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!
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?
Former Member
When I did my 100fly in 1:00 minute in 1958 I did it by training 500 meters a day. Mostly free 25s or 50s sometimes some 25m fly and 25 fly kicks, I raced my fly kicks against the free swimmers. If you want to swim fast you have to train fast.
George Park www.swimdownhill.com
Former Member
There are a few questions i would ask before designing a fly based training program.
The obvious one is are you looking at two 24 week cycles in a year, peaking for 2 national events ?
General season planning would have the periodisation based around your main competitions.
Working from that there would an initial General endurance phase, specific endurance phase, etc, etc leading to maximum training and speed work and then taper. Each phase has its own mix of the 4 zones - Aerobic, Anaerobic and Lactate Production & lactate tolerance work and hence each work out has defined percentages of work in specific zones.
You are not going to be able to do enough work in all the training zones swimming fly only, but you must swim enough fly in each of the training zones to properly condition for competition.
You can get all of the season planning info from Maglischos 'Swimming Fastest'.
The problem with the information in all of the books is that it is aimed at programs for young age group or 20 yr old swimmers. Programs for Masters need to be adapted, dependant on your age, range of motion, time available for swimming etc.
The adaptation would be shorter workouts, more rest days between, back off at 1st sign of shoulder pain, more testing. Incorporate specific tests to determine your progress. This may be a timed 25m fly swim and 25m kick.
Fly training should be 1/3 kick based, 1/3 arm based, 1/3 whole stroke. You can incorprate drills into each phase Use kick based drills and arm based drills, done at slow, medium and fast speeds. I have a fly kick sequence in the thread Pull v Kick. Many people only do drills slowly, that is a mistake.
Do stretches to enhance your range of motion, and weights or bands for the muscles between shoulders, in upper back, which are often weak and tight.
Increase workouts distance and intensity by max 5% week ( if swimming 4 - 5 times week ) or by 5% every 2 weeks if swimming 2-3 times week.
Get yout technique looked at and analyzed and if you can get a good coach.
Former Member
Hi Gareth,
Many thanks for your detailed reply!
In my case I am thinking more in terms of learning to do the stroke right and over longer distances rather than performances in specific competions. I figure I should complete a 200m fly before I start thinking about getting competitive! I think of the 200m fly as a personal "grand challenge" kind of thing. The 100m fly I've done a few times and have gone from "I just want to finish" to "I want to finish without any final 25m drama", now I want to start bringing my time down. Well, even in the 100 and 50 my technique needs a lot of improvement.
Having said all that, my big meets are in early Oct, late May (Cdn Nationals), and late July (World Masters Games - no qualifying times!). It would be very cool to do a 200m in Oct, right now I can't judge if that is realistic. Maybe there's a reason so few people swim the 200fly... :)
Masters has shut down for July and August here so I don't have coaching other than getting workouts by email.
I had Swimming Fastest out from the library for quite a while but I didn't go through the seasonal training (it's a BIG book!) because it seemed to be aimed at someone beyond my current level.
I assume arm-based drills are anything other than kicking?
I have to admit that I have never tried to pick up the speed with drills, perhaps because I'm still struggling to integrate all the components with the correct timing. Certainly something to try, anything specific you recommend?
Flexibility is certainly something I need a lot of work on, I'm very poor in that department. The last time I tried improving my shoulder flexibility by stretching a lot I started having shoulder problems, is there anything specific I can try or that I should avoid? I have had shoulder problems in the past but after changing my freestyle stroke I haven't had problems for a while now, fly has never seemed to cause a problem for me (knock on wood!)
Thanks again for input so far!
