Swimming butterfly faster comes down to three things: reducing drag, improving kick timing, and generating more power per stroke. Most swimmers lose speed not because they lack fitness but because small technical errors create resistance that no amount of effort can overcome. Fixing those errors, and building the right kind of strength, can produce noticeable drops in your times.
Keep Your Body Low and Flat
The single biggest speed killer in butterfly is a sinking hip. Every time your upper body rises to breathe or recover your arms, your hips drop, and you end up plowing through the water at an angle. That angle creates enormous frontal resistance. Elite butterflyers barely clear the surface when they breathe. They come up just enough to get air and nothing more.
Breathe low and forward, not upward. Your chin should skim the water’s surface rather than lifting high above it. By the time your arms finish their recovery and re-enter the water, your head needs to be back in line with the rest of your body. If you delay getting your head down, you’re stuck in a high-drag position for longer than necessary, and your speed bleeds away with every extra fraction of a second your face stays above the surface.
Timing your breath matters as much as head height. Breathe with the natural rise of your body during the stroke, not after it. If you wait too long, your arms have to recover over the water while your body is already sinking, making the whole movement harder and slower.
Lock In Your Two-Kick Timing
Butterfly uses two kicks per stroke cycle, and each one has a specific job. Getting the timing right is what separates a smooth, fast butterfly from one that feels like a constant fight against the water.
The first kick finishes right as your hands enter the water after the recovery. This kick drives your body into a streamlined, aligned position at the front of the stroke, setting up a strong catch. The second kick finishes as your hands exit the water at the back of the stroke. This one lifts your hips, making it easier to swing your arms forward over the surface without dragging them through it.
Two of the most common timing mistakes are kicking twice after hand entry (which leaves you with no propulsion during the pull’s finish) and skipping the kick at hand exit entirely. If your arms feel heavy during recovery, a missing or mistimed second kick is almost always the reason. A useful cue: think “kick in, kick out,” matching each kick to the moment your hands enter and exit the water.
Pull With High Elbows and Accelerate
Your arms generate roughly 90% of your forward velocity in butterfly, so small improvements in your pull translate directly into faster swimming. The pull has three connected sweeps, and the key to all of them is keeping your elbows higher than your hands.
After your hands enter the water about shoulder width apart (thumbs first, elbows slightly bent), sweep them down and outward into a Y shape. Then turn your hands inward and sweep them back toward each other underneath your chest while maintaining that high elbow position. Finally, turn your palms up and push them backward along the sides of your body until they exit near your hips.
The most important detail here is acceleration. Your hands should speed up through the pull, moving fastest at the finish. Many swimmers do the opposite, putting their energy into the catch and then coasting through the back half. Think of the pull as a whip that snaps at the end. That final acceleration is what launches your arms into a clean, relaxed recovery.
Make Your Dolphin Kick Smaller and Faster
A big, sweeping kick feels powerful but actually slows you down. Research comparing human swimmers to dolphins found that while both use similar kick depths relative to body size, human swimmers need up to five kicks per body length traveled, compared to about 1.3 for dolphins. The difference comes down to efficiency. Humans tend to kick with too much amplitude and not enough frequency, pushing water in directions that don’t help propulsion.
Focus on a compact, quick kick that originates from your core and hips rather than bending deeply at the knees. Your feet should move through a range of roughly 12 to 18 inches, not two or three feet. Think of your legs as a whip: the motion starts at your chest, rolls through your hips, and finishes with a snap at your feet. Reducing kick size while increasing tempo keeps your body in a tighter, more streamlined shape and generates propulsion more consistently.
Use Your Underwater Phase
Every wall is a chance to gain free speed, but only if your underwater dolphin kick is genuinely faster than your surface swimming. If it isn’t, you’re better off breaking out early and getting into your stroke.
For swimmers who can kick fast underwater, the general ceiling is around eight kicks off each wall. Beyond that, you start decelerating and lose whatever advantage you gained. The priority is speed, not distance. Training your underwater kick over short bursts of five to eight meters at maximum intensity builds the explosive power you need far better than grinding out long underwater sets at moderate effort. Quality and speed matter more than how far you can stay submerged.
Build Power on Dry Land
Butterfly demands explosive strength from your upper body for the pull and your lower body for the kick. Research on competitive swimmers found strong correlations between lower-body explosive power and butterfly sprint performance, with vertical jump scores predicting swim velocity remarkably well. In one study, the correlation between sustained jump power and speed over the first five meters was 0.90, meaning jump performance explained about 81% of the variation in sprint speed off the wall.
Most of the dolphin kick’s power comes from the muscles that extend your knee, which are the same muscles that drive a vertical jump. This makes jump-based exercises one of the most effective and accessible dryland tools for butterfly. Repeated vertical jumps done for 30 seconds (sometimes called a continuous jump test) closely mirror the sustained explosive effort butterfly demands. Box jumps, squat jumps, and depth jumps all target the same pattern.
For upper body work, focus on movements that mimic the pull: lat pulldowns, straight-arm pulldowns, and medicine ball slams all train the muscles responsible for sweeping your arms through the water. Pairing upper and lower body power work two to three times per week gives most swimmers a noticeable improvement in stroke power within a few training cycles.
Putting It Together in Practice
Trying to fix everything at once rarely works. Pick one element per practice block and drill it until it feels automatic. Kick timing is the best starting point for most swimmers because it affects everything else: body position, breathing ease, and arm recovery all improve when the kicks land at the right moments.
Single-arm butterfly drill lets you isolate timing and breathing without the coordination overload of full stroke. Vertical kicking in deep water builds kick strength and teaches you to generate propulsion from your core rather than your knees. Short sprint sets of 25 meters at race effort, with plenty of rest, reinforce good mechanics under fatigue better than grinding out long butterfly sets where your form breaks down after the first 50.
Butterfly rewards efficiency more than any other stroke. A swimmer who stays flat, times their kicks precisely, and accelerates through the pull will always be faster than one who simply tries harder. Work on reducing what slows you down before adding more effort, and the speed will follow.