patterns. Emotionally, you’re practicing patience, humility, and resilience. Physically, you’re improving balance, body awareness, and coordination that carry over into every other stroke.

Even if you never race backstroke, the capacity to improve transfers everywhere.

Wisdom in Working Weaknesses

There is real wisdom in committing to something you may never “use” in a traditional sense. Not because backstroke will suddenly win you races, but because the way you approach your weaknesses shapes the way you approach everything else.

The practice itself becomes the lesson.

At the end of the day, this work makes you:

• a better athlete

• a better learner

• more adaptable to new challenges

• more prepared for discomfort and growth

And, ultimately, better at life.

So why improve your backstroke if you never swim it?

Because the stroke doesn’t matter nearly as much as the "way " you learn to improve it