anyone know some decent video tutorials online? or just some really good advice about proper swimming techniques? I mostly swim the breaststroke and my neck hurts while i do it. Last time my lower back ached a little. Not actual injury kinds of pain, just poor alignment kind of pain.

I know when I do breaststroke as compared to freestyle I get a sore back and neck also... I've concluded it may be because I am looking up and arching my back too much... An instructor once told be to kick faster to straighten my body out, but this is when I was doing the freestyle and at the time I was getting a sore back doing the freestyle also...

cool, thanks. this is what i thought it was but no matter how hard i try to kick, it doesn't help. If I try with the board, I just wind up going backwards.

Yeah, your neck isn't supposed to be bent back when doing the brest stroke. Your spine is supposed to be fairly straight, with your head looking partly towards the bottom of the pool, and a little bit ahead. When you pull with your arms, you should be getting enough momentum to propel your head and neck out of the water enough to breathe.

Are the fingers on your hands apart when you're pulling down toward your hips? Making sure they're forming a scoop will help.

You can try using a special sort of fin that you wear on your hands - it lets you scoop a lot more water, and will give you more of a push out of the water. It is more tiring to use them though (you're pulling against a lot more water, so it's more tiring).

BP

It took me a long while, both with breast stroke and freestyle, to learn to keep my head out of the water just enough to breathe and look forward just a little. Breast stroke is all about timing as well. What helped me was to take some adult classes. If you have a pool near you, you might inquire. I took mine at the high school, and while it was a "class" the instructor actually worked with 1-2 people at a time while the rest of us practiced, though she was careful to get to everyone several times during the session. The people ranged from those who could barely swim, through people like me who just needed to "tune up" their strokes, to a couple training for triathalons. The class was about 8 weeks, 2 x a week, and quite inexpensive.

I think I may have gotten the hang of this. No sore neck today! and actually, man it was a more exhausting workout than ever. I feel so self conscious when I have to stop laps to catch my breath. No one else does this.

No sore neck .... Don't be self conscious about the stopping, when I first started I had to stop every lap, it took me a year to be able to do it consistently and smoothly without stopping... It just happened one day BAM I was able to do it... I think relaxing and not thinking so much about it and just breathing and not gasping at the breath when my head was out of the water was the trick for me...