Sinking hips during recovery in fly

All right. First, I have to slightly disagree with your statement of the facts. Your issue begins well before the arm recovery started. Your hips are already too low just a fraction of a second after hands entry (reference, minute 1:06 from slowmo clip). If you agree with this then we have to start analyzing your movements from this point on. Now. Let us immediately drop all pre-formatted thoughts and stick to Newton's Third here for a moment. Which forces could account for this loss in buoyancy? What particular movements are taking place at this particular moment? I see two things: 1. You're raising your head to breathe, then 2. You're recovering the legs to prepare for the second kick The timing of your head action? I'm rather satisfied with it. You did you homework. You documented yourself. You know that breathing in butterfly is something that you need to plan. Therefore you immediately start raising the head to do what I often refer to as : Looking where you're going to breathe before actually surfacing. So to me, that's good. This force brings you down but hey. You have to breathe after all and you seem to be doing this smartly. That leaves me with what I believe to be the main cause for your issue. Look at: Min 0:26; 0:34; 0:42; 0:52 (very apparent there) ... then 1:06 etc All these frames have one thing in common. At the precise moment when you're recovering the legs (to prepare for this second kick), your hips sink by 6-10inch in one fraction of a second. That can not be a coincidence. Now what forces could help you counterbalancing this? Well the only one I can see would be some lift force created by improving the early phase of your pulling. I read few members referring to this. I tend to agree. But if you could limit this "sinkage" by first correcting the leg recovery, less pulling lift would be required to stay at the surface. Less force required = less energy expanded doing this. So for me? Kick is promising. Like RTodd suggested, Lots of potential right there. But in my opinion, you kick as hard on the upbeat than you do on the down beat. The downward kicking causes the hips to go up but the upward kicking causes the hips to go down. Be careful in recovering the legs. BF is a b.tch. You have to be extremely powerful on the downbeat and extremely careful on the upbeat. Extremely powerful on pull and recovery and extremely careful not to splash on the entry. Gotta switch between those extremes within a cycle that lasts 1.5 seconds, while giving the impression that there's no issue at all. That comes with the job. Gotta do gotta do. For butterfly kicking, I like to use a simple drill I created way back then. It's butterfly without the arms (breathing every stroke preferably). I do all my BF kicking like this. It's fast (easily hold 1min/50min) and it tackles the body undulation much more specifically than any other form of BF kicking (especially in regard to the differences between first and second kick). You can accelerate it and incorporate some half or full pulling cycles. All this to learn to better control how much depth and how much amplitude. YouTube- Fly DrillSide Sorry for the longish post. You started me on Butterfly? That's what you got!!

All right. First, I have to slightly disagree with your statement of the facts. Your issue begins well before the arm recovery started. Your hips are already too low just a fraction of a second after hands entry (reference, minute 1:06 from slowmo clip). If you agree with this then we have to start analyzing your movements from this point on. Now. Let us immediately drop all pre-formatted thoughts and stick to Newton's Third here for a moment. Which forces could account for this loss in buoyancy? What particular movements are taking place at this particular moment? I see two things: 1. You're raising your head to breathe, then 2. You're recovering the legs to prepare for the second kick The timing of your head action? I'm rather satisfied with it. You did you homework. You documented yourself. You know that breathing in butterfly is something that you need to plan. Therefore you immediately start raising the head to do what I often refer to as : Looking where you're going to breathe before actually surfacing. So to me, that's good. This force brings you down but hey. You have to breathe after all and you seem to be doing this smartly. That leaves me with what I believe to be the main cause for your issue. Look at: Min 0:26; 0:34; 0:42; 0:52 (very apparent there) ... then 1:06 etc All these frames have one thing in common. At the precise moment when you're recovering the legs (to prepare for this second kick), your hips sink by 6-10inch in one fraction of a second. That can not be a coincidence. Now what forces could help you counterbalancing this? Well the only one I can see would be some lift force created by improving the early phase of your pulling. I read few members referring to this. I tend to agree. But if you could limit this "sinkage" by first correcting the leg recovery, less pulling lift would be required to stay at the surface. Less force required = less energy expanded doing this. So for me? Kick is promising. Like RTodd suggested, Lots of potential right there. But in my opinion, you kick as hard on the upbeat than you do on the down beat. The downward kicking causes the hips to go up but the upward kicking causes the hips to go down. Be careful in recovering the legs. BF is a b.tch. You have to be extremely powerful on the downbeat and extremely careful on the upbeat. Extremely powerful on pull and recovery and extremely careful not to splash on the entry. Gotta switch between those extremes within a cycle that lasts 1.5 seconds, while giving the impression that there's no issue at all. That comes with the job. Gotta do gotta do. For butterfly kicking, I like to use a simple drill I created way back then. It's butterfly without the arms (breathing every stroke preferably). I do all my BF kicking like this. It's fast (easily hold 1min/50min) and it tackles the body undulation much more specifically than any other form of BF kicking (especially in regard to the differences between first and second kick). You can accelerate it and incorporate some half or full pulling cycles. All this to learn to better control how much depth and how much amplitude. YouTube- Fly DrillSide Sorry for the longish post. You started me on Butterfly? That's what you got!!