question about a safe butterfly recovery

[Danny]

In the TI freestyle forum there has been an extensive discussion on the importance of recovering in the scapular plane. (one aspect of that discussion concerns just what is meant by this.) The idea is roughly to keep your elbow in front of the plane, parallel to your shoulders, which separates your front side from your back side during the entire recovery, because that helps to avoid shoulder impingement.

I am 66 yrs old and have just finished a month of physical therapy for an old injured shoulder (separation 25-30 yr. ago) because the shoulder started to hurt during my butterfly recovery. Once it started hurting, I stopped doing fly, and have only been doing freestyle since then, but the thought is that I am now ready to have another try at fly and see whether or not my shoulder can handle it. As I contemplate this, it occurs to me that the above advice about staying in the scapular plane is hard to follow in a fly recovery, especially if you pull your hands out down by your hips. One person has advised me that the solution is not to allow the pull phase to go down that low and to exit earlier so as to keep your arms in the scapular plane during the fly recovery.

I would be interested in thoughts on this subject. Is there some sort of consensus on the question? Is it possible to stay in the scapular plane during a fly recovery and, if so, how?

Thanks for your input