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!
I am curious if there are many like me who have:
A) a relatively slow kicking speed
B) a relatively slow pulling speed (i.e., with pull buoy)
C) despite the above two shortcomings, a relatively decent swimming speed
It makes me think that it's not just adding the pull and the kick together to get swimming speed, but some weird synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
But what, I wonder, accounts for this? What is the Mystery Factor? Body roll? Some unintended anchoring effect whereby the legs allow the arms to gain greater purchase on the water?
I am curious if there are many like me who have:
A) a relatively slow kicking speed
B) a relatively slow pulling speed (i.e., with pull buoy)
C) despite the above two shortcomings, a relatively decent swimming speed
It makes me think that it's not just adding the pull and the kick together to get swimming speed, but some weird synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
But what, I wonder, accounts for this? What is the Mystery Factor? Body roll? Some unintended anchoring effect whereby the legs allow the arms to gain greater purchase on the water?
