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
I think the question is whether kicking is the activity that will give you the greatest improvement, and the answer for that depends on the swimmer.
I'm talking here about the 15-25% of a workout typically devoted to kicking.
For an extreme example, an inexperienced swimmer will benefit far more from stroke development than from kicking, so should probably kick less than the standard amount.
At the other end, I think, would be a person who swims 100 SCY in, say a minute but kicks it in two. That person probably has good technique already, so a kicking regimen would benefit them more than additional stroke technique. This person would probably benefit from kicking more than 25% of a workout.
Of course, integrating the skill and strength into the stroke is important too.
Not really based on experience but on common sense.
I think the question is whether kicking is the activity that will give you the greatest improvement, and the answer for that depends on the swimmer.
I'm talking here about the 15-25% of a workout typically devoted to kicking.
For an extreme example, an inexperienced swimmer will benefit far more from stroke development than from kicking, so should probably kick less than the standard amount.
At the other end, I think, would be a person who swims 100 SCY in, say a minute but kicks it in two. That person probably has good technique already, so a kicking regimen would benefit them more than additional stroke technique. This person would probably benefit from kicking more than 25% of a workout.
Of course, integrating the skill and strength into the stroke is important too.
Not really based on experience but on common sense.
