Hi all,
I'm looking for advice on training for the butterfly. In the way of background I'm 40, male, and started swimming with a Masters swim group last summer and have been learning butterfly. I was only a fitness swimmer before last summer, and only off and on. I did a 50m fly in 35.97 last November but haven't gone below 36s since. I've swum the 100 fly four times and have done 1:31.5 +/- 0.5s each time. I would like to work up to the 200m fly but am not sure how to go about it, unlike the other strokes I can't go further simply by going slower! At this point 100m is pretty much my limit, and I only do 100m in meets not as part of workout sets. I found an article on the H2ouston site on training for 200m fly, which brings up another issue: short axis pulsing/body dolphining. First, I'm not very good at it, I spent an hour on the weekend swimming back and forth across the width of the pool (6 lanes, not sure the distance), and I can do a width of the pool underwater but I'm pretty slow. Second, I don't really understand the relationship between body dolphins with one kick per cycle and butterfly with two kicks per cycle. The H2ouston article said there would be a separate article explaining this but I couldn't find it. I've got the total immersion butterfly/*** stroke video, but so far my butterfly is nowhere near "virtually effortless" as they describe in the video. I think I have the timing of the two kicks down ok, but I'm missing the connection between the body dolphins and the full stroke, other than initiating the launch kick of the full stroke in my upper body rather than just using my legs. I also worry that body dolphins involve a larger undulation than is desirable in the full stroke. I've seen a video of me swimming fly and it looks like it is in slow motion! My impression is that I might need less undulation in order to increase turnover?
I am also unsure of what extent one has to swim fly to train for fly, we don't get a lot of fly, and really nothing over 50m of fly in our workouts, and if I tried to do 100m fly in the "choice" sets I would probably have a coronary! My current hypothesis is that technique is a greater obstacle to getting to the 200m fly than conditioning so all my freestyle training is going to have minimal impact. I just have to figure that those of you talking about doing 1650 of fly or 10 x 200m fly sets must be doing something different, I can't imagine that conditioning alone would allow me to keep up my stoke for 10 x 200m! But is there some particular aspect of technique one should adjust for longer distances?
Help!
Parents
Former Member
Time goes on and I've got some new butterfly training questions I'm wondering about :)
Q1: how much of your workout should be butterfly?
Q2: what non-butterfly work will most help with butterfly?
Right now my sole objective is to improve my butterfly technique and conditioning. The only way I can swim all-fly workouts is to do 25m repeats with a lot of rest. I guess I could do 50m repeats with even more rest. The alternative is doing drills and mixing in other strokes. The workouts my coach gave me have a lot of sets like 3x400 (75cr,25fly) which I think of as his variation on Half-Fly (ala Coach Hines), think of it as a 100m pool where I am at the point where I swim 25m fly and then finish the other 75m as crawl. I figure the purpose of these sets is to increase endurance and get comfortable swimming fly when not freshly rested. The workouts also have sets like 6x200 of 2-2-2 (2left-2right-2full), I figure these are also building endurance while giving me a chance to concentrate on timing and technique. I think I could swim 2-2-2 for an indefinite distance now. I've started working on 2-2-2-2 (2left-2full-2right-2full i.e. 50% full up from 33% in 2-2-2) but I can't do it indefinitely yet.
Because our pool is now closed on weekends I've been swimming Mon,Tue, Thu,Fri but I have found that the Tue and Fri workouts seem to suffer, what I did relatively easily on Thu leaves me gasping for breath on Fri. I am thinking I might try MWF this week in hopes of having three good workouts instead of two good workouts and two discouraging ones. Or would I be better doing four but doing something other than fly on Tue and Thu?
I feel like I have several good sets to build workouts from but don't know how to design whole workouts or a week of workouts. I'm making progress but I would like to get around the days when I just don't seem to have any gas in the tank as they leave me feeling discouraged.
Any ideas or advice?
Time goes on and I've got some new butterfly training questions I'm wondering about :)
Q1: how much of your workout should be butterfly?
Q2: what non-butterfly work will most help with butterfly?
Right now my sole objective is to improve my butterfly technique and conditioning. The only way I can swim all-fly workouts is to do 25m repeats with a lot of rest. I guess I could do 50m repeats with even more rest. The alternative is doing drills and mixing in other strokes. The workouts my coach gave me have a lot of sets like 3x400 (75cr,25fly) which I think of as his variation on Half-Fly (ala Coach Hines), think of it as a 100m pool where I am at the point where I swim 25m fly and then finish the other 75m as crawl. I figure the purpose of these sets is to increase endurance and get comfortable swimming fly when not freshly rested. The workouts also have sets like 6x200 of 2-2-2 (2left-2right-2full), I figure these are also building endurance while giving me a chance to concentrate on timing and technique. I think I could swim 2-2-2 for an indefinite distance now. I've started working on 2-2-2-2 (2left-2full-2right-2full i.e. 50% full up from 33% in 2-2-2) but I can't do it indefinitely yet.
Because our pool is now closed on weekends I've been swimming Mon,Tue, Thu,Fri but I have found that the Tue and Fri workouts seem to suffer, what I did relatively easily on Thu leaves me gasping for breath on Fri. I am thinking I might try MWF this week in hopes of having three good workouts instead of two good workouts and two discouraging ones. Or would I be better doing four but doing something other than fly on Tue and Thu?
I feel like I have several good sets to build workouts from but don't know how to design whole workouts or a week of workouts. I'm making progress but I would like to get around the days when I just don't seem to have any gas in the tank as they leave me feeling discouraged.
Any ideas or advice?
