After getting some advice on improving my butterfly kick I rewatched the TI Butterfly/Breaststroke video with an eye to how much knee bend the swimmers had while they were body dolphining. It seems to me that the people who actually managed to move forward were the ones that bent their knees enough that their lower leg could provide some backward force. The ones that mostly bobbed up and down were the ones that kept their knees straighter. Even the runner who supposedly couldn't make progress due to inflexible ankles had much more pronounced knee bend when she put the fins on.
While I realize that it is easy to overdo the kick and lose the undulation, it seems to me that the video would be more effective if it spent a few moments explaining that forward propulsion comes from the backward movement of the calves and feet and how to develop that, rather than jumping to putting on fins. A LOT of people go nowhere trying to do body dolphins without fins and it seems like it would help to explain how to move the legs in a way that give some propulsion instead of saying that "there is no overt kick in a body dolphin", which I think is just false.
Anyway, different ways of describing things click for different people and what clicked for me was the idea of drawing the knees forward and then whipping the feet downward with a feel that is similar in some ways to *** stroke kick but with the legs together and toes pointed back instead of out.
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Your point is taken. For people watching the video on their own I think it would be good to be a little clearer about what should be taken literally and what is just a loose statement of how it should feel. I have talked to several people who just gave up on body dolphins and the TI approach because they didn't get anywhere and either didn't have fins or found that while they could do it with fins they were no further ahead when they took the fins off.
On the plus side I did my first length of fluid relaxed head lead body dolphin without fins tonight! With that under my belt I'll continue to practice it and try some more of the progression.
Your point is taken. For people watching the video on their own I think it would be good to be a little clearer about what should be taken literally and what is just a loose statement of how it should feel. I have talked to several people who just gave up on body dolphins and the TI approach because they didn't get anywhere and either didn't have fins or found that while they could do it with fins they were no further ahead when they took the fins off.
On the plus side I did my first length of fluid relaxed head lead body dolphin without fins tonight! With that under my belt I'll continue to practice it and try some more of the progression.
