New York Times magazine article on the best exercise
"Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.
So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University in England and a past Olympian in the modern pentathlon, known for his swimming. The butterfly, he said, is “miserable, isolating, painful.” It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury."
Former Member
Yeh, they're commonly used in CrossFit.
Gotcha. Thanks to YouTube - CrossFit Burpee Demo, I may try a few tomorrow.
Looks like a worthy thing to help with a good start.
"It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury. "
Somehow I'm managing to swim fly with just the pool from that list. I do however find a swimsuit, hat and goggles to be beneficial.
"It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury."
Why is any of that a bad thing?
And I'm not sure why it is specific to butterfly, either.
(I thought the idea that flexibility training reduces injury -- though it might be good for other things -- was thoroughly debunked.)
"high risk of injury"??? Relative to what--sitting on the couch? Do your studies consider people performing the stroke properly. Please show me the data on this. I'm sure you have plenty of elegant, double blind, prospective, randomized trials to support your statements on butterfly specific injury. If not, please be more careful with your opinions. Butterfly is hard enough to master without uninformed bad press scaring people away.
"requires a pool"??? "requires a coach"???? I would think a well respected professor would be able to bring to bear a little more substantive support onto his assertions.
Good Grief
Burpees-- yes, most boot camp or Tony Horton-esque training includes them. We did them when I was in the Army.
Butterfly--yes, the toughest exercise I can imagine. After 12+ years of masters swimming, I can possibly do a 50 fly on a good day, with tons of rest, I've slept well, ate properly, etc. Basically once a year if I'm lucky. I'd rather run a marathon than swim butterfly, and I've done 2 marathons.
That said, the comparisons in the story are rather weak. Running a 10 min mile? The average marathon finish in the US last year was about that (just a little slower, 4:30 and that average includes all the walkers). And biking at 14 mph... I'm no bike expert by far, but I can usually avg 18 or so with my hybrid bike.
"It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury."
Why is any of that a bad thing?
And I'm not sure why it is specific to butterfly, either.
Its not a bad thing, just not 100% necessary or as Chris said, specific to butterfly. Also I wouldn't think the risk of injury from butterfly is any greater than any other stroke, and probably a lot less than land-based sports.
I definitely feel my shoulders in backstroke and my lower back in breaststroke, so have to ease off sometimes. On butterfly, I just feel my core muscles give up after a while at which point its time to revert to freestyle!
I do kind of wonder. In my case, doing one 50 fly or 4 fast 25s seems to be about equivalent to 500 yards of free in terms of what it takes out of me and deducts from my workout total. It is only highly aneroebic for me and it likely provides some benefit in that capacity. But I wonder if for overall health and calorie burn if I would be better off just giving it up.
My shoulders have also been a little screwed up forever, which I always thought might have been the result of butterfly as a youth but I can't prove it.
"It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury."
Why is any of that a bad thing?
A lot of Times lifestyle articles seem to be written by Trustafarians, or their friends.
That said, this particular ramble addresses a training method that was discussed, more or less, in the thread about masters' practice - high-intensity interval training. The article calls it the HIT method:
In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise.
Most interesting - this researcher found that high-intensity intervals build aerobic capacity faster than long-distance training:
After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours.
Now by coincidence, I'm trying to learn butterfly. It takes me about 30 seconds to swim 25 yards, then I'm so fagged I have to rest about a minute. So it sounds like - for me, at least - butterfly is the perfect exercise.
