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!
Former Member
Kicking is important. Right - but if the kick is not efficient it some times becomes a hinderence. Runners kick is a problem and has to be changed. My coach told us 55 years ago, if you run backwards this helps to make the change from a runners kick to an efficent kick.
Yesterday I saw a triathlete training and this is what he was doing.
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
I am definately in this boat but with the key word being "relative" because I am nowhere near any elite level.
My kicking speed is very slow yet I am slower with a pull buoy and have decided I have no use for them.
I can swim a 50 SCY all out from a push in 30 seconds and a kick would take me 60 seconds. I'm once again pondering whether improving this kick time will actually give me any real benefit in swim times. I just started again today but will likely end up following my usual pattern of giving up as focus races approach due to lack of progress and soreness.
I'm not sure what happened, but after a 25 year layoff and knee surgeries, circulation problems, etc. I just can't seem to hack it. I'm still not convinced that pushing the issue doesn't give me zero or even negative benefit.
If anyone has any advice on whether you think I can get any kind of benefit from improving my kick times I sure would appreciate it. I wonder if since it is not an asset it is a waste of my limited training time. But I have no idea as I also think it could be my #1 area of potential to drop times.
