Sidestroke Swimming: Technique, Scissor Kick, and Lifesaving Use

Sidestroke swimming is a non-competitive stroke swum lying on one side, combining an alternating “picking an apple” arm pull with a scissor kick, and it’s the backbone of lifeguard rescue tows and long-distance survival swimming. Unlike the four strokes swum at the Olympics, nobody races the sidestroke — its entire purpose is efficiency: keep the face out of the water, spend as little energy as possible, and stay in control for as long as the swim demands.

If you’ve ever watched someone glide almost silently across a lake, barely splashing, one arm slicing forward while the other pulls back, that’s very likely sidestroke. It looks slow because it is slow — deliberately. That’s the whole point.

What Makes Sidestroke Different

Every other major stroke keeps the body roughly flat: front crawl and breaststroke face down, backstroke faces up. Sidestroke rotates the body about 30–40 degrees onto one side, with the lower shoulder and hip staying just under the surface and the head turned to rest one ear near the water while the mouth and nose stay clear for breathing.

Because the body is rolled onto its side, the two arms can’t do the same job at the same time — one becomes the “leading” arm (the one closer to the bottom of the pool or lake floor) and the other becomes the “trailing” arm. That asymmetry is the defining feature separating sidestroke from the symmetrical strokes covered in our guide to the types of swimming strokes.

Step-by-Step Sidestroke Technique

Sidestroke is built from three parts working on a repeating cycle: the leading arm pull, the trailing arm recovery, and the scissor kick, all timed so the glide phase — not constant motion — carries the swimmer forward.

1. Start in a side-lying glide. Roll onto one side with your bottom arm stretched forward past your head and your top arm resting along your top side, legs together and streamlined.
2. Pull with the leading arm (“picking an apple”). Sweep the bottom arm down and back in a semicircle, as if reaching up to pick an apple off a branch and pulling it down toward your hip to drop it in a basket. This pull generates most of your forward drive.
3. Recover with the trailing arm. While the leading arm pulls, the top arm bends at the elbow and slides forward along your ribs and chest, tracing the same path the bottom arm just left, until both hands meet in front of your chest.
4. Kick with a scissor motion. As the hands meet, draw both knees up slightly, then open the legs — top leg forward, bottom leg backward — and snap them together in a wide, scissoring sweep. This kick fires at the same moment the leading arm finishes its pull.
5. Glide. After the kick and pull finish together, extend fully on your side and glide in a streamlined position before starting the next cycle. The glide is where sidestroke saves its energy — resist the urge to rush into the next stroke.
6. Breathe naturally. Because the face stays mostly above water throughout, breathing doesn’t need to be timed to arm strokes the way it does in front crawl; you can breathe on almost every cycle without turning your head.

Component	Motion	Purpose
Leading (bottom) arm	Semicircular pull, forward-down-back (“picking an apple”)	Main propulsion
Trailing (top) arm	Bends and slides forward along the torso	Recovery, sets up next pull
Legs	Scissor kick — open wide, snap together	Secondary propulsion, stabilizes body
Head/body	Rotated ~30–40° on side, ear near water	Keeps airway clear, reduces drag
Rhythm	Pull, kick, and glide finish together, then pause	Conserves energy over distance

Swimmers who are just building comfort in the water may want to start with fundamentals first — see our primer on tips to start swimming before layering on side-lying technique.

The Scissor Kick, Explained

The scissor kick is what visually separates sidestroke from every other stroke. Instead of a continuous flutter kick (used in freestyle) or a simultaneous whip kick (used in breaststroke), the legs move in opposite directions along a single plane — one forward, one back — then close together in one strong, wide sweep. It’s intentionally slower and more exaggerated than a flutter kick, and because both legs contribute a large surface area on the closing sweep, it produces a strong, efficient burst of thrust without requiring rapid leg turnover. That efficiency is a big part of why the stroke barely raises the heart rate compared to strokes like freestyle swimming.

Why Lifeguards and Rescue Swimmers Use It

Sidestroke is the standard tow stroke taught in lifeguard and water-rescue training, including American Red Cross lifeguarding courses, for a few practical reasons:

• The airway stays clear. With the face mostly out of the water, a rescuer can watch a victim and communicate without stopping to breathe.
• One arm is always free. Because only the leading arm needs to actively pull for propulsion at any moment, the trailing arm and hand are free to grip and tow a person in trouble.
• It’s low-energy and sustainable. A rescuer might need to swim a fair distance while towing dead weight; a stroke that spends energy carefully matters more than one that’s fast for 25 meters.
• It keeps the swimmer calm and controlled. The slow, deliberate rhythm makes it easier to monitor a distressed swimmer and adjust pace than a fast, breath-timed stroke like crawl.

A more modern, streamlined descendant, combat sidestroke, was developed for U.S. Navy SEAL training. It compresses the body position and shortens the recovery to make the stroke faster and more hydrodynamic for long ocean swims while keeping the same low-profile, energy-conserving principles.

Sidestroke vs. the Competitive Strokes

Sidestroke has never been part of Olympic or World Aquatics competition, and it isn’t swum in NCAA or FINA-sanctioned meets. The four recognized competitive strokes are freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. Sidestroke’s closest historical relative is the Trudgen stroke, a 19th-century hybrid that combined a sidestroke-style scissor kick with an over-the-water freestyle arm recovery — a transitional stroke on the path to the modern front crawl.

The clearest practical contrast is with breaststroke swimming, the other stroke that keeps the head largely out of the water. Breaststroke is symmetrical, swum face-down, and raced competitively at every level; sidestroke is asymmetrical, swum on the side, and essentially never raced. Both share a slower, more controlled rhythm than crawl or butterfly, which is part of why sidestroke is often taught as a bridge stroke for swimmers still building water confidence.

Who Should Learn Sidestroke Today

Sidestroke remains genuinely useful even though nobody competes in it. Open-water and long-distance swimmers use it to rest a fatigued shoulder mid-swim by simply rolling to the other side. Triathletes and endurance swimmers use it as an active-recovery stroke during long training sets. And anyone pursuing lifeguard certification, boating safety, or basic water-survival skills will be taught it directly, because towing another person is genuinely difficult without it. Even recreational swimmers benefit: practicing the side-lying body position and the timing between the scissor kick and arm pull builds body awareness and rotational control that carries over directly into freestyle and backstroke.

Sidestroke won’t win you a race, but it’s one of the most practical strokes in the water — built entirely around lasting longer, breathing easier, and, when it counts, getting someone else safely back to shore.