Butterfly gliding technique

Hey people, and welcome back to my swimming blog. As most of you may know, we're still discussing about the butterfly style. This time in studying the butterfly style, we're going to study the gliding technique. This is probably the simplest (if that's the right word) component of the butterfly style, since it needs pretty much zero effort. And once again, this is actually a component in the butterfly style I've actually mastered, being so simple to perform, so I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to fill you guys in with the details about the butterfly glide. Anyway, enough chitchat, let's just get straight to it then!

However, as usual, I cannot possibly make this post trustworthy of a post that provides swimming tips unless accompanied by a video to help assist you on how to swim. Official or otherwise, at least there's a video. Anyway, feel free to check out the video if you desire. This time, however, my “infamous policy” about the videos (you know, “if you don't watch this video you're going to not understand the rest of this blog, if you watch it then you'll understand, blah blah blah”) has changed. This time, since the video is not going to be very helpful for you guys, there's going to be a few new rules...

As usual, you might want to watch the video (especially the part about the gliding) to help understand the blog, but it isn't filled with the helpful tips you'd usually find in my videos in my other swimming posts. This one's just pure swimming, with very little advice given to the watcher. So watching it won't make much difference, feel free to just read the post, the video's not really important to watch. If you want to watch it, well, good for you. Not saying that it'd really help with understanding the post. Oh yeah, and by the way, here's the link for the video...

Anyway, back to the main topic; the “gliding” phase of the butterfly style. After you move your hands and feet in butterfly, you only have a few milliseconds worth of gliding before you unleash the power of your feet and hands again. However (at least as far as I know judging from search results from the Internet), swimmers (or at least me) don't usually call the brief milliseconds' worth of cool-down from the hand and leg strike a “glide”. We usually call this the “recovery phase”.

In the recovery phase of the butterfly, it is merely just a period of time when in that precious milliseconds worth of cool-down I told you about, you take a few short moments to relax your feet and hands before starting them up again. And that's pretty much it, really; just a cool-down period for your body so it can be ready for the next hand and leg strike.

Anyway, that should be all for today's post. Forgive me for the inadequacy of content in the post, it was just so hard to find videos and tips on the “glide” phase of the butterfly style. However, I do hope that it will be of some use for you guys. I'll (probably) be back with the final post on the butterfly by tomorrow, but until then, goodbye and see you until the next post!