Skipping rope is not only a low impact way to quickly develop strength in your ankles and calves, but it will also develop overall athleticism and help you be lighter on your feet, which comes in handy for developing quicker turns and starts. Swimmers can build up ankle strength by incorporating skipping into their warm-up/mobility/dryland plan. We spend a majority of our time training in water, with horizontal push-offs the only real shock to our little feet. Swimmers can be forgiven for having ankles that aren’t the most stable. Here are 6 tips for improving your freestyle kick: 1. So now that we understand why having a strong flutter kick is important, what can we do to improve our flutter kick? Having the endurance in your lower body is essential to keeping your body position in the most efficient and powerful position possible.
Strong legs come in handy towards the end of races, where your muscles are failing left and right, with your stroke disintegrating with each passing meter. A strong kick keeps your stroke together.Your freestyle stroke benefits from having more power from the core and your kick. This in turn helps you drive your arms forward for a faster and more dynamic arm pull. Strong legs and a strong kick add power to your hip rotation. A strong kick launches you in to your arm pull.While we are still a ways away from sprint swimmers completely hydro-planing across the water, that is the goal. Beyond propulsion, kicking-particularly for sprinters-helps the speed-seeking swimmer maintain a high body position in the water. A strong kick gives you a killer body position in the water.The faster you can kick, the faster you can swim. Added propulsion. The immediate goal of developing a faster flutter kick is as basic as wanting to go faster.Why You Should Be Working on Your Freestyle Kickĭoing kick goes beyond just giving your shoulders a break (although that is a solid reason in itself).Īnd it’s easy to understand why we ignore our legs– they are working down below on their own, while we are paying attention to what is happening right in front of us with our arms and hands.īut having a solid flutter kick will help you become a better swimmer overall. Your legs, being those big trunks of muscle that they are, need to be in hilarious shape in order to develop the type of propulsion and stability necessary for high speed swimming.
Sure, a bunch of kick sets might get scrawled up at the beginning of the season for aerobic work, but this typically tapers off as the season unwinds. SEE ALSO: 3 Drills for a Faster Freestyle Kickĭespite this, it seems many swimmers (and even coaches) don’t emphasize lower body work in the pool. Even if you are not a sprint swimmer, athletes like Katie Ledecky are showing that you need to have some serious wheels in the lower body to compete at an elite level. Other top sprinters including Americans Nathan Adrian and Jimmy Feigen have made it clear that to swim fast you need to put in work on your legs. The fastest freestylers on the planet always have an unbelievable kick.Īlexander Popov, two-time Olympic champion in both the 50m and 100m freestyles could kick a 50m long course in 27 seconds. Cesar Cielo, world record holder in the 50 and 100m freestyle can kick the same length in 30 seconds. Here is your guide to a faster freestyle kick. The top athletes in the pool are not only fast swimmers, they are fast kickers.
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