How to use your legs properly while you swim

Developing a solid kick during freestyle swimming is difficult to do. The mistake many triathletes make is that they’ll perform a kick set to develop the skill and fitness of their legs, and then they’ll perform a swim set. Or they’ll perform the kick set at the end of a workout after they’re swimming. 

The problem with this approach is that they’ll never learn how to integrate the kick into their stroke when the kicking and the swimming is separated.

You want to practise some kicking and then go right into swimming working the kick with the same skills and effort. You want to continue to alternate between kicking and swimming and do so as often as possible. 

To learn any skill requires repetition. The more practise you get, the faster you will improve. 

By doing some kicking and then going right into some swimming, you’re going to get used to using the legs in your stroke by incorporating what you learn by kicking right into your swimming.

It’s also effective from a fitness perspective. When you race, you want to make sure your legs are appropriately engaged, and they have to be fit if you’re going to sustain that effort for an entire race. 

By alternating between kicking and swimming, you’re actually challenging the legs to do more than what they’ll face in a race. 

When you kick, the legs provide all the power, and going right into swimming challenges you to keep the legs working in spite of the fatigue that’s been generated.

With one strategy, you can improve your skill and your fitness. Let’s take a look at how to put it into practice:

Kick/swim sets

The simplest way to use this strategy is to perform sets where you alternate between kicking and swimming like the set below:

8 x 50m as: ODD flutter kick; EVEN freestyle

You can use any distance for either the kick or the swim, and the distances don’t have to be the same.  You can emphasise one or the other depending on the distance you choose. 

Same goes with intensity. You can adjust the intensity of the kick and the swim depending on what you to focus one. You can go hard on the kick and smooth on the swim or go hard on both.

Kick/swim repetitions

You can take the concept from above and incorporate kicking and swimming into the same repetition.  For instance, you could use a set as simple as the following:

8 x 75m as: 25m flutter kick + 50m freestyle

This turns up the fitness development and the learning because you’re immediately shifting from the legs to the swim. The legs don’t get a break which makes it more effective at helping you learn to incorporate your kick into your stroke.

Top image credit: Getty Images