The counterintuitive way to improve your swim kick endurance

Many triathletes struggle with their kick. While the arms are the primary driver of speed, the legs still matter, and having an efficient kick is a valuable asset to any triathlete looking to perform well during the swim.

When it comes to improving the kick, most triathletes take the same approach they take when building endurance for the run or the bike. They use a low to moderate intensity level and kick for an extended period of time.

It’s a logical approach. The only problem is that it usually doesn’t work! And the less skilled you are at kicking, the more likely it is that it won’t work. As compared to cycling and running, there is a large skill component to kicking.

Further, the muscles are being used in relatively novel ways. For these reasons, performing a lot of short fast kicking is actually a more effective way to improve your kicking. It allows you to develop the skill of kicking and condition the muscles to sustain a great kick in less time.

When you’re struggling with your kick, try focusing on the speed of your kick prior to working on sustained efforts. Once you make progress with shorter, faster work, then using longer distances can be more productive.

Here are some basic guidelines you can use to attack your kicking.

Go fast

The key to improving the kick is to practise kicking fast. This is rule number one. More than anything else, you want to get a lot of practice kicking at high speed and with effort levels. The more you can achieve this objective, the faster your kicking will improve.

Keep it short

To get a lot of practice kicking fast, you’ll need to keep the repetition distances short. When you’re first starting out, you’ll want to keep the distances as short as 25 meters.

If you’re a particularly weak kicker, 12.5 meters is acceptable as well. You can even use time, focusing on kick fast for 10-15 seconds. What really matters is that you’re working the legs, and you feel like you’re making forward progress down the pool.

Take your rest

A key aspect of learning to kick hard and fast is ensuring that you’re getting enough rest to exert a lot of effort and move forward down the pool. Because you’re keeping the distances short, you can also keep your rest periods relatively short.

However, you’ll want to take about twice as much rest as the duration of your kicking efforts. That allows you to get sufficient rest to create speed, while still allowing you to get enough repetitions in to practise your skills.

Build over time

It may take some time before you feel like you can make forward progress with a decent amount of speed. Once you do, then you can do some longer kicking work to build the endurance of the legs. Just keep in mind that kicking isn’t like running or cycling.

There’s a baseline level of effort that’s required for kick training to be productive. Make sure you can maintain a solid effort throughout.