freestyle vs kick-only times

Former Member
Former Member
In my quest to figure out how to improve my freestyle speed away from embarrassingly slow times, I am working on the following three categories: 1) General form (especially arms) - I made a post about this awhile back with video and have improved a good deal since then, shaved a few seconds off my 50. 2) Stroke frequency - eventually going to one of those pace beepers and experiment with different frequencies. 3) Kick - kick frequency, kick width, and foot flexibility This post is concerned with the last of these - the kick. I recently compared my fastest kick-only time (no snorkel or flippers) with my fastest freestyle time and it is almost exactly 2x slower. I read various places that the kick provides a much smaller portion of the total propulsion in freestyle, so this gap seems smaller than I would expect. One explanation is that I am probably not giving the same attention/efffort to my kick during freestyle, which makes sense. Nevertheless, I still think I have much more work to do on my kick - its about ~86 seconds for 50m. Please let me know your kick times and ratio to equivalent free style times so I can set some reasonable goals and figure out how much my kick is holding me back. Thanks!
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  • Former Member
    Former Member
    To show what is possible... "...Recently, one such kicking savant from Michigan suggested I write about these kick sets. Former All-American and National Teamer, Chris DeJong, relished these sets and he spoke about the kickboard battles waged among his Wolverine teammates. "It got intense," he remembers. "Me, Vanderkaay, Vendt when he was with us in '08, we really got into it. The standard was breaking five minutes in a 400 kick - long course. We could do it, and we heard Ian Thorpe was one of the only other guys ever to break that barrier."" www.swimnetwork.com/.../Grab-Your-Kickboard.aspx Peter Vanderkaay has gone around 3:45 for 400 LCM. Kicking 400 LCM in 5:00 gives him a swim/kick ratio of 0.75.
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  • Former Member
    Former Member
    To show what is possible... "...Recently, one such kicking savant from Michigan suggested I write about these kick sets. Former All-American and National Teamer, Chris DeJong, relished these sets and he spoke about the kickboard battles waged among his Wolverine teammates. "It got intense," he remembers. "Me, Vanderkaay, Vendt when he was with us in '08, we really got into it. The standard was breaking five minutes in a 400 kick - long course. We could do it, and we heard Ian Thorpe was one of the only other guys ever to break that barrier."" www.swimnetwork.com/.../Grab-Your-Kickboard.aspx Peter Vanderkaay has gone around 3:45 for 400 LCM. Kicking 400 LCM in 5:00 gives him a swim/kick ratio of 0.75.
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