Fix Freestyle Kick and Swim FAST

Your legs are sinking, you can't float, and you don't know why. You need to fix your kick. Wrong kick or no kick at all can cause your body to sink or disbalance your body position in the water completely, leading to a slower swim and faster fatigue. Just fixing your kick alone can help you breathe better, stay on the surface of the water, and most importantly, it can help you swim faster for longer. I'm Dasha, a former swimmer and a coach with 15 years of professional swimming experience, and today I'm gonna teach you how to use your legs in swimming so your kick will never drag your energy down again. Kick is a part of swimming where you use your legs and your feet to move through the water. It is as important in swimming as your body position, breathing, and pulling catch. Actually, not swimming right equals a disbalanced body position in the water, and that can cause you breathing issues, sinking legs, and discoordinated movements in the water. So let's fix this kick once and for all. Oh, and by the way, if you still don't know how to breathe in the water and not get tired, I left the link down below. Freestyle kick, also known as flutter kick, is made out of two phases, the up kick and the down kick. The up kick is when your leg moves up to the surface from the low point in the water, and the down kick is when you push your leg down from the high point in the water towards the bottom. The down kick is the main move where most of the power and the speed come from. The up kick is more relaxed and is there to actually prepare you for the down. During the kick, legs move in the opposition, meaning when one leg is doing the up kick, the other leg is doing the down kick, and then they switch, repeating the same circle over and over again, and that is actually called the kick. The kick starts from your hip and then moves to your knee and only then finishes with your foot. So don't bend and bring your knees to your chest, for example, like in the bicycle exercise. This is wrong. Don't bend your knees too much. Bend them slightly enough to bring your feet up to the surface of the water when you're doing the up kick. When you're doing the down kick, start pushing from your hip to your knee to your foot and then finishing with your toes. Think about a fish or a dolphin, as smooth as possible. Engage your core and try not to drop your hips and your legs too low. Keep them on the surface of the water so when you kick, it's noticeable from the outside. Incorporate the kick drill in every practice, in the warm-up, in the main set, or in the cool-down. These are the variations of the kick that you can try during your swim practice. Kick with the kickboard. So you take the kickboard in front of you and you kick without using any more additional equipment. Kick with the kickboard and the fins. So when you're using the fins, try to keep your body as high to the surface of the water as possible, and fins will actually help you to move a bit faster through the water. Kick with fins only. So here you're not going to have a support in front of you, so you can use your hands to school a little bit. That can also help you to practice your catch in the water. And the last one, kick with no equipment at all. This is a bit advanced kind of a kick, but that's great for you to actually get that feel of full coordination freestyle and the way you're going to kick during swimming freestyle. So once you get comfortable with swimming with the kickboard and in fins, I highly recommend removing all the equipment and getting this real feel of kick. Another thing that you can do during your drill exercise is to practice different breathing patterns. So the first one is where you hold the kickboard in front of you and you're breathing in and out. You're breathing out in the water, so you're blowing the bubbles when you're holding the kickboard. That's a great one to practice breathing in and out. So remember to breathe in with your mouth and to breathe out in the water with your nose. The next one is kicking and not really blowing bubbles in the water. So you're just holding a kickboard in front of you and you hold your head outside of the water. This exercise is really nice when you want to kick and talk to somebody to socialize or you just want to look around and maybe just look around. I don't know. And another last one is great if you want to practice side breathing. So you're going to kick and breathe on the side but here you're going to hold the kickboard in front of you only with one hand. So you're going to hold the kickboard with one hand and then you're going to put your face in the water, blow the bubbles and then turn your head to the side, inhale the air and go back in the water. So at the beginning it's better to use fins in this one because the movement is going to be really, really slow. But once you get better you can remove the fins and then you can alternate the arm. You can hold the kickboard with the other arm and breathe on another side. So that's a great one if you want to practice side breathing and then to take this and then mimic this in the full coordination freestyle. You can try these drills during your next swim practice and if you have nothing to swim there are five really easy beginner-friendly sets with the link down below and they all include kick by the way. Let me know in the comments below what's your biggest struggle in swimming. Is it kick? Is it breathing? Is it your technique or anything else? Let's fix this together! Subscribe to this YouTube channel if you like and you want more helpful videos and I will see you in the next one!