When Bruno practices the underwater dolphin portion of his starts, first he goes slow and builds the feeling he wants to maintain when going fast.

Think of doing these in slow motion at first.  Notice a couple very small differences between slow and fast.

When he goes a bit slower, after he enters the water, he allows his body to glide a bit more.  Think about how he worked on this in the last video when he practices diving in and gliding.  He enters the water and reaches his best body line before initiating the kick.  When he’s going fast, he reaches that same line, only a bit shallower.  This means he’s not going to have to wait as long to initiate his first kick.

When Bruno is practicing the movements a bit more slowly, you’ll see that his underwater dolphin kick is a bit larger.  This helps him identify where the power is being generated from.  When he speeds things up, the amplitude or height of the dolphin becomes smaller... which he hopes makes it quicker.

Whether Bruno is going slower or faster, you can also see how stable his head is as he initiates his dolphin kicks.  He focuses on driving the head and core of his body forward.

When he’s going a bit slower, it gives him just a little more time to focus on the kick.  He adds a kick or two to give him more opportunity to feel all the details of his kick.  When he increases the tempo, he’ll only take three kicks prior to the transition from dolphin to flutter.

On his fast breakouts, he makes sure his head stays down and he approaches the surface of the water in as parallel body position as possible.  Again, forward becomes more important that exploding upward.

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Start - Underwater Dolphins