Thanks for writing. Although I compete in butterfly and individual medley events, I’m not a TI butterfly coach/instructor so I can’t help with fly. But, if you go here [url]http://www.totalimmersion.net/store/home-page/betterfly-for-every-body.html[/url]you’ll get what you need to know about the stroke.

If you want to talk about power from the core, I can help explain it, but it can be like Americans understanding intransitive verbs. One day you just get it and it makes sense. But this doesn’t help if you haven’t figured it out yet and you’ve got a grammar test.

You are right to use the Cheshire Cat analogy.

I’m more existential with hip involvement discussions, so I’m comfortable using a fly drill to help people learn freestyle hip connection. I know many students aren’t though. A lot of people want to know exactly what to do to incorporate core body into a stroke. I’m hoping, however, that your brain will make some connection between the fly drill and hip involvement in freestyle and the intransitive verb euphoria will take over. In a strict training environment such as TI, I need to make sure everyone understands that I don’t have an easily transferable set of steps to guarantee power from the core.

I work one-on-one with athletes and they all eventually get it. I’ve never seen someone jump in the water and swim with connected hips. People think about not drowning, breathing, moving arms and legs, and then start thinking about hips.

Also, swimming is something you do differently as you get better and it’s really impossible to bring hips into the picture when gross body movements aren’t controlled yet. So we ignore core body propulsion for the most part and that’s our fault for not emphasizing that you may be kicking gently with your feet to complete drills but that doesn’t mean you will move your feet faster in order to go faster. We need to make the transition to core body propulsion a coming attraction when a swimmer first gets in the water.

StoneSkipper, which we also let go, was a Fly-only drill that involved bring the hands back to hips after a chest pulse. Why do we no longer teach it? Because we now emphasize a fly stroke that is more about landing forward than pushing back.

Since we let it go, you’re welcome to appropriate the name.;)

Yes. I can reshoot it. Steve Jobs and I have this ongoing discussion about why I have to hold my iPhone sideways to get video that shows up in portrait format on my pc but then in…anyway, I’ll reshoot it and send Steve the bill.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Incorporating stone skipper into freestyle is more focal-point-based and less muscle- and motion-based. The objective is to go faster by incorporating core body.

It’s more like that little vent in the corner of your dashboard that points air toward the side window. If you put your hand in front of it, even with the defrost fan on high, you can’t feel the air coming out, but the window isn’t fogged up, so something is happening.

I think the biggest mistake I used to make was assuming that drills are useless after the basic gross body movements are learned. I’d bore swimmers to death with them when they’d rather be doing high-heart rate activities, so they’d look at them as training wheels to be relegated to the garage as soon as possible.

I think drills serve this gross muscle training goal, but as swimmers become more proficient, drills are one of the few mechanisms available to help us recognize the nuances necessary to go faster. This means they have to become dynamic activities that are incorporated into swimming.

When I read Terry’s blogs, like “Little Known Fact About Speed” [/url]http://www.swimwellblog.com/archives/926[/url], I feel like he is talking directly to me and addressing this nuanced, swimming-incorporated drill structure. I read about his swim adventures and see them as mental and physical puzzles he works out – drills – in order to increase his speed as well as his love for the sport.

This is another way of saying the brain has to direct the muscles.

When muscles direct the brain the freestyle swimmer bounces after doing stone skipper.

Are you proposing to swim freestyle with more of a butterfly like motion as one switches from side to side?

John