Freestyle kick

Hi Terry, Thanks for the reply. In that case, like I said, I have no problem whatsoever with no kicking sets, especially kicking sets with a board! Congrats on your improved butterfly. Mine is not yet to that point and it is definitely due to a poor connection between the dolphin and the arms. This upcoming season is dedicated to the 100 free, but I plan to work on my butterfly a bit too and plan to keep on dolphin kicking (more about this below). Hi Josh, No, I don't use fins... but I should say that I have a really REALLY bad flutterkick and when I first started kicking on my side it was very hard. I might have benefitted from fins just to figure out the way kicking on your side is supposed to feel. The reason I don't use fins is because you can't use fins in a race. Almost all the swimmers on my team do use fins, so when we do a kick set, I just go last and do the dolphin-side flutter drill I described. I like this drill because it forces you to really work the 'down' leg and try to balance the right and left side of your body. My left leg is a much better flutterkicker than the right due to a broken right leg when I was 10 (didn't have any PT, the right ankle turns out more than the left and is less flexible). If I kick on my stomach, I find that my more floppy flexible left leg dominates and my right sometimes goes along for the ride. Last season was the first time I added the dolphins to the side kicking. Our head coach is very big on dolphin kicking off our flipturns so I decided last season that I would do 2 dolphin kicks off every single flipturn - I was coming back after a 2 year layoff and a baby and needed something that even a chubby out-of-shape person could work on :-). I'm a worse dolphin kicker than flutterkicker, but after an entire season of 2 dolphins+tight streamline after each turn (and I mean every single turn - warmup, drills, sprinting, you name it) my underwater dolphins have improved such that I can catch up with the person wearing fins ahead of me off the wall. There is nothing more gratifying (especially if you're a bad kicker) than nearly tapping the toes of a fin-wearer in front of you. Then I surface and start to flutter and vroom vroom away the fin-wearer goes off into the distance!! :D

Hi Terry, Thanks for the reply. In that case, like I said, I have no problem whatsoever with no kicking sets, especially kicking sets with a board! Congrats on your improved butterfly. Mine is not yet to that point and it is definitely due to a poor connection between the dolphin and the arms. This upcoming season is dedicated to the 100 free, but I plan to work on my butterfly a bit too and plan to keep on dolphin kicking (more about this below). Hi Josh, No, I don't use fins... but I should say that I have a really REALLY bad flutterkick and when I first started kicking on my side it was very hard. I might have benefitted from fins just to figure out the way kicking on your side is supposed to feel. The reason I don't use fins is because you can't use fins in a race. Almost all the swimmers on my team do use fins, so when we do a kick set, I just go last and do the dolphin-side flutter drill I described. I like this drill because it forces you to really work the 'down' leg and try to balance the right and left side of your body. My left leg is a much better flutterkicker than the right due to a broken right leg when I was 10 (didn't have any PT, the right ankle turns out more than the left and is less flexible). If I kick on my stomach, I find that my more floppy flexible left leg dominates and my right sometimes goes along for the ride. Last season was the first time I added the dolphins to the side kicking. Our head coach is very big on dolphin kicking off our flipturns so I decided last season that I would do 2 dolphin kicks off every single flipturn - I was coming back after a 2 year layoff and a baby and needed something that even a chubby out-of-shape person could work on :-). I'm a worse dolphin kicker than flutterkicker, but after an entire season of 2 dolphins+tight streamline after each turn (and I mean every single turn - warmup, drills, sprinting, you name it) my underwater dolphins have improved such that I can catch up with the person wearing fins ahead of me off the wall. There is nothing more gratifying (especially if you're a bad kicker) than nearly tapping the toes of a fin-wearer in front of you. Then I surface and start to flutter and vroom vroom away the fin-wearer goes off into the distance!! :D