Kicking can be your secret weapon if you focus on developing it. Whether it comes naturally to you or not, a strong kick will help you close your races hard. Let’s discuss how to take advantage of your leg strength in the pool with these easy tips.
1. High Volume Kick Set
In order to improve your kicking, you’re going to have to dedicate a main set entirely to kicking on a regular basis. Whether it’s once per week, or every other week, execute a high volume kicking set on the order of 1500-2000 yards or meters. This can be broken up into descending segments or best average components just like regular main sets. In order to develop leg endurance and tolerate lactate build up in muscle, your kick sets need to vary in distance and intensity.
2. Quality Kicking
To track your progress, repeat a timed kicking effort once per week. This can be a 100-meter kick for time at the end of a workout. If you want to have a speedy kick, you’ll have to kick fast in practice. Leg muscles will develop fast twitch fibers if your training includes some speed play and all-out efforts. Kicking on your back in a streamline creates a better bodyline in the water and more closely simulates kicking in a race environment.
3. Leg Power on Land
In dryland, develop your leg power by focusing on explosiveness. It is easier to develop leg strength on land than in the pool. Body weight exercises like box jumps, squat jumps, and burpees are great from improving leg power. Loaded exercises like front, back, and single leg squats, or any variation of lunges also help develop quadriceps, hamstring, and glute strength. Kicking integrates the major muscles of your lower limbs with your core, so remember to maintain core training in your dryland.
Your kicking will improve if you bring it to the forefront of your training. Continue to work your legs and core hard in dryland, and devote entire main sets to a kicking focus. As with anything in swimming, train at race pace to get your kicking up to speed. Dedicate additional focus to kicking to make this summer your best racing yet.
BridgeAthletic works with elite professional, collegiate, and club swimming programs to provide a turnkey solution for dryland training. Led by Nick Folker, the top swimming strength and conditioning coach in the world, our team builds stroke-specific, custom-optimized dryland programs for each of our clients. The individualized workouts are delivered directly to athletes via our state of the art technology platform and mobile applications. Check Nick and BridgeAthletic out as recently featured in SwimSwam.
Nick Folker is the Co-Founder and Director of Elite Performance at BridgeAthletic. Nick’s roster of athletes includes 35 Olympians winning 22 Olympic Medals, 7 team NCAA Championships and over 170 individual and relay NCAA championships. Megan Fischer-Colbrie works as the Sports Science Editor at BridgeAthletic. Megan was a four-year varsity swimmer at Stanford, where she recently graduated with a degree in Human Biology. The Championship Series by BridgeAthletic is designed to empower athletes with tips from the pros that will help them reach peak performance come race day. We will be covering competition-focused topics such as nutrition, recovery, stretching, and mental preparation.
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Ankle flexibility!!!!!!!!!
I’m on a Boy’s and Girl’s Club team, and I always emphasize my underwater kicking and I usually pass faster swimmers with my underwater. I also beat others during regular kicking sets.