3 Quick Drills To Perfect Your Kick

Freestyle is all about the arms. Long-distance swimmers don't need to kick. If freestyle kick only makes up about 20% of propulsion, ignore it. Now, yes, freestyle kick does have less impact on your overall speed than the pull, but it still plays a vital role in being fast and efficient. Get it right, and you'll see the difference. The kick can be a really frustrating element of the freestyle stroke. If you watch the pros of middle and long-distance swimming, it seems like they're hardly kicking. In fact, their legs and their position is so dialed in, it just looks like their legs are floating behind them. Looks can be deceiving, as actually the position and the movement of your legs goes far beyond just adding that propulsion. The correct kick will aid your stroke rotation, help with an effective catch, reduce drag, contribute to the timing and the rhythm of the stroke, and contribute to your speed through the water. The bad news, in order to improve your kick, you're going to simply have to do more of it. There's not many ways of dressing it up. If you watch swimmers, you'll quite often see them doing plenty of kick drills, usually with a kickboard, arms out on top of it, looking really relaxed and finding it quite enjoyable. If you don't relate to that, or that's not you, or you don't even manage to go forward when you isolate your legs, do not panic. You're not alone. There are, in fact, many intricate parts to what looks like a very simple action of moving your legs back and forth or up and down, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that. We will be covering all of those elements as we go through some of these suggested drills. You just need to find a deep enough section of the pool where you obviously can't touch the bottom, probably near a lane rope if you need the support, or maybe even the side of the wall. Start sculling water and then drop your legs down so you're in a tall standing position. Begin to kick your legs and reduce the hand and arm movement. In the ideal situation, you will remove the assistance of your arms altogether, but first, keep them still, and then if you're feeling strong, try a stint with your hands and even your elbows lifted out of the water. Now, this is a really tough drill and it's totally okay to wear fins if you need to. You want to imagine yourself in a tube so that you're really upright and almost straight like a pencil, and your legs and your knees and ankles aren't coming out too far in front of you or too far behind you. Ideally, because it's really intense and you want to do it well, do it in really short bursts and then have plenty of rest in between. It's time to bring out all of the toys, the kickboard, the fins, and even the snorkel. Now, the snorkel and the kickboard are there purely so that you can concentrate on your legs. The idea is you can keep your head and your upper body completely still whilst focusing on that kick. Using fins will naturally highlight ankle flexibility or lack of, as the case might be. You'll find that you want to have your toes pointed yet relaxed, which might, for some of you, sound a little impossible at the moment, but don't worry. You can work on that. Just swimming with fins will help, but also, you can do some work out of the pool as well. Now, a tip for getting more range out of your ankles is to actually look at rotating your legs, so bringing your big toes closer together. Now, you do that by simply rotating further up the chain. If you can have a practice sitting down on the ground, you'll find that if you just rotate your legs in, it'll look as though your toes are more pointed even though the actual ankle flexibility hasn't changed. In order to effectively use the fins, you'll need to engage your glutes on the upward phase of the kick. Without the use of this large muscle, you'll struggle to recover from the powerful downward kick. Think of pulling in your tummy and engaging your core. This will help with controlling the movement. In a superman position, by this, I mean have your lower arm extended out in front of you, and your upper arm is just going to rest on your hip. You're going to be swimming effectively on your side. Now, again, if you want to use fins to help get this right, that's great. It's not a competition. It's just about ingraining really good technique, so feel free to pick them up. Now, ideally, you want to be, again, swimming in that fairly tight tube that we talked about earlier. For this, it's a really good idea to swim next to the wall or the lane rope. You'll notice that your kick's probably wider than you think it is. If you swim along facing said lane rope or wall, and then turn around and come back the other way with it behind you, you'll notice if any bits of your body, your knees, or your ankles are touching the wall or the lane rope, then that probably gives you a bit of an indication of the position that you're actually creating when you're kicking. If you like numbers, then this is for you. The correct knee bend is up to 130 degrees. Any more, and you'll actually be adding resistance and slowing yourself down. That might even sound more than you expect, but when you factor in the hip selection that happens simultaneously, it's easy to reach or even go further than that angle. Side kick is effectively just another way of dressing kick, but it gives you a different proprioception. You're going to need to engage your core, so you've got to hold that position. You've got to think about where your body is in the water. Also, it just helps you remember that kick is not just about kicking down. You've obviously got to bring it back to the center point each time, which probably seems obvious, but when you're kicking on your front, you can just say, oh, I'm kicking down, the leg comes back up naturally, but on your side, you really need to focus about kicking of both elements of it, the flexion and the extension part. Isolating the kick is a hard work, however, it's necessary. If you try to focus really closely on the legs whilst doing full stroke, it ends up being a little bit too much for the brain to compute, or at least it does for my personal experience. With that in mind, you want it to become a little bit of a habit of just doing some regular kicks. If you put it in your warm-up on every time you swim, you'll just start to find that you can do that little bit of focus. Then obviously, you've got to put the kick back into the full stroke. This is where it's a real focus on timing. If you are a long-distance swimmer and you're only doing a two or four-beat kick, it becomes more noticeable. Ideally, you want to have the downbeat of the kick on the same side as the arm that's going into the water. As you're pushing down in the catch, that same leg should be kicking down. Now, try not to overthink it. I know I've just planted that save. You might find you're already doing it or you can't even work out if you are, but wouldn't overthink it, but the kick will naturally hopefully fit in with the rest of the stroke. Then there's probably a few of you watching this video saying, I'm a triathlete. Even after this, I still just want to save my legs for the bike and the run. I hear you. However, the leg kick, getting it right, is not about kicking hard. It's about kicking efficiently. Once you've got your kick in time with your stroke, it's not only going to make you swim faster and more efficiently, but it won't be any harder work. I would suggest investing a little bit of time on working on these legs, even if they are just 20% of the overall propulsion. Hopefully, you have enjoyed this. Do give us a like if you've liked this video. If you're not yet a subscriber for some reason, hit the subscribe button and join us at GTN.