relationship between fly and free

I posted in another thread that when I do short repeats of fly followed by free that my free feels stronger and faster. Nice to hear it isn't just me...maybe there's something to it? Personally speaking, I think I have a weak catch on the free, and flying beefs it up. My 2 cents anyway.

I too feel stronger and feel faster in freestyle since training more fly. Objectively, I can now make some freestyle intervals that I have never been able to do before, ever. I feel that this mainly due to the the fact that I find freestyle the most physically taxing stroke to swim at medium to high intensities. In the past, I believe I was actually overtraining freestyle and it had a negative impact on my freestyle performance. For me, swimming fly has definitely helped my freestyle. However, conclusion begs the following 2 questions: 1) Was it actually the fly, or was it simply swimming less freestyle that actually helped? 2) Could the same/or better improvements in freestyle be made with swimming more backstroke or breaststroke, or doing something totally different? I feel that my freestyle improvements were 50% due to swimming more fly, and 50% due to not swimming freestyle. Further, I would suggest that for me, neither backstroke nor breaststroke nor any other activity could have produced these freestyle results. I suspect that some people may efficiently (and possibly most efficiently) improve their freestyle by swimming more fly. This is likely a small group of people, and I would never suggest that most people can efficiently improve their freestyle with swimming more fly.

Well, I can't now as an adult say doing more fly has improved the free. I have been doing a little more fly to swim a 50 yard race in a meet. The last time the fly was done in a meet it was slower. Anyway, its getting faster the fly and I was at one time one of those usual people that could swim a 50 yard fly as fast as they could a free. Couldn't hold it in the 100 yard.

FACT! Swimming fly does make you stronger and it helps put you in great shape wind (cardio) wise.

I agree with Tom. Fly IS the most physically challenging style but because of this it will make you stronger and more flexible thus improving the other strokes, especially freestyle. Remember that the one of the secrets to great swimming is to not screw up your swim style as you get tired and to keep the intensity and style up you need to be stronger, Fly is the best example of how tiredness will make you screw up the stroke/style. Dolphinccc

We had a Masters coach last year that made us do a lot of fly. Everyone's free improved and she maintained doing a lot of fly improves free. Maybe because fly takes a lot of strength, so you build that strength and it transfers to free which has like movement on the stroke.

Count me in. Even in the midst of a workout, a lap or two of fly (trust me, I don't do much more than that) makes the following free feel much stronger. I've thought that the fly somehow engages core muscles that I don't otherwise use during free ... but that actually help it quite a bit!

I'm convinced that fly gives the core muscles a good workout... How do I know... by what is sore after doing a lot of fly, or after a fly clinic... and ouch ouch ouch, I do know the next day that I definately use those muscles in freestyle. Freestyle alone doesn't make them sore like that.

Originally posted by jsm545 i have been doing more fly than i use to do and my freestyle is feeling stronger, does fly help freestyle or am i just getting stronger I think in my case, fly is making me work some core body muscles that are too easy to leave lazy in just freestyle, but if they're stronger, and you use them in freestyle, they do help.

i think that it helps because if you are a serious flyer, then you learn to finish your stroke past your waist, which can give you more speed, i've noticed (myself included) that some freestylers finish around thier naval, which cuts thier stroke, but fly helps you to finish, and chances are as your fly gets faster, your freestyle will also get faster