How to Swim Butterfly?

As parents, it’s good to know what your kids are learning and why. These tips are applicable to adults learning to swim butterfly as well 

The hardest obstacle in learning how to swim Butterfly, is coordinating the stroke (the arms) with the butterfly kick. We teach that the kick should always initiate the stroke and there are only 2 butterfly kicks in one full butterfly stroke!

You might hear our coaches instructing your child to wriggle? It’s may sound weird but instead of encouraging our students to just conduct a butterfly kick we are encouraging them to wriggle their bodies to help stimulate their arms into the butterfly stroke!

So, we ‘wriggle’ to pull our arms down through the water (this is referred to as the pull phase in the stroke), then we wriggle to bring our arms over the water and back to the front of the body (known as the recovery phase). We tell our students to “wriggle pull, wriggle back/recover” and breathe every second stroke as this helps to build momentum.  Often kids ‘wriggle’ continuously and too much which interrupts their arms in performing the stroke and often results in a disconnected stroke and not a lot of movement forwards!

2 x wiggles is all you need! …next lesson is when and how to breathe effectively in Fly. Stay tuned for more stroke development tips!!