I've always tried to breathe every other stroke in fly, but watching the elites at Worlds breathe every stroke made me want to try it out. So recently I experimented with breathing every stroke in fly. Findings after a couple workouts where I averaged about 600 total yards of full-stroke fly:
Breathing every stroke has a negative impact on my body position
I can help that by kicking harder
The additional oxygen that I get from all the extra breathing helps fuel the harder kicking, but it seems like I'm working harder overall (higher perceived pulse rate at the end of each swim, but I didn't actually measure it)
Stroke counts and times are about the same
So I think I've found a useful drill to make me kick harder, but I doubt I'll be trying this in a race anytime soon. Has anyone else (who hasn't always swum fly this way) messed around with breathing every stroke in fly? What were your findings?
I figured something out today. Today while messing around with some breathing-every-stroke fly during a warmup 200 IM, I noticed that my hands were close together as they passed my abdomen, I was recovering higher out of the water, and I was diving deeper. (It's entirely possible that I've been doing this for days but hadn't realized it before. I'm dense like that.) So for the last few strokes of the fly leg of that IM, I played around with adding more power at that particular part of the stroke cycle and OH WOW now I finally understand why Phelps does this. It adds amplitude to the wave. (I never understood it before because, well, each pull looks like an S-curve...) So, feeling like I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I swam my main set the same way. For the first time, I found myself swimming fly in a manner where it would be silly not to breathe, since I'm already up there. However it didn't actually add much speed to my workout; I swam a better-than-usual main set but that may have been due to my excitement. I will keep at it and see where it goes.
Nice. Keep us posted on how it goes. I'm on a pool break (local pool closed) and am really missing it.
I figured something out today. Today while messing around with some breathing-every-stroke fly during a warmup 200 IM, I noticed that my hands were close together as they passed my abdomen, I was recovering higher out of the water, and I was diving deeper. (It's entirely possible that I've been doing this for days but hadn't realized it before. I'm dense like that.) So for the last few strokes of the fly leg of that IM, I played around with adding more power at that particular part of the stroke cycle and OH WOW now I finally understand why Phelps does this. It adds amplitude to the wave. (I never understood it before because, well, each pull looks like an S-curve...) So, feeling like I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I swam my main set the same way. For the first time, I found myself swimming fly in a manner where it would be silly not to breathe, since I'm already up there. However it didn't actually add much speed to my workout; I swam a better-than-usual main set but that may have been due to my excitement. I will keep at it and see where it goes.
Nice. Keep us posted on how it goes. I'm on a pool break (local pool closed) and am really missing it.
