Has anyone tried to stretch their ankles to improve their kick?

In my junior year at Texas, Eddie Reese put me on The Rack, a device Finis designed to help with ankle flexibility. I used to sit on the deck every day for about 10-15 minutes with my ankles in that thing. The name "The Rack" is a perfect term. It felt like torture. And it did not help my ankle flexibility. I'll rewind a bit. My ankles used to bend, and still bend, to about 40 degrees, if you say that zero degrees is an ankle flexibility where the toes point straight up, and 90 degrees is where the foot is parallel to the floor. That's pretty bad. The average elite swimmer, which is what you could define me as back then, could flex their ankles to at least 60 degrees. My feet even had a nickname: the Aquabrakes. When I dove in, people would make screeching sounds to imitate my immediate slowdown when my feet hit the water. Yeah, it was a laugh riot. Anyway, I tried everything else when The Rack didn't work: stretching my ankles while watching TV, getting physical therapy to loosen the tendons. Nothing worked, and nothing ever will. Eddie threatened to break my ankles. I think he was joking. I'm "blessed" with bad ankles. But it's kind of good for breaststroke! Paul Smith loves to mock my backstroke, in which he inaccurately says he can see my toes pointing straight out of the water on my kick. Again, my toe point is 40 degrees, not zero. I don't know if I could have had good ankle flexibility if I had worked on it at a much younger age. I know I never stretched regularly as a teenager, and I think various parts of my body have paid the price for that as I have aged. But my ankles even more. I am sure my other strokes would benefit from flexible ankles, but I seem to be doing well with my Aquabrakes. I do the best with what I have. I'm a bad kicker. Always will be. I don't dolphin kick off every wall on backstroke. I go last on kick sets. I get beat by girls on kick sets. And I have size 13 feet. But I wouldn't have achieved what I have in swimming if I let myself be defined by my bad ankles. Don't let yourself do the same.

In my junior year at Texas, Eddie Reese put me on The Rack, a device Finis designed to help with ankle flexibility. I used to sit on the deck every day for about 10-15 minutes with my ankles in that thing. The name "The Rack" is a perfect term. It felt like torture. And it did not help my ankle flexibility. I'll rewind a bit. My ankles used to bend, and still bend, to about 40 degrees, if you say that zero degrees is an ankle flexibility where the toes point straight up, and 90 degrees is where the foot is parallel to the floor. That's pretty bad. The average elite swimmer, which is what you could define me as back then, could flex their ankles to at least 60 degrees. My feet even had a nickname: the Aquabrakes. When I dove in, people would make screeching sounds to imitate my immediate slowdown when my feet hit the water. Yeah, it was a laugh riot. Anyway, I tried everything else when The Rack didn't work: stretching my ankles while watching TV, getting physical therapy to loosen the tendons. Nothing worked, and nothing ever will. Eddie threatened to break my ankles. I think he was joking. I'm "blessed" with bad ankles. But it's kind of good for breaststroke! Paul Smith loves to mock my backstroke, in which he inaccurately says he can see my toes pointing straight out of the water on my kick. Again, my toe point is 40 degrees, not zero. I don't know if I could have had good ankle flexibility if I had worked on it at a much younger age. I know I never stretched regularly as a teenager, and I think various parts of my body have paid the price for that as I have aged. But my ankles even more. I am sure my other strokes would benefit from flexible ankles, but I seem to be doing well with my Aquabrakes. I do the best with what I have. I'm a bad kicker. Always will be. I don't dolphin kick off every wall on backstroke. I go last on kick sets. I get beat by girls on kick sets. And I have size 13 feet. But I wouldn't have achieved what I have in swimming if I let myself be defined by my bad ankles. Don't let yourself do the same.