How to Swim BUTTERFLY Like the BEST in the World

Butterfly is tough. We all know that. So how on earth do these swimmers make it look so effortless? In this video, we're diving deep into the butterfly technique of some of the fastest swimmers on the planet. We'll slow things down, break down their strokes, and find out exactly what makes them so good at it. Whether you're a beginner or advanced swimmer, I'm sure you'll learn something you can apply to your stroke. So let's dive in. Now immediately you see how low he is to the water. When you take the breath, that's one of the things he does really well. He rides high in the water. Let's go ahead and look at what he's doing really well. So great body extension. This is his body. Now if you see his hands where they're set up, that's the initial catch and it's at a shoulder width right there. You can see where his shoulders are and the hands press just outside the shoulders. That's really, really good. Now the next thing I want you guys to pay attention to is how he's pressing his chest down. The chest is coming down. That's fantastic. I'm gonna do it in red so you can see that. So the chest is being pressed down which is gonna make the hips go up and that's why he's so good at the 200 butterfly because the hips are riding high. If this is the water line, his body's riding on top of the water. I mean that's not realistically the water line. It's probably more like that. So if you look at that higher red line that I drew, basically half his body or at least trying to get half of the body above the surface of the water and that's critical if you're trying to swim fast and Leon Marchand does an incredible job at maintaining his body position in the butterfly. We saw it above the water how he breathes. Wow, right there you can see where his eyes are and his the water lines here and his chin is right above the line. If you notice how his hands are exiting the water, his thumbs are basically facing the water all the way through the recovery. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to clear the screen. I'm going to zoom back out and I want you to pay attention to that how his hands basically recover with the thumbs facing the water very very close to the surface of the water because if you come too high out of the water in butterfly, your legs are going to sink and we saw that and that's not going to help you out. Pay attention to what we just talked about. Beautiful stroke. So clean. So effortless. It looks like he's not even trying. If you notice her dolphin kick is actually not that big. She's really minimizing resistance rather than going for increasing propulsion. Now it's really important to note that in butterfly everyone and all the strokes actually everyone is built a little bit differently so the amplitude of the dolphin kick is going to be different. If you notice she doesn't bend her knees a lot. Her body is following a relatively straight line. The dolphin kick is originating from the hips. She actually generates most of the power I would say from the middle of the diaphragm all the way back and as you can see from this front facing view it's actually really interesting to note how she doesn't really displace that much water. You can actually fit her whole body through this box and her frame is not really occupying that much space. It's relatively narrow and that's the goal. You want to be like a torpedo underneath the water. When we look at the hand entry it needs to enter the water at 11 and 1 so that means you basically your hands are floating on top of the hitting the water at 11 and 1 of the clock so if we had a clock and these are the arms of the clock this is where they are entering the water and oftentimes swimmers are either going to enter too wide especially if they're trying to go fast and they're picking up their tempo or actually more often a lot of swimmers actually go too narrow and basically the hands are touching and I believe at every speed Sara does an incredible job positioning her hands right in front of her shoulders maximizing distance per stroke. Now one thing we're going to transition when we talk about her stroke is how she's able to always move forward and here it is in slow motion. Hands are entering at 11 and 1 she's not really going up and down that much and I think this is what benefits her a lot in these shorter distance the 50 and the 100 butterfly. She's really keeping a relatively flat dolphin body motion and I think this underwater shot right here shows everything that you need to know. Basically when she's swimming butterfly she's not really doing a lot of displacement up and down I mean certainly her body has this sine curve going for it right her hips are going up and then down up and then down and that's great but the total amplitude meaning the amount of displacement right it's relatively narrow it's not very wide. Now if we focus in on what makes her so fast it's the power of her pull look at how she's entering the water 11 and 1 and from that position her hand pulls immediately back there's no out sweep and in sweep as soon as the hands get in front at shoulder width it's an immediate pull back. There it is in slow motion you can see the pull pattern underwater I'm going to pause it on this next stroke so you can see that you can see the high elbow catch right there it is that's the high elbow catch and the water is being just thrust behind. The first thing I want to focus on with Michael Phelps's stroke is just how smooth the recovery is here's a few great underwater shots let's go ahead and back up on that now if you notice he keeps his chin just at the surface level of the water you want to keep your body as your head at least as low to the surface as possible because if you lift your head too high out of the water then your hips are going to sink on the back end and that's going to mean you're dragging your legs kind of like an anchor and it's going to make you swim really slow so Michael has done an incredible job even though he breathes pretty much every single stroke in both the 100 and the 200 butterfly he's able to swim so fast by maintaining his speed at all parts of the stroke and when you breathe that is potentially the slowest part of the stroke now a lot of butterflies actually have a different size amplitude when I'm talking about amplitude I'm talking about the total the distance in how far you're kicking both up and down so Michael actually has a relatively bigger amplitude than a lot of other swimmers do underwater so I did an analysis on Sarah Sjostrom and her underwater dolphin kick is actually a lot smaller than Michael's is doesn't mean anyone is wrong or right everyone has different body positions strength flexibility and that all factors in but if you notice Michael is kicking in both the down direction as well as the up direction and so a lot of swimmers they only focus on the down kick that's this part right here and that part is actually a lot easier but you actually get the benefit of kicking both directions in butterfly so the best swimmers in the world and Michael included they're actually kicking in both directions and the faster you can kick in the up direction then the faster you can return to the down kick which is actually more powerful now if you notice he's kicking in both directions up and down eyes are looking down the streamline is really good meaning the fingertips are together the arms are nice and tight he's very narrow like a torpedo moving through the water this is something that's often overlooked now if you look at what's going on with the hands his fingertips are you know one hand on top of the other his eyes are looking down relatively and that is a body line that we aspire to he's trying to displace as little water as possible maximizing the power of the kick when you look at the pull it's almost like two freestyle strokes happening at the same time we're going to put it right here what does that look like it looks like a freestyle stroke get that high elbow catch there's the other arm right and then the pull happens you know not with a straight arm now the shorter the distance the butterfly the power you can generate but really what we have here is two early vertical forearm and that really means you're in positioning your hands from your fingertips to your elbow to pull the water behind you because that is how you you pull yourself forward if you notice his body line is pretty high in the water his body is actually pretty flat at this point so oftentimes swimmers they have this like huge like up and down swivel and really that's that's reserved for when you're under the water when you're on top of the water it's actually a little bit flatter even for someone like Michael Phelps he isn't really displacing the water in that wave motion so he's pretty flat on the upper body i'm gonna pause it right there his eyes are looking down and at this point if you start to notice that is his body position so what happened to his legs his legs are sinking a little bit his butt is no longer at the surface of the water i'll draw the surface of the water that is the surface of the water and there's a gap between his butt which means he's displacing more water now that's actually not that bad of a thing because look what happens next his eyes and his chest are gonna press down boom and now look what happened to his hips remember that water line that was the water line and look at his butt his butt's riding high in the water you'd be able to see his butt because his hips are pressing up and his chest is pressing down and that is where the actual motion of the dolphin kick appears in the butterfly stroke now this is from back in his Michigan days as a teenager early 20s you can see the two i want to look at the strokes right here so you can see how he's pressing his chest down and his hips are coming up you can't even see the top of his swimsuit his butt right so let's play this here and you can see what that looks like it looks like his kick has actually gotten a little bit more compact a little bit of knee bend you don't want to bend your knees too much all right let's talk about drills so here is a great drill it's called two strokes on your right two on your left two together and what you're trying to do is work on that rhythm we talked about that undulation motion if you notice his elbow is bent that's not how you swim the stroke but in this drill and his coach even talks about it you're really focusing on pressing that chest down getting the hips up there it is she's right there in case you missed her and if you notice when she breathes she's not really coming too high out of the water right here's a line at the top of her head and her chin right there's a very level channel because you don't want or your head to go up too high because then your hips will sink we don't want that yeah let's take a look here you can see when her hands enter the water we're going to zoom in right there and so we look at how she's entering the water it's just past shoulder width keeping in line with the spine that's the middle of her body and you want to have your hand and hands enter at 11 o'clock and one o'clock and she's so consistent you know breathing every stroke we see Michael Phelps do something like that but not everyone will be successful with a breathe every stroke but she's able to do it and consistently hold a high tempo which is really really unique in an event like the 200 fly or 400 ion so this is her underwater dolphin kick it's beautiful and so one thing that's really important i'm going to try and find a point where she has the biggest knee bend so there's a big misconception is that you want to bend your knees a lot to go faster in the underwater dolphin kick that's not true you want to have a small this is the maximum knee bend right now i'm going to draw line from her hip to her knee at the pivot point and really you don't want to bend your knees that much this is the most extreme knee bend so if you look at her hands perfect streamline right she's very narrow the front of this box very little displacement and then the kick is driving in both up and down direction so you can use your glutes lower back hamstrings to drive in one direction and then your hip flexors and your quads and then your shins and you're pointing your toes are going to drive the kick in the opposite direction so i'm going to go ahead and take everything off the screen now watch this in slow motion you can see there's an up kick and a down kick and some swimmers have a bigger amplitude some other swimmers are a little bit flatter we did an analysis on sarah hoistrom of sweden and she doesn't really bend her body that much at all it's very flat so right away we see these early vertical forearms engaging on both sides oh there it is and i'm actually gonna draw it here so you can see how he's generating that power when his hand enters the water and he's really positioning himself to catch the water immediately in butterfly a lot of swimmers do this wrong especially in the 200 butterfly the longer the race you're actually going to have sort of this like out sweep and then it's like a pull down and we don't want that and what he's doing really well we're going to slow this down and watch it here he engages and pulls in a straight line immediately that is a beautiful early vertical forearm and that's right here that's what we're talking about actually more specifically right there and so that's from the fingertips all the way to the elbow that allows you to pull with both hands and oftentimes i mentioned earlier in butterfly a lot of swimmers i'm going to draw with this with uh with the blue they'll have like an out sweep and then they'll have an in sweep and then they'll have this pull and you don't want that this is all bad i'm going to draw that out you want to have just this one pattern on both arms to really propel you forward two free self strokes at the same time so underwater dolphin kicks immediately grabs the water keeps his body in line presses the chest down and then one other thing to note really quick look at his ankle flexibility watch what happens when he does his first dolphin kick how good his flexibility is i mean look at that look at that flexibility that's a beautiful sine curve and so that's why you know wearing fins is a great way to improve your ankle flexibility and just swimming more kicking more and the more surface area you can create to kick in that up and downward pattern the faster you're going to be and this is not only for butterfly but any of the strokes except for breaststroke as you can see video analysis is really important to swimming fast so if you've never seen yourself swim you've got to make sure you start filming yourself at different speeds and angles just like we watched in this video if you want our team of coaches to analyze your stroke we do this every single week in our swimming academy so go to the link in the description and join us if you want to take your swimming to the next level