5 THINGS THAT MAKE YOUR KICK EFFECTIVE (INSTEAD OF SLOWING YOU DOWN)

if you struggle with your kick and you feel that it gives you no propulsion and you feel it only slows you down compared to helping you with your swimming then this video will show you some things that you can do to help improve your kick and make sure that it's effective one of the things we get asked a lot about is kicking in freestyle now kicking is obviously important and you want to be doing it the right way now we tend to talk about in two ways one is when you're sprinting with swimmers you want to be having a fast and propulsive kick all the best swimmers all the best sprinters in the world have a fast and propulsive kick but for middle to long distance from us you don't necessarily need to use it for propulsion but you want it to be an effective kick because that is going to help you overall with your rotation and your timing and the rhythm through your stroke so with the propulsive kick you need relatively flexible ankles you need to be able to point your toes a little bit so mobility plays a part there but we're going to talk mostly about middle to long distance swimming and how you need an effective kick and how you can go about having that so what are the things that make up an effective kick the first one is the size of it you need to keep the kick somewhat narrow that the analogy are like there is a man you've got a bucket like a normal sized bucket double that that should be roughly where your feet stay in your kick so you put that out behind you that's roughly how big the kick should be the feet will come out a little bit wider than your body line but not a whole lot just a little bit wider so that's the first thing it needs to be somewhat narrow the second thing that we want is for the toes to be somewhat pointed pointed back towards the end of the pool behind you and a good way to do that even if you've got tight ankles you can generally sort of help with this is point your toes but turn your big toes you feet in towards one another kind of like pigeon toed slightly that gives you a bit more flexion through the ankles then if you're just purely pointing them so try that even where you're sitting now point your toes turn your feet or your big toes in a little bit that will give you slightly more flexion there now yeah it can feel a little bit different if you're not used to it but using that to help you point the toes more give you more service so that'll be pressing down and backwards as you're kicking that's going to be a lot faster than if your toes are pointing to the bottom of the pool all the time because even though like your foot it doesn't look like that much extra drag it really makes a difference then if your toes are pointing down to the bottom of the pool all the time there so if you aren't really tight yeah turn your toes in but you might also need to just work on that ankle mobility and that can come with time that can come with a few different stretches and exercises there even simple ones like sitting on your on your feet and on top of your your your toes there that can help you with it but number one narrow toe kick number two toes somewhat pointed the third thing with an effective kick is we need to make sure that we are bending the knees the right amount so I've seen people go both ways one their true straight and stiff with their legs and the other way is they're bending their knees too much so want to sit in between there now with the elite swimmers you'll find they've been there their knees up to about 130 degrees so if you measure the angle through their their knees it usually doesn't go much further than 130 degrees there so if you are bending the knees so far that it's going to like 90 degrees that resistance that the leg is going to be creating is a lot so we want to try and just keep it to about 130 degrees there no more now it can it can be less as well you look at someone like Katie ledecky we did a video on this a couple of couple of weeks ago where we looked at how she Basin keeps one leg straight with a very small amount of knee bend and the other one just does that a 130 degree range so it can be smaller than that but it's different for each person so we want to keep the kick in the right range there the other thing we want to try and do that is time it well with our catch and our rotation now again we did a V on this and I'll link to this below and I'll put it up in the drop down box here so the we want to try and time the catch on the right hand side with the downwards kick on the right hand side as well so timing the catch and the kick together will make a big difference with getting that cross connection through the body getting all the the catch the rotation the kick all of that working together and syncing up so if your catch and your kicker happening together that's the right timing and that is really the key to an effective kick for middle to long distance runners now the very last thing that we want and it's sort of covered in those last few points is that we generally want to try and have the leg coming up somewhat high in some of the up kicks so those upward motions with the legs we want to have the leg coming up somewhat high and straight and it needs to start from your glute so if you are bringing the leg only up by bending the knee it's going to slow you down you've got to use your glute so like you're thinking of your bum muscles there lift your leg up a little bit in some of those upward kicks now the way that we like to teach this and then arch and sort of teach this at clinics for people who aren't quite there with you yet I think of a standing up tall all right you've got the right posture so proud posture now suck your bellybutton into your spine so suck your tummy in and then as you're standing there squeeze your bum cheeks together lightly like you've got a coin in between them yeah it's a bit weird but when you're doing that you'll find that your hips and your legs are really straight compared to if you don't do that where you let your tummy go you let you your glutes go then you tend to be a bit more bit through the hips there's more been through the waist there now when we swim we generally want to try and keep that line pretty straight so that's the right sort of tautness that we want through the midsection and we teach this inside our video membership under the second core principle of having tautness through the core and tautness through the midsection where you suck your tummy in squeeze your bum cheeks together and that starts to engage the glutes slowly to help you bring it up somewhat straight in the up kick compared to always having a bent or being bent at the hips whether the quads and the thighs are dropping well below that hip line there so that's the other thing we want to do when it comes to an effective kick now in terms of developing all this stuff there's a lot you can do there one of the best ways to do it is to just isolate the kick and do some pure kicking sets in training there's no way around developing an effective kick apart from just doing the work and doing some kicking sets in training so with people who haven't done any before what I'll normally give to them is a 25 put a snorkel on if you need to wear fins to start with that is fine wear snorkel use a kickboard and just do some pure kicking sets if you don't need Fitness to move forwards then you can start without them but depending on where you your starting position is look you might want to use some fins and there's nothing wrong with that but just starting to do a couple twenty-five maybe a couple of 50s in your training of kick is going to help you develop the effectiveness of it and if you do have an underwater camera like a GoPro I film yourself when you're swimming see what you're doing in the kick and you can actually get a pretty good sense of am i true stiff and my a little bit too rigid with everything or am i bending my knees too much am i doing it right so I hope that video helps if you did enjoy this video please like and subscribe and check out the effortless swimming video membership we go into more detail with tautness on the core kicking developing a stroke step by step to help you become a faster and more efficient swimmer so that's there's a link in the description below thanks for watching and I'll see you next week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Effortless Swimming

Views: 188,353

Rating: 4.9636812 out of 5

Keywords: swimming kick, how to kick in swimming, freestyle kick, how to kick in the pool, triathlon swim kick, freestyle kick mistakes, how to be a jetter kicker, freestyle kick technique, effortless swimming

Id: _R4nHuAfRuQ

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019