OTHER SWIMMING STROKES The fact is, the number of possible strokes is pretty large, so that any ingenious person can invent them by the handful. There are three ways of using the legs, and four or five ways of using the arms.. The body may travel on side, breast, or back ; or roll from one to the other. The face may be carried in the water or out. Each of these several ele ments may be matched up with almost any other, and each may be variously altered at will.
Trudgeon, who seems to have started the spirit of innovation, swam a breast stroke kick, both legs together, but com bined this with the alternating double over-arm movement which still bears his name. The original trudgeon soon yielded to the modern form with the scissor kick ; but for years this scissor-kick was made as wide as possible, in imitation of the kick of the breast-stroke. The side stroke also was originally swum with the breast-stroke kick, and the arms, though no longer making the movements of the breast-stroke, still moved together in stead of alternately. For a long time, in England, the single over-arm side-stroke with the scissor-kick, which was for years the favorite racing-stroke everywhere, had a curious flick at the end of the leg motion, which seems hardly to have been used at all in this country. And there
have been other variants adopted for a time by a few swimmers, and abandoned. There is a very fast back-stroke, in which the arms alternate, and the legs thrash back and forth alternately — in short, a sort of crawl on the back. The back stroke can also be swum with the scissor kick.
In all this confusion, nevertheless, two tendencies have been clearly marked. The first has been to get both the arms out of the water on the recovery. The other is to sacrifice the power of the leg stroke for the sake of getting rid of the drag of its recovery. For this reason the old breast-stroke kick gave way to the wide scissor-kick. This in turn has yielded place to narrow form. The crawl kick is essentially a narrow scissor-kick, with the forward lift of the knee com pletely suppressed. At least one success ful racer swims with the arms alone. The secret of modern speed-swimming is not the increase of power, but the cutting down of friction. It is by no means impossible, therefore, that the next strik ing advance in the art will come from some method of carrying the feet forward above the water, and bringing them down beneath.