One of our Readers Writes:
One-armed butterfly is a swimming drill that helps improve your butterfly stroke because it is easier and less tiring than the full stroke, so you can do it for a longer time.
To practice this drill, you do the butterfly technique using one arm. Your other arm is either kept at your side or extended straight in front of you.
You could, for example, do 25 meters of the drill using your left arm, then 25 meters using your right arm.
Swimming regular butterfly is hard to do for anything but a short time, so you end up not being able to practice as much.
Doing it with just one arm is easier and doesn’t tire you as much. Also, you can get the stroke perfect.
Once you feel confident you understand how to do this drill, you can try doing a few laps of the proper butterfly stroke.
One-Armed Butterfly Video
The following video illustrates one-armed butterfly and gives some additional explanations:
Our Comments:
This is indeed a nice drill. We practiced it regularly when I took swimming lessons a few years ago. To practice this drill, we used short swim fins.
This drill allows you to get the feel of the butterfly stroke, and especially the movement of the body dolphin.
It also lets you practice the correct timing of the arm stroke without getting tired quickly, as described above by our anonymous reader.
Learning Path for the Butterfly Stroke
Below is an overview of our series of articles on learning the butterfly stroke. Each article in this series contains one or more drills that have to be mastered. The current article is highlighted:
Once you have gone through all the steps of this learning path, you should be able to swim butterfly without any problems.
Good luck!