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!
Parents
Former Member
Swimming is a combination of every thing you do. I prefer to call it technique. A great kick is not going to do it by its self. I quit doing kick sets when I was 17. I did most of my work outs at full stroke. I did heavy kicking sets in combination with swimming. What I mean is I kicked harder while swimming. I also did a lot of swimming with a reduced strength of kick. I did what they call arms only but did it with a very light flutter kick.
When working on Butterfly I raced the club freestyle sprinters by doing 50's of dolphin kicking in a 25 yard pool. I used to do 50 yards of dolphin kicking with a dive in around 24 seconds. Just took a breath at the turn. I know 50 yards dolphin in 24 seconds may not be considered fast now.
To get a faster freestyle every thing has to work together (synergy). Synergy - The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual.
Swimming is a combination of every thing you do. I prefer to call it technique. A great kick is not going to do it by its self. I quit doing kick sets when I was 17. I did most of my work outs at full stroke. I did heavy kicking sets in combination with swimming. What I mean is I kicked harder while swimming. I also did a lot of swimming with a reduced strength of kick. I did what they call arms only but did it with a very light flutter kick.
When working on Butterfly I raced the club freestyle sprinters by doing 50's of dolphin kicking in a 25 yard pool. I used to do 50 yards of dolphin kicking with a dive in around 24 seconds. Just took a breath at the turn. I know 50 yards dolphin in 24 seconds may not be considered fast now.
To get a faster freestyle every thing has to work together (synergy). Synergy - The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual.
