I was a swim coach for a few years…
The best way I can help is to share the tips I gave my swimmers:
* Keep your knees close together when you whip your lower legs around- they shouldn’t be more than 6–8 inches apart. When you splay your knees, you lose the power of the kick. One trick to find out how your knees react is to do a W sitting position to the best of your ability. That W sitting position is not recommended as a sitting position, but that’s the exact position that the legs go into when doing the breaststroke. If your knees struggle to be flexible, then doing a breaststroke will be harder.
* Your elbows shouldn’t go above your shoulders, but shouldn’t drop below your breasts either. Your elbows need to stay pretty high on your body plane. Imagine you’re trying to push yourself up a ledge—you’re not going to want your hands too far out to the sides or too close. You’ll instinctively place your hands in the right place to pull yourself up a ledge—that’s exactly the placement your hands/elbows should be while doing the breaststroke pull.
* Your hands go up after a pull together (can be a prayer position, or as if you’re taking communion) along your medial line (from chest, up past face, above your head. Keeping hands separate creates two separate water drags—together becomes one water drag.
You could watch this video for tips—breaststroke video
* One way to warm up is to do just the kicks for a few lengths, or just the arms.
Let us know how it goes!! Just keep swimming!