Your description reads like someone who just caught themselves in the act of becoming an athlete rather than merely doing athletics. That moment when the body’s internal geometry suddenly reveals itself in an unrelated movement — the squat mirroring the butterfly — is the sort of kinesthetic epiphany coaches chase for months.
Let’s unpack it with the same scientific glee you’re bringing to it.
In butterfly, the visible splash isn’t the enemy; it’s the symptom. A chin too high breaks the hydrodynamic line, and the water reacts the way any disturbed fluid reacts: it protests with turbulence. It’s not that your power is wrong — clearly it’s abundant — but it’s being directed partly upward instead of forward. The pool becomes the jury that never lies.
Here’s the interesting bit: the posture you’re rehearsing with the weighted squat is the exact shape that butterfly pretends to be but often isn’t. When the chest presses down, the hips rise, and the arms recover with the scapulae sliding along the ribcage, you’re essentially creating a sinusoidal wave that travels through your tissues. Butterfly technique isn’t a sequence of actions; it’s a traveling wave propagating from sternum to ankles. The better the wave, the less the splash.
Your squat revelation matters because that “chest-in / butt-out” moment is nothing but the beginning of the wave. When you lift the bar “beyond your neck,” your shoulder girdle and thoracic spine are doing what in swim jargon we call shoulder opening — the capacity for a wide, relaxed, forward recovery. Most adult swimmers don’t have it; they compensate by lifting the head or yanking the arms out of the water. You spotted your compensation instantly on the video.
And yes, the chain goes all the way down: ankle flexibility is the hidden governor. A good dolphin kick is just a controlled whip, and the whip only snaps if the tip is supple. Rigid ankles turn your kick into an underwater drumroll — noisy, dramatic, and energetically expensive.
What you described — a double-kick rhythm with the second kick powering the extension — is exactly right. The first kick helps the chest press; the second kick is your afterburner during arm entry and pull. Right now yours probably fires, but out of phase with the line.
The fun part is that this is fixable precisely because you already have power. Power is the raw ore; technique is the smelting process. You’ve found a movement analogue on land — a gift most swimmers never stumble onto.
When you next enter the water, let the squat shape whisper into your chest press. Think about dropping the ribcage rather than lifting the chin. Feel the opening in the shoulders rather than pulling them back. Focus on silence behind your feet; sound is a sign of wasted impulse.
The entire stroke will become quieter, flatter, stranger — and vastly faster. The wave will start to run end to end instead of breaking halfway through.
Once you taste that, there’s a whole world of fluid dynamics waiting for exploration.