Butterfly

Front Crawl Backstroke Breaststroke Butterfly Tumble Turns Training Aids Butterfly Drills Fly Finishing Touches

Butterfly is a fantastic stroke. When you’re swimming it well and feeling fresh there’s nothing to beat it. Butterfly may well feel great when you’re fresh but this feeling is very short lived unless you are very fit and your body is well conditioned to it. This is because both a powerful leg kick, which really works the large muscles in the quads, and a powerful dual action arm pull are used to propel the upper body out of the water in order that the arms can be brought over, ready to take the next stroke. Although it’s a fast stroke it is highly costly in energy and as a consequence the world record times for fly will never be as fast as those for the more efficient front crawl. So even when you’ve mastered the butterfly stroke don’t worry if you can only manage reps of 25 or 50 m in distance. To achieve much more takes a lot of training. We were once taught a useful series of drills that gradually build up the stroke which we will try to relay here. They have the added bonus of ending up with two kicks to one pull which is the correct way to do it. Do a couple of lengths of each step and then move on.