I find myself being very oriented toward short axis. I find that my butterfly is just as fast as my freestyle and my breaststroke just is fast as my backstroke. Anybody else experience this? Could be that I just don't swim enough. Also does training for butterfly and training for breastroke compliment each other well? Mostly a butterflier but also somewhat an IM'er and am wondering if i train breastroke more than i have will it still be beneficial to fly or should i just stick mostly with fly?
Thanks, Steve
I am mostly a breaststroker who can do fly pretty well,much better than I can the long axis strokes.The breaststroke pull ,up to the insweep, should be the same as the fly pull to that same point.The need for body undulation is similar.I find swimming fly helps my BR.My BR is much faster than my BK by the way.
I'm good at free and *** and whoa boy do my back and fly have a lot of room to grow.
But then again, I think that's because I didn't swim competitively as a kid, so free and *** are the strokes you do when you swim for fun, and I'm working on getting some muscle memory on proper back and fly technique.
So I don't think of myself as a short of long axis swimmer.
I had a co-worker who was a back/fly specialist in college, so we always joked about having a two-person relay.
Even though I can do fly and ***, I know plenty of people who are bad in one or the other. I know plenty of guys who are great in the fly and back (and back is my weakest stroke). Personally, I don't think there is much, if any, correlation. It would be interesting to see some stats on this, but it would be hard to measure. You'd have to take a large subset of swimmers and see who makes a top 100 list in fly and *** events, then see how many made back and free. And then eliminate the people who are good at all the strokes. The difficulty with that is many swimmers will only do a handful of events on taper, so you don't know how fast they would have been in every event.
I don't think there is any substitution for fly, but it's not necessary to train fly every day. If nothing else, swimming *** mixes up your practices so you're not doing the same stuff all the time.
Actually had a major breakthrough today. For the first time toward the end of practice i could actually sense my hip position in the water and when i made a conscious effort to keep it high i found the stroke got immensely easier (felt more fluid and less tiring). Crazy thing too is i've been swimming butterfly for many years and tonight was the first time i truly noticed it.
