A lot of coaches referred a butterfly rolling is a short-axis.
Though, I hate that term because you really don't wanna rotate the body up and fly.
You want to keep the body pretty close to horizontal as much as you can, and reduce drag.
And so the way we teach that is
by trying to avoid elevating your shoulders for the breath,
coming up using your neck muscles instead of your shoulder muscles to get the air.
It's actually one stroke,
where you almost go from a full extension of the neck here,
to when the hands come down, to almost a complete flexion of the neck down.
So you're going from almost one extreme to the other.
But the way we teach that is, what we call, the butterfly skate drill.
And so you're gonna actually pull, skate over the water,
using your neck staying low, keeping the shoulders down.
And then you're gonna stop here.
This is kind of the way we swam butterfly when we first learned when we're six years old.
We didn't have the strength to get arms back. So we stop, then we drop the head, and then we come over.
over.
The purpose here is to get low to the water, skate over the top, but not come up like this, okay.
The butterfly can produce the greatest speed of all four strokes,
potentially reaching over three meters per second, or nearly seven miles per hour.
Olympic champion Roland Schoeman demonstrates,
how the simultaneous pull of both arms, plus the first of two hard down kicks in the stroke cycle
produce a tremendous force, lifting him higher in the water and propelling him forward.
Because of the exponential relationship between speed and frontal drag,
it's important to roll and keep a horizontal body position during this critical moment,
almost as if you were skating over the top of the water.
This drill encourages Roland to use his neck rather than his shoulders to do the heavy lifting.
Going from a full neck extension as he breathes,
to his chin dropping down to nearly touch his chest during the arm recovery
If your kick isn't as strong,
then try this drill with fins on,
to appreciate the importance of keeping the shoulders down, and elevating the neck for the breath.
Not only we assume faster in this horizontal position,
but you'll find doing the butterfly become earier. |