Freestyle stroke advice Please (video included)

Hi there - very glad to see you have been working on improving your kick! Judging from the previous videos you have posted, your kicking is much improved - both in terms of strength/conditioning and in terms of technique, especially given the fact that you are relatively new to swimming. I can see that you are trying to emphasize the finish portion of the kick. I would not be too concerned about ankle flexibility at this time - the more you kick, the better it will get. Be sure to continue to maintain patience in this process - it takes persistent effort to improve the kick, and progress does not happen in a day. One of the issues that I see is that your feet are coming out of the water and catching some air (you can see this in the video), which reduces the efficiency of your kick. You need to practice keeping the feet slightly under the water - and you can do this by incorporating variety in your kicking drills. For example, practice side kick, and kick on your back in addition to streamline kicking on your stomach. Try to continue practicing the single arm drill with the same kicking amount and speed - this will allow you to practice incorporating the kick with the upper body movements, which in turn will transfer to your fullstroke. Best of luck and looking forward to seeing your fullstroke video as well!

One_Eyed-King, Probably, the primary reason your feet are coming out of the water so much is because your upper body is submerged enough to cause you to be out-of-balance. When streamline kicking, like in your video, the back part of your head (some coaches call it the monkey bump) should be slightly breaking the surface of the water and your shoulders should at the surface as well. You should decide what is more important: kicking faster or swimming faster? Your swimming is being held back by your two beat kick. No amount of kicking and kick sets will help you swim faster if you stay with the two beat kick technique. Paul

Probably, the primary reason your feet are coming out of the water so much is because your upper body is submerged enough to cause you to be out-of-balance. When streamline kicking, like in your video, the back part of your head (some coaches call it the monkey bump) should be slightly breaking the surface of the water and your shoulders should at the surface as well. Paul Paul - Thanks for this tip about my head. I had a coaching session recently and he also pointed out my head is too low in the water and moving too much. I changed my head position and it helped with the kick speed and also my swimming speed. In the last two months I went from kick sprint (25m) time of 31s to 24.2s. Of this, 2 seconds came from the change to the head position. The rest came from (1) practice (2) no breathing and (2) kicking harder during the last 10m, though I feel like dying, lol. www.dropbox.com/.../Dec 21-2018-Kick.mp4 This is the video of my current kick. Initially I improved at the rate of 1-2s per week but in the last 3 weeks I've stagnated at ~ 24sec. I really want to get below 20sec. How do I do that? Is something wrong with my kick technique or am I not kicking fast enough? You should decide what is more important: kicking faster or swimming faster? Your swimming is being held back by your two beat kick. No amount of kicking and kick sets will help you swim faster if you stay with the two beat kick technique. Paul I imagine they're not mutually exclusive? But definetely swimming faster is my primary goal. I've started doing drills like 4 (or 6) kicks 1 stoke, where I try to I kick continously. This has been helping my swimming speed. For example I'm 0.5-1 sec faster with this continous kick compared to my previous 2-beat kick for 25m. At this point I dont know if my continous kick is a 4-beat or 6-beat kick. May be it doesn't matter. I'll keep practicing these drills for now and report back later. But I would certainly like to know what other drills I can do to better integrate a continous kick into my stroke.

Nice improvements in freestyle and kick! Keep working at it

Good Morning One-Eyed-King, Thanks for the video. Head/upper body position is more streamline. Now, to my eye anyway, there are three more things to work on: a) Body alignment (most important): I see too much pelvic tilt (aka "anterior pelvic tilt") that can be caused by a number of things. In my experience, triathletes often have this because their hip flexors are tight from their running and biking position. Your pelvic orientation is limiting power and increasing drag. Thought many will disagree, I like kicking with a board (looking straight ahead) because it "encourages" a more superman (yoga) orientation. Of course, this assumes no back, neck, or shoulder issues. This might take some dryland and stretching routines to change your pelvic tilt. b) Kick Amplitude:The distance from the top to bottom of your kick is pretty large. At the top, it looks like your calf/knee is out of the water and at the bottom, your foot is about 12" below your body. This creates alot of drag (bottom of your kick) and wastes effort (leg coming out of the water). This is due in part to your pelvic orientation in "a" above. Try kicking "silently" meaning your feet do not break the surface of the water and your amplitude will decrease which reduces drag and does not waste energy. c) Ankle Flexation: If you can improve your ankle flexation (higher degree of toe point) throughout the kick, you will reduce drag and increase speed. This may be out of your control or, with stretching, a longer term "project" to fix. Your current kick speed is pretty good. Kicking 25 m in under 20 secs is very good. Your tempo looks good to me. Kicking faster and swimming faster are not mutually exclusive. They are not equally correlated either. IMO, the kicking drills you are doing will not help you incorporate kicking into your pulling because of your specific situation, it is possible the anterior pelvic tilt keeps you from optimal body alignment. Good body alignment is the single most important technique to master in swimming. My suggestion is to focus on altering your pelvic tilt (if possible) to get closer to a small superman (yoga) alignment position. If you can achieve this, it will change alot of what you do. Good Luck. Good Luck

Thanks Paul. I tried reducing the amplitude and went 23.4 today. :) Maybe there is potential for even more improvement here. I'll shoot another video next week to check. I found a bunch of youtube videos on how to fix "anterior pelvic tilt". I'll look into them. Thanks again for the detailed feedback. I dont like kicking with a board as I used to have shoulder issues and had surgery on my right shoulder due to persistant dislocations. Just for kicks, I measured the kick tempo (number of times the left foot came down) and it was 2.42 per second. Assuming I glide for 3 seconds, I need 50 kicks (left + right counted as one kick) to go 25m. I wonder if there are any stats available for comparison with others.

I have never seen stats on the number of kicks that swimmers taken, but I have counted mine in the past. For flutter kick, I usually take 65-70 (each downkick counts as one), dolphin was +/- 25. This is for a 25 yard pool with a kickboard with times around 20 -22 secs/25 yds. What are other forumites finding? ps - did you try doing the superman yoga pose - just getting off the ground a little?

There was a good article in Swimmer mag this month about stretching to streamline against a wall. That could certainly help you out with getting the feel of a good streamline and body position.

Even counting for the yds-m difference, my kick is 20-25% less effecient than yours in terms of DPS. Good data point for me. I haven't tried anything regarding the body position yet. Hopefully this weekend. When I clicked on the Swimmer Magazine through my USMS link, it seems I needed Adobe Flash to read it. I'm wondering if there is any other way to read it without having to download that buggy Flash software.

@__steve__ I replied to you PM regarding my shoulder surgery but for some reason I'm not seeing that in my 'Sent Items'. I actually tried twice. I'm wondering if you got the reply?