SWIM FASTER: BUTTERFLY
Learning to Swim the Most Challenging Competitive Stroke Faster
Students who reach the Butterfly milestone will:
- Push themselves to set a personal best time
- Learn more about streamlining and minimizing drag
- Get detailed instruction on positioning
- Standard for mastery: Butterfly with pattern stroke, turns and finishes: goal time x 1 lap for respective pool
The butterfly is a unique stroke, and many swimmers find it the most challenging of the four competitive strokes. But it’s also a stroke that is gratifying to master, and if you can find a way to swim it with speed, it makes a swimmer a well-rounded contributor on any swim team.
At Foss Swim School, we also believe the butterfly is a good stroke to develop strength, stamina, and focus. It’s not the fastest or most efficient stroke, but if you can swim a strong Butterfly, you can swim anything!
The butterfly is a face-forward stroke in which the swimmer reaches out with both arms, pushes water back, then recovers the arms to reach out again above the water, the shoulders moving in a circular motion. The legs stay together in a dolphin kick, and when the timing is right, swimmers move above and below the water like a dolphin, grabbing a breath and bringing the arms forward as they rise.
Moving Water Efficiently
The key to swimming the butterfly efficiently lies in both form and timing. The goal is to move the largest amount of water with your hands and feet while expending the least amount of energy. Once you have achieved maximum efficiency through form, you can add speed to your stroke to go faster.
To maximize efficiency in the butterfly, swimmers are coached on five elements that are common across all strokes:
Propulsive Hands and Feet
To catch as much water as possible, focus on stretching as far out as possible, with hands streamlined when punching forward to minimize resistance. When bringing the arms back, the hands catch water like paddles, and the power comes from the forearms. A key is to make the dolphin kicks even in amplitude up and down – a coach on the deck is helpful because it is hard to judge your own legs.
Recovery
Recovering the arms is an exercise in timing – you want to bring them forward right as the kick propels you upward, so as much recovery as possible happens above the water. Forward motion of the arms while underwater will push you backwards.
Streamlining
The butterfly is not an especially streamlined stroke, as the swimmer repeatedly breaks and reenters the water. But keeping the hips up helps keep the lower body streamlined, and the hands should be positioned to minimize splash on reentry.
Timing
There is a lot of timing going on with every element of the butterfly – synchronizing kicks, arms, and head in a single wave-like motion. Top swimmers need to focus on both stroke rate and efficiency. An efficient butterfly with a slower stroke rate may be faster than an inefficient, poorly timed stroke with a high stroke rate. But once efficiency is maximized, increasing stroke rate – the number of strokes per minute – will increase speed. In high-level swimming, the number one rule is “stroke rate wins the race.”
Breathing
The breaths have to be carefully timed with the upward motion of the stroke, but it’s also important to make sure you have enough oxygen for the distance you are swimming. Taking a breath with each stroke is inefficient, so learning the timing of when to catch a breath is critical to swimming the butterfly. Taking deep breaths, especially early in the swim, can help fuel you to the finish.
The Swim Faster Levels
Is Swim Faster right for your student? Since this program (level Big 6 in our Swim Path) assumes students have mastered the four competitive strokes and are familiar with turns, finishes, and swimming longer distances, we recommend a Preview Lesson to assess skills unless you are joining from another FOSS program.
The Swim Faster Levels
Is Swim Faster right for your student? Since this program (level Big 6 in our Swim Path) assumes students have mastered the four competitive strokes and are familiar with turns, finishes, and swimming longer distances, we recommend a Preview Lesson to assess skills unless you are joining from another FOSS program.
Achieving the Butterfly Milestone in the Swim Faster Program
Over the course of a quarter, Swim Faster swimmers will work on these improvements to swim a personal-best time and will pass the milestone once they surpass the target time for the breaststroke.
After that, swimmers can work on other stroke milestones or sometimes return for another quarter of Swim Faster to improve speed further. It’s all about what swimmers want to achieve and represents the ultimate culmination of their Swim Path journey with FOSS!
