No kick

I hate to say this, but... Without increasing ankle flexibility, which was posted on another thread, it won't matter much if you use a board, snorkel, etc. In and of themselves, they will not improve your kicking ability. Yes, they will improve your body position and reduce frontal drag, but without better ankle flexibility, there will be no increase in forward propulsion. So, if you "kick-in-place" or maybe even go backwards when you kick, find exercises to increase ankle, foot, and even toe flexibility to reduce backward drag. There are plenty of them. How successful they will be depends on your specific situation (age, swimming history, etc..). As an aside, the more I bicycle and the older I get, the more time I have to devote to stretching my ankles/toes before I swim to prevent cramps and keep my toe point. Good Luck Sumo - don't give up on increasing those tight ankles of yours. :) Co-sign. I am not a great flutter kicker to start with, and I have an ankle that I severely sprained about 4 years ago. That ankle is still tight. When I'm kicking, I can tell the difference between my floppy ankle and my tight ankle. Going to start back on my ankle flexibility exercises, so thank you all for the inspiration!

Yeah, the ankle flexibility is a big thing. I remember I think it was my sophomore year of high school, I sprained my ankle really badly in the spring playing basketball and had trouble kicking for like half of the next summer. Have you seen anyone in Olympic 10 km open water swimming without a strong kick? I'll be honest, I've never watched an Olympic 10k.

I hate to say this, but... Without increasing ankle flexibility......... Well, I for one am glad you did! Not sure why you said you hated to say it (other than repeating the other thread, but as someone who wasn't around back then, I like seeing things that may be "old news" to some folks. That said, I noticed that when I went from lap swimming to following the posted workouts, swimming with fins (UDK sets) KILLED my ankles. Part of that was kicking with my legs, but another part was lack of ankle flexibility. Granted, I'm an odd case in that I quit swimming for exercise over 20 years ago when I broke my ankle (took me 12 years to have it surgically repaired) because I lost all flexibility in it, and the pain was overbearing. It is still not quite as flexible as the other, but it is much better. I mention all this to say that I honestly believe that doing the UDK sets with fins has been a big component in increasing my ankle flexibility. I'll let you more knowledgeable people opine on my anecdote, but since some have argued against fins, I thought I'd bring up a counterpoint. Have you seen anyone in Olympic 10 km open water swimming without a strong kick? Actually, many of the distance swimmers like Ledecky and Yang use very little kick for the first 1/2 to 2/3rds of the events. I believe it is because kicking uses a disproportionate amount of oxygen, relative to benefit. Not a problem for short races, but a notable one for purely aerobic events.

Interesting now that I look - Ledecky actually does a 4-beat kick in her 400. It's a strong 4-beat but it's definitely not classical 6-beat! https://youtu.be/mFcDum8eCaA And yes, Sun Yang's legs pretty much drag for the first 1400 of his 1500s :P

Until I watch someone in a modern NCAA or Olympic championship final swim a 50, 100, 200, 400/500 with a dragging kick, I will continue to maintain that a strong kick should be the base of swimming fast for most people. Have you seen anyone in Olympic 10 km open water swimming without a strong kick?

67King, I agree that kicking with fins can be a nice gentle way to improve ankle flexibility - with one caveat. The kicking action needs to be very similar to your kicking action without fins. Too many swimmers put fins on and proceed to bicycle kick which will not improve ankle flexibility nor kicking speed. And, because they are moving forward, they think they are doing it correctly. Like so many of the posts, I have also sprained my ankle and noticed the difference between the feet. The worst case for me was having both ankles in a cast for 9 weeks. That does a number on ankle flexibility. It was very hard to go faster than 2 minutes per 100 when I started swimming again. Fortunately, they loosened up pretty quickly. Sumorunner - thanks for posting this thread. I know your ankles feel like they cannot get looser, but I am sure they can improve to some degree if you can find the right exercises/stretches for you. Even calf raisers with full flex and point will help. Paul

find exercises to increase ankle, foot. See Redbird's ideas above. Do you ever see good ,fast swimmers "drag"dead feet& legs behind them? No. You need to work on this till it makes you go forward!

swimswam.com/.../ I'm throwing this link out there without fully digesting the study. It may be complete BS. Apologies if it is. I'm just grasping at straws right now. :)

swimswam.com/.../ I'm throwing this link out there without fully digesting the study. It may be complete BS. Apologies if it is. I'm just grasping at straws right now. :) Unless I am missing something, I'd call it complete BS. I read the study. The word "kick" appears 0 times, as in zero, nada, zilch, none, in the paper. And in one of the methods, they adapt a system used for ships with propellers, where the props are a propulsive force component. This study used the arms as that propulsive force. The editorializing by Swimswam appears to only focus on the drag component. Well, of course the legs create drag, and as any body moving through a fluid, that drag is squared relative to speed. However, if the propulsive force added by the legs exceeds the drag, then kicking is beneficial. Unless I am missing something, that is not brought up at all. Swimswam published another article a few months ago where someone was speculating similar things. It was complete speculation, and the person was from a smaller country not really known for swimming (only mentioned because I doubt there were resrouces available to help said person test said theory). I had a problem with it because there was no data to support the speculation. Seems there are some folks at that site who have an aversion to kicking. Wonder why?

I also found what appears to be video footage of some of the participants from the study (www.asahi.com/.../AJ201807160003.html) The snapshots below show a knee bend in the kick, which could cause considerable resistance, thus slowing them down the more they kick. A poor kicking technique would certainly affect the rate of speed, and the technique of these swimmers could skew the study against the use of the kick. lh3.googleusercontent.com/.../2019-06-23.png lh3.googleusercontent.com/.../2019-06-23.png