Breathing Exercises for the Butterfly Stroke

Video Transcript

"PHILLIP TORIELLO: Hello and welcome to Expert Village. I'm Phillip Toriello from the Avila Bay Athletic Club. Butterfly breathing. Butterfly breathing involves breathing every two strokes. We've talked about breathing every three strokes with your freestyle. We've talked about breathing every stroke with your breaststroke. In butterfly, you're breathing every two strokes, and basically this will happen during your pull portion. This is basically lifting you up out of the water, taking your breath, and going right back down. Now, a misconception that people have much like with the breaststroke is that the higher you come out, the stronger you are, which is nice; better breath you'll get, which is good, but what it ends up doing is you turn your body flat, basically you're bringing yourself to a stop. And again, the higher you come out of the water, the deeper you go into the water, and that's not what we want. With butterfly, we want to stay on top of the water, gliding through it as smoothly as possible. So when we're doing our breathing, we pull, just barely lifting our head up out of the water. We want to bring our chin about right here, about an inch off the water; if that, to get that breath and keep our head looking down. If we bring our head up during the breathing, basically it's going to compromise the rest of our body. If you lift your head up like this when you're lying flat, if I lift my head up, it's going to turn my body this way as opposed to keeping it flat and on top of the water. So, remember, just keep your head low so you can maintain the proper formation and flow of your butterfly stroke."