Questions and Answers - February 2004 edition
by Dan Thompson

Q."My legs seem to tire disproportionately during freestyle. What does that indicate?"

A. Answer 1: Good question, do like I do and let your legs drag behind your body. -- Dv

Coach Dan's Comment:

Yea, right … But really this may be a very good idea! It relates to ankle flexibility. Ande Rasmussen would tell you that if you can will a great kick, you can have a great kick. Arm yourself with this great attitude, and you can bound the tallest mental block. But in all sport, I’m afraid, there are certain biological imperatives. I should know. I busted my shoulders trying exceed my endowment — to stretch toward the same suppleness as the great Jerry Heidenreich (who by simply competing honored us all). No, the albatross won’t zip through treetops. The sparrow will never soar. The pear-shaped person, bless ‘im, will never pierce water like the Cutty Sark. And you, unless you can sit straight-legged and clap the soles of your feet flat together like a seal, will never make Trials cut in the 100 kick! To invest prodigious effort in feet not born to water is to create turbulence, not propulsion. I bring this up not to bring you down. We must all of us detect and deal with weak links in our physical make-up. Yet if you are among those denied your right to floppy feet, ‘tis better to face facts and look to your strengths. Relax your legs except for balance, avoid the sprints except for fun, and divert fuel to your shoulders where it can exert some force!

Answer 2: Why are you kicking anyway? You only should kick to keep your hips up in a stream line position, not as a method of propulsion.

1. You most likely kicking too much
2. and most likely bending your knees.

You need try to keep knees straight and have the kick come from your hips.

Cheers!
Marcin

Coach Dan’s comment:

Well said, Coach M. In freestyle swimming, there are things you think about and things you don't. Kicking---get ready for a shock---you don't! Core-body balance and rhythm, you do! Get the core right, and your kick will flow from it as second nature and not tire disproportionately.

Good swimmers don't pick their kick. It picks them. There is no set rule. Some great sprinters, like Gaines and Skinner, were not six-beaters but lesser-beat and broken-beat kickers. And some middle-distance greats, like Thorpe, are full six-beaters. So, perhaps you are trying artificially to glue the wrong kick onto your stroke. The key, as always, is to find and establish proper mechanics at the center of your stroke — and to allow peripheral technique, like the kick, to follow.

For instance: if your torso is unbalanced vertically — that is, if a line drawn head to toes is not flat with the surface of the water, then you are in effect swimming uphill, which forces you to compensate by overusing the kick to avoid sinking. You are asking too much of your legs, and as they give out you will find yourself swimming not a hill but a cliff face!

The precept bears repeating: to correct a flaw at the periphery (in your kick, or pull, or recovery), find the core-body weakness causing it. Then develop a stroke drill to fix it. The drill you come up with should be difficult, damned difficult — because it exposes and amplifies your hidden technical weaknesses. If you like stroke drills, the way some folks like kick sets (because it feels good hanging onto a kickboard and discussing Kant with your lanemates), then I assure you that while you may be doing a recovery set of some kind, you are not doing a stroke drill. It may be a stroke drill for the other guy, but it is not one for you. We can talk about stroke drills — a critical but lonely subject — another time.

[You all realize of course that I am speaking here of speed swimming. I have no expertise in over-distance, rough water, or water polo style swimming.]

Actually, you should not really hear a good kick. The feet don’t bash the water. Your ears don’t bleed from the impact of that constant kerplunking sound. Instead, the feet caress and roil the water, sweeping down and up — and do not break the surface. I recall something analogous from running. A fluid stride is silent, making the barest tap, tap, tapping at footstrike. You can train to run this way — that’s why they don’t call it jogging — and you can learn to kick this way too.

Parenthetically, I have read almost everything put out on the subject, and I have not seen anyone explain with any real degree of credence what is actually takes place, beyond mere description, in the freestyle kick. If this seems odd to you, your notion of the kick is probably what you see going on with a kickboard. It may be what is meant by “flutter” kicking, but it is not freestyle kicking. Freestyle kicking is a cycling series of up and down sweeps of both feet, attached to ankles that move in six planes of movement, and to knees and hips that move in four planes of movement — all attached by way of the pelvis to a spine that turns back and fourth, with — in six-beat kicking — three upsweeps and downsweeps per foot per rotation cycle, the downsweep of one foot coinciding with the upsweep of the other. I mean, the complexity of it is stunning. I challenge you to get underwater behind a freestyler and just watch what is going on. How do the sweeps interact with one another, and in conjunction what is their effect on the core body and the core body on them? Because the hips rotate continuously, each foot sweep describes a different arc in space. The physics is different times six on each side! Especially pivotal is the sweep that coincides with the core-body re-roll of each rotation cycle. There must exist a plyometric phenomenon at this point that helps to yo-yo the core body out of the inertia of rotating in one direction and into its reverse.

My only point in alluding to all of this is to detach your perception of what kicking is from what you see being done on a kickboard. The kickboard is an ancient tool that butchers the kick by cleaving the action of the legs from that of the core body. That little flip of the ankle that seems to define the kick is, like the snapping tip of a whip, merely the climax of a complex kinetic chain beginning in and powered by the core body. Because a kickboard actually hinders hip rotation, what is done on it is artificial and perhaps even detrimental.

Which leads to my final point. To train the legs without also training their connection to the trunk is to leave weak links in the kinetic chain, and we all know what this implies about the strength of the chain. Would Hogan have trained his swing by using some medieval device to lock his hips in the forward stance position? Or Mr. N. Ryan the same? Not likely. In boxing such weenies are called “arm punchers.” They put no hip behind their hook and no one on the canvas. In fact, the kickboard — except for vertical-board resistance training — may be a museum piece. How else can I train my kick, you ask? Well, that discussion will wait for another time. But in the interval, promise me you will not take the feel you get from a kickboard and try to paste that monstrosity onto your stroke. You may create a ghoul.

Send your swimming technique questions to Dan Thompson at thommed@bellsouth.net.