HOW TO] What are swimming strokes to get broader shoulders?
The answers about butterfly are erroneous. All strokes will strengthen your shoulders. However, the muscles used MOST for swimming are the muscles of your back (latissimus dorsi or lats) and your abdominal muscles. One part of the stroke, the recovery (where you return your hands to the beginning of your underwater work) uses the deltoids (muscles that round your shoulders) and develop with all strokes but more so with butterfly and freestyle than others. Contrary to another poster, you CANNOT get a rotator cuff stress fracture as the rotator cuff is a set of muscles inside of your shoulder joint and stress fractures occur in bones. I coach swimming (over 30 years) and in practice backstrokers swim backstroke, breaststrokers swim breaststroke, freestylers swim crawl stroke and butterfliers swim butterfly! My best swimmers swim up to 10,000 yards of butterfly in a day. Doing butterfly does NOT cause injuries, swimming incorrectly causes injuries. Paddles do NOT increase shoulder size. P
