h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i have to ask. if it is so efficient why isn't it faster than freestyle?

My guess is that you can increase your rate of swimming more easily in front crawl than you can with the butterfly.
It's more difficult to undulate your body more quickly (with associated kicks and arm movements) than it is to whirl your arms faster through the water and paddle faster in front crawl.

Personally I used to find (when I was swimming evry day up to last year) that I kind of had one speed in butterfly whereas I could speed up or slow down at will using either breastroke or crawl.


In othe words, just because butterfly is more efficent (i.e power applied to forward speed ratio is better) than crawl, doesn't mean that you can't apply far more power in crawl and so go faster.

The most efficient, and fastest stroke by the way is, I believe, neither of these and is the one where you just swim underwater - that's why competitve swimming has limits on the amount of time you can spend under the surface.

Of course, in the absence of scuba tanks or being a fish, this has it's own limitations

but isn't efficiency a measure of energy converted into forward momentum in this instance? and as others have suggested, butterfly is especially tiring. this would seem to indicate that large amounts of energy are expended that do not result in either endurance or speed. ie it isn't actually efficient. my question originally was framed with an open mind; i had thought that it was possible that freestyle, being the premier event, attracted the better athletes and therefore this resulted in faster times. additionally, it might be that being a relatively new stroke, and technically more difficult to master, that the 'fine tuning' still had some margin to make up on freestyle.

which returns me to the original question. if butterfly is more efficient (in a meaningful sense), is it the case that, in theory at least , one day the fastest times will be by butterflyers?

"The peak speed of the butterfly is even faster than that of the front crawl, due to the synchronous pull/push with both arms, yet since speed drops significantly during the recovery phase, it is overall slightly slower than the front crawl." -- wikipedia