Swimming Butterfly, WEST Swimming technique
20 years ago Olympic swimmers started swimming Butterfly in a different way. In fact, one of the best Olympic swimmers in the world today, the Hungarian Cseh László, swims this way – he closes his hands in an arrow over his head.
If you lift your hands slowly from the sides of your body so that the backs of your hands will meet over your head eventually, you will be able to feel the point where tension is created in the shoulders. This is the exact point and angle where your arms should be when they penetrate the water. If you try to do it with your hands lifted beyond this point you will create tension in your shoulders and pain in your neck, to the point that this will be impossible for you to perform.
Olympic swimmers hold their hands in an arrow over their heads, their head is deep under water and their hands above it. This is hard even for a very flexible person.
Another thing is the kicking. Anyone will tell you that there are two kicks in Butterfly , and this is true, but in WEST swimming technique we want to drag our legs and the whole area of the core muscles. We don’t want to work with our legs because the arching will create pressure to the back, and in WEST technique we treat every person as if he or she has a herniated disk.
What we want to do is glide deep, something like half a meter, and then wait. When we dive with our head and then glide the kick will happen on its own, and in this way we will avoid pain to the neck, because when you have neck pain your whole body goes into stress.
The only situation where we won’t recommend Butterfly is when there is pain in the shoulders, because then it’s very hard to lift the arms from the sides of the body the way you should do when swimming this style, but if there is such pain you can work on it using the WEST technique in other styles, get over the pain and the swim Butterfly. When swimming Butterfly becomes easy for you, you can start swimming long distances.
In conclusion, the three important points in swimming Butterfly are: Diving, Gliding deep and open arms.
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