The obvious conclusion: Kicking can add only a modest amount of propulsion to an efficient stroke, while it can add a significant amount of drag and enormously increase the energy cost of whole-stroke swimming, if overemphasized. Therefore swimmers should do all they can to maximize the benefit of their kicking while minimizing the work they put into it.
Kick for Efficiency, Not for Speed
"Fine," you say. "If all kicking does is burn energy and cause drag, why bother to kick at all?" Well, because that's not all kicking does. An efficient kick will improve your stroke and, in fact, is essential for the kinetic chain to produce anything like the power it's capable of producing for you.
To understand this, you have only to imagine a baseball pitcher trying to throw a fastball with his legs shackled. Or Venus Williams trying to hit a tennis serve without being allowed to step into it. Or you, trying to swoop and soar on a playground swing while holding your legs tucked tightly under you.
The key is to allow your legs to move in the most natural, efficient way while avoiding non-essential movement. An efficient, impeccably timed kick can make the action of the kinetic chain far more potent, and cost very little energy. Skeptical? Stand with your feet a bit more than hip-width apart and let your arms hang loosely, with room to swing them freely. Keeping your feet flat on the floor, rotate your body right and left, letting your arms swing out freely as you do. You'll feel the relatively rigid, fixed position of your legs impeding your movement, creating tension from your knees to your hips.
Now repeat the movement, but allow your back heel to lift as you swing. You'll find that you rotate freely at least an additional 30 degrees in each direction, and eliminate the inhibiting tension. Repeat the experiment one last time, but now add just a little push off the ball of the rear foot whenever it feels most natural to do so. When you time this gentle push correctly to the body swing, you '11 feel yourself rotate with even more speed and power.
Just for fun before you quit, try the same rotation/swing while fluttering your feet rapidly in place. See what happens? Right. Your coordination and efficiency break down and the movement degenerates into a sloppy, shapeless mess. Uncoordinated leg movements always scuttle the rhythmic, driving momentum you can create when your legs and torso move with great coordination.
And that shows precisely what can happen when an efficient kick coordinates well with great body rotation - in both long-axis and short-axis strokes. It also shows what can happen with an inefficient kick — no matter how well conditioned it may have become through miles of diligent kickboard training. The inefficient kick will be very good at adding drag and energy cost and contributing nothing to propulsion or speed. And it will be very good as well at making you much more tired, much more quickly. I know from years of observation that the final, uncoordinated twitching I suggested you try above is exactly what happens to an unbalanced swimmer. An unbalanced swimmer will sense his or her legs are sinking, and react by moving them even more frantically. The uncoordinated kick that results not only fails to correct poor balance, but also destroys any possibility of smooth, fluid body rotation. And it needn't happen at all to a swimmer who has truly mastered balance, for a balanced swimmer's legs are freed of having to kick this way and can move freely. When they do, they can find the movement pattern that coordinates best with body movement.
The first example above — swinging with feet flat and fixed — is equivalent to a swimmer trying not to kick (or perhaps wearing a pull buoy). Legs held rigidly in place will add tension or torque that impedes the free rotation of the body, and muscle tension is nothing more than work with no benefit. The free-heel movement is the equivalent of a natural, non-overt, 2-beat kick, moving in coordination with body roll. This kind of kick feels effortless, almost unconscious, and is the best for most people when swimming longer distances or when doing fitness or lap swimming. The third example, adding a well-timed push to your body swing, is the equivalent of putting a bit more snap into the downbeat of your 2-beat kick. If you add it at just the right time and put in just the right additional amount of effort, you'll feel your hips drive with more power. And if you keep your armstroke connected to body roll as you're supposed to, increased hip drive will translate, finally, into a more powerful stroke.
But it's critical that you first establish impeccable timing in your 2-beat kick, and that you can sense where to add the extra snap just as easily as you can while standing in the middle of the room and swinging back and forth.
Long-Axis Kicking
So, how do you develop a good kick? Nearly 30 years of coaching have convinced me that a swimmer's kick is not nearly so susceptible to "molding" or skill-improvement as other pans of the stroke. In almost every case, the kicking ability or tendencies I've seen a swimmer display in his or her first year of training have been little changed 5 or 10 years later. Coaching has often helped smooth out the rough spots and minimize correctable inefficiencies, but it virtually never resulted in a swimmer with a middling kick somehow learning a great one. A great kick seems to be one of those things with which you are either born or you are not.
So, as a coach, I have mainly tried to help swimmers find their own best way to kick, and then to coordinate that kick as smoothly as possible with the overall stroke. Kickboard training, particularly in the long-axis strokes, has never been an effective aid to that process. The flutter kick that you practice on a kickboard is so different from the kind you use when you swim freestyle or backstroke that kickboard sets have next to no value for developing an efficient kick (i.e., one that properly assists the kinetic chain, with the lowest energy cost, and without increasing drag).
"Well," you say, "if the kickboard doesn't teach me to kick, what does?" By now, you're probably able to anticipate my answer: drills. The kind of kicking you practice in drills uses your legs to help in practicing balance, rotation, and much more dynamic movement than is possible on a kickboard. And if you're concerned about conditioning, don't be. The kicking you do while swimming at moderate, sustainable speeds readies your legs to do that same kind of kicking in longer races. And when you're pouring on the speed, you're conditioning your legs for the demands that sprint races will place on your legs. At West Point, we never did a single kickboard set. Yet none of my swimmers ever complained that his or her legs "died" in a race. They simply trained, with fluent swimming at a variety of speeds, to use their bodies as efficiently integrated units. Their legs provided just the help that was needed at each speed and, as they did, became conditioned for the work each kind of swimming required.
So if you're not to worry about conditioning, what about execution? Is there one particular kicking style in the long-axis strokes that's kind of a gold standard? No, there isn't. For although freestyle and backstroke use virtually the same kick, virtually all backstrokers favor the steady, unbroken 6-beat kick, while among competitive freestylers, the number using either 6-beat or 2beat kicks is fairly even. Among fitness and lap swimmers, the 2-beat is much more common than the 6-beat. Different strokes, as they say, for different folks.
When it comes to the top freestyle sprinters, you'll find a strong 6-beat kick almost universal. But there's more at work here than the beat. The best sprinters in the world (who, you'll remember, also tend to be among the tallest swimmers) almost always have large, supple feet, great ankle flexibility, and consequently a great kick. A superb flutter kick, in fact, seems to be one of the great assets of highly accomplished sprinters.
My sense is that a great kick like this is less important for the propulsion it may contribute, than for its effect in raising more of the sprinter's body out of the water. Because drag builds exponentially with increases in speed, the sprinter encounters far more drag than the slower distance swimmer. So one of the things sprinters must do to achieve those speeds is reduce drag by lifting as much of the body as possible above the surface. And since the hydroplaning effect requires many times more velocity than the human-swimming limit of 5 mph, a swimmer can't depend on l
ift created by forward motion. So, we create some lift with a powerful kick. The energy cost for doing so is enormous, but the race will be over in less than a minute anyway so it's an affordable cost.
The primary danger among sprinters, by the way, is emphasizing the kick too much, which increases drag and energy cost and decreases coordination and control. A too-powerful kick is just as bad as too slight a kick when sprinting, and in both cases the remedy is the same: to make whatever kick you have fit in as seamlessly as possible with the overall stroke. Whenever I see someone swimming with a kick that's too visible, too apparent, it shouts "wasted energy" to me. So I tell them, "Just make the kick fit the stroke." The best kick is usually one where all pans of the stroke simply harmonize to the eye. As the swimmer goes faster, the kick also speeds up. But remember: You don't swim faster just by kicking harder or faster. That will usually just waste energy, impede the development of a natural rhythm, and overwhelm the movement of the other parts of the stroke.
Butterfly Kicking
In the summer of 1999, Jenny Thompson swam 57.8 seconds for 100meter butterfly to break the oldest world record in swimming and culminate an eight-year process of learning to swim butterfly the right way. It had been a relatively long haul. When she arrived at Stanford University as a freshman in the fall of 1991, she was already accomplished enough to have become one of the fastest of high school butterflyers. But she was certainly no threat to the world record. Just one year later she was so awesomely conditioned and powerful that she broke the world record in 100-meter freestyle, but she was still more than 3 seconds — a yawning gulf, by world-record standards — away from the butterfly mark.
And she might have stayed there, had Jenny not eventually learned one of the most important lessons in the stroke: to stop kicking. For while the Stanford women's team gets the cream of high school swimmers every year, Stanford Head Coach Richard Quick says that every freshman has to be taught not to kick in butterfly, at least not in the sense they're used to. What Jenny and all of her teammates learn is that butterfly kicking is really done with the core body, not the legs. By practicing short-axis rotation drills, first in a headlead position (arms at the sides) and then in a hand-lead position (arms extended) they gradually learn to move efficiently through the water with rhythmic, effortless, body undulation. We call this motion body-dolphining, and we teach it through the drills described on pages 158-165 and shown on our Four Strokes Made Easy DVD.
As the body-dolphin movement begins to feel more natural through practice, you'll realize you are "kicking butterfly" without using your leg muscles. Simply by rhythmically pulsing your chest down and maintaining a long, supple bodyline, you create a body wave much like the ripple that flows through a garden hose when you snap one end. The "kick" is the last wave in that body dolphin, but the core body does most of the work.
After you have imprinted this new skill, you can begin doing short swims with the whole butterfly stroke. But the emphasis continues to be on rhythmically undulating the core body (initiated each time by pressing on the chest) and allowing the arms and legs to simply become extensions of core-bcxly movement. The rhythm and power are in your core. When you want to move faster, you move your core faster.
I'll explain this process and how to train it in greater detail in the section on butterfly technique in Chapter 13. For now, the key point is that the butterfly kick is but one more example of how the job of the legs is primarily to integrate with core-body movement. In butterfly, as in the long-axis strokes, the legs are part of the kinetic chain when they're used properly, and the kinetic chain in turn takes the burden off the leg muscles and saves them from fatigue. Drills teach you the new movement habit of "not kicking." Then slow, controlled, fluent swimming integrates that habit into your whole-stroke and helps make it permanent.
Breaststroke Kicking
If you were hoping to find a place in swimming where the legs actually do have a starring role, you've found it. In all the other strokes, the pull creates more propulsion, more easily, than the kick ever could. In breaststroke, the reverse is true. And breaststroke kick is also somewhat less fully integrated with core-body rotation. I'll explain this more fully in the section on breaststroke technique in Chapter 13.
Considering strictly what part of the stroke makes you go forward, the breaststroke kick is a major part of the propulsion system — the body is moving faster at the end of the kick than it is at any other time in the stroke cycle. Because the body is moving faster, it is also encountering more drag than at any other time in the stroke cycle. So it's critically important to have everything forward of your hips streamlined into a needle-like position at the moment you complete your kick.
But there's one way in which the breaststroke kick is not an exception to the rule. When you want to swim faster in breaststroke, you do it by increasing the tempo of your short-axis rotation, not by kicking (or pulling) faster.
Chapter 9
How To Develop More Speed Without Losing Fluency
By now, it's obvious that TI swimmers do not speed up by pulling harder or faster, and they do not speed up by kicking harder or faster. Squeezing more speed out of yourself as you continue to swim fluently is a far more subtle and sophisticated process, but, once mastered, that knack is guaranteed to make you a much faster, more successful, and much happier swimmer. And that is one of the lessons — among many— you may find extremely difficult to learn while actually swimming. Sometimes, you can pick up what you need to know more easily through another sport.
Take the challenge of how to increase speed without losing fluency, without breaking the link between kinetic-chain power and our propelling movements. Our instinct to speed up by pulling and kicking faster is powerful. It is so powerful that, notwithstanding hundreds of pool lengths of drills or controlled-speed swimming to learn fluency, grace, and efficiency, the first time someone fires a starting gun, your hard-won efficiency may crumble into your old churning habits.
The best inoculation is a systematic plan to gradually expand the range of speeds and stroke rates at which you can swim smoothly, sometimes reaching out to another sport entirely to get the message across to your body. And of the myriad things you can do to help your stroke, here are my three top "keys to speed:"
TI's Top Three Keys to Speed
Key #1: Train your torso.
Once you have learned the fundamentals of Fishlike Swimming, whether your swimming becomes raggedly choppy or remains fluidly graceful at higher speeds will be determined purely and simply by how you set your rhythm. Rhythm is just as important to a beautiful swimming stroke as it is to a beautifully performed piece of music. In the same way that a well-rehearsed orchestra plays in perfect harmony by taking its cues from the conductor, graceful and fluent swimming takes its cues from the core body. A bedrock principle of rhythmic movement is that timing and tempo should always originate at the center of the movement, not at the extremities. That's another way of saying that your arms and legs take their cues from the core, never the other way around. Two of my favorite non-swimming activities that can teach you this in no uncertain terms are cross-country skiing and in-line skating.
In both sports, the principle of propulsion is the same. While it seems, on the surface, that the energy pushing you forward comes from moving your legs, it's easy to prove this isn't so. For if you try to go faster by just moving your legs faster, you end up scrabbling them ineffectually, like a car spinning its wheels in sand. For the skier, the skater, and, for that matter, the car, the secret to power and propulsion is traction. You must anchor your foot (there's that kinetic chain concept again!) before you push off. Cross-country skis are bowed in the middle; that mid-section must be weighted and pressed into the snow to get a grip. After gliding forward on your right foot, you must put all of your weight on it to gain traction. Only then can you push off with it and thrust the left leg forward. In-line skating works in much the same way.
Thus in both sports, your speed (or stride rate) is
determined not by how fast you can move your legs but by how fast you can shift your weight. Try to move your legs faster than you can shift your weight and you lose your anchor, your power, and ultimately your forward momentum. Your stride rate may increase, but your stride length—how far you travel each time you thrust a leg forward — will deteriorate precipitously, and your fluency and efficiency will go right along with it. The only thing that will happen faster is the rate at which you fatigue.
Swimming works the same way. Trying to swim faster by moving your arms faster is a quick route to a ragged, exhausting stroke.. .for two reasons. First, arms that move too fast cut themselves adrift from the torso's powerful energy. Compared to the torso, the arms have relatively little mass, so you can accelerate them much more rapidly than you can your core body. If your torso is unable to match the rhythm of your arms, the torso simply drops out. This is like sitting on a playground swing and pumping your legs rapidly without using your upper body. Second, as we discussed earlier, if the armstroke rate gets too high, you can't anchor your hand. You lose your grip just as surely as you lose your traction in skating and skiing when your legs move faster than you can shift your weight. The result is similar, too: You take shorter strokes. You take more strokes per lap, which causes fatigue. Your hand slips instead of anchors. You lose power.
Again — just as in skating and skiing — you swim fast efficiently by using weight shifts to set your tempo. Speed up in freestyle and backstroke by shifting your weight faster from side to side. As you move your torso faster, stay balanced and "swim downhill" (leaning on your chest in freestyle or your upper back in backstroke). In butterfly and breaststroke, rock your hips and shoulders faster and you can't help but go faster. In breaststroke, for example, when you drive your chest down and forward faster after the breath, you also drive your hands forward to their anchoring point faster and you drive your hips up faster, setting you up more quickly for the next powerful core-body contraction that brings your hips to your hands' anchoring point.
Swimming made easy Page 9