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PHILLIP TORIELLO: Hello and welcome to Expert Village. I'm Phillip Toriello from the Avila
Bay Athletic Club. The butterfly kick: The butterfly kick is comprised of, simply put,
the dolphin kick, which many of us know and many of us practiced and worked on and played
with when we were first learning how to swim. "Hey, mommy, I can swim like a dolphin," was
very common. Basically, you're going to be utilizing your knees. You're going to be utilizing
everything from your knees down to your toes. A lot of people have fallen under the thought
that you use your whole body into one giant wave motion but that's a little--I mean it's
close but it's a little bit off. When you're focusing on your kick, you're focusing on
everything from your hips down. You're not utilizing your lower back. You're just focusing
on everything from your hips down. When you look at dolphins as they swim through the
water, they're not moving their whole body up and down like this as far as their middle
point. They're focusing on everything from where approximately our hips would be down
through their tail or the lower half of their body, not their entire body. An important
aspect of your dolphin kick is to remember to keep your legs and your feet close together.
You don't want to have two individual dolphin tails; you want to have one giant dolphin
tail. So, an example of that would be keeping your feet, just like this, nice and close
together, bending at the knees and just going up and down. The bend of your knee or your
kick motion as one giant tail will be about a third of the way. You don't want to bend
your--or bring your heels all the way to your bottom, but instead, you just want to bend
about a third or a 30-degree angle, not a 45 and not a 90, but about a 30-degree angle
to get a fast, proper, dolphin kick.