I've been playing around with my kick (again) after recently getting a chance to train with Misty Hyman as well as talking with one of our coaches from Japan who trains Kohei Kawamoto (who works out with us on occasion as well)...Coach Tako has been pushing me to work on the "up-kick" (on fly, downward on back SDK) and in turn I've been having some swimmers I coach do the same.
As obvious as it may sound it seems many people (myself included) focus so much on how fast they are trying to SDK that it may in fact be working against them as it requires such a massive amount of effort. My latest "tinkering" is try and actually gauge my distance per kick underwater (using the lane lines and/or cross lines on the pool bottom as a referance).
What I'm finding is that there is a definite and measurable difference by how fast I move thru the water when I "tempo-play" with my kicks and incorporate more of the power in the opposite direction. For me I actually start with several slower/bigger SDK's and then move into fast/smaller kicks...focusing from not just kicking from my core but also using more snap from the knee's.
It's had fro me to articulate...and its something that I've only been playing with a couple of weeks but just the awarenes of how far I'm going/how fast vs. simply kicking as hard as possible with the same tempo seems to have made a big difference.
We talked a little bit about this on Fortress' blog and she found the following video interview of Misty Hyman's old coach, Bob Gillett:
www.floswimming.org/.../1004-gillett-bob
After talking a lot about the evolution of Hyman's kick, and about frequency vs amplitude, he makes a comment that strikes me as very sensible (I'm paraphrasing here): you need both, in optimum amounts.
He draws an analogy to the trade-off between stroke rate & DPS. You don't want to just spin your wheels (high turnover, low DPS) and you don't want to have great DPS but swim in slow motion (low turnover, high DPS), you want the best of both worlds. It strikes me that it is worth exploring, as Paul has been doing, where the sweet spot is.
Of course, that sweet spot may be distance dependent...just as turnover & DPS will be different for a 500 compared to a 50.
We talked a little bit about this on Fortress' blog and she found the following video interview of Misty Hyman's old coach, Bob Gillett:
www.floswimming.org/.../1004-gillett-bob
After talking a lot about the evolution of Hyman's kick, and about frequency vs amplitude, he makes a comment that strikes me as very sensible (I'm paraphrasing here): you need both, in optimum amounts.
He draws an analogy to the trade-off between stroke rate & DPS. You don't want to just spin your wheels (high turnover, low DPS) and you don't want to have great DPS but swim in slow motion (low turnover, high DPS), you want the best of both worlds. It strikes me that it is worth exploring, as Paul has been doing, where the sweet spot is.
Of course, that sweet spot may be distance dependent...just as turnover & DPS will be different for a 500 compared to a 50.
