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!
here's links to my speed improvement programs
My times were SCY
20.4 50 fr
28.0 50 k from a push in a brief
Ian Crocker 50 scy
19.0
24.5
shaun jordan 50 scy
19.1
23.3 board with a dive, brief
Garrett Weber Gale 50 LCM
kicked in 27.2 &
swam 21.4 in 50 LCM in a LZR, 22 low in jammer
here's links to my speed improvement programs
My times were SCY
20.4 50 fr
28.0 50 k from a push in a brief
Ian Crocker 50 scy
19.0
24.5
shaun jordan 50 scy
19.1
23.3 board with a dive, brief
Garrett Weber Gale 50 LCM
kicked in 27.2 &
swam 21.4 in 50 LCM in a LZR, 22 low in jammer