Our friends at ProSwimwear host Speedo's video about swimming the Butterfly stroke. The swimmer you see has good technique, because he's learned and practiced for many years. See how he pushes his hands back all the way to the thighs when pulling? Where do his eyes look when he swims?
Thanks to Indiana University and Dr. James Counsilman, we can see what butterfly stroke looked like fifty years ago. What do you think? If you watch the video on the left, from nowadays, what do you notice? Do they look the same? Or different? The swimmer in this video (Mark Spitz) won nine olympic gold medals in swimming, seven of them all in one games, in 1972. Do you recognize the key words Ms. Vivian uses in the lesson about Butterfly?
The stroke we swim today, called Butterfly, came about as a change to another popular stroke, one that we're still swimming today.
The folks at SwimmingWorldTV put together this video showing the history of those changes, and how it happened!