Enhance Your Freestyle Kick Strength
The number one stroke that most swimmers do regularly is Front crawl or Freestyle. It's the easiest to accomplish a lot of meters in a short amount of time. It is usually the first stroke that most young swimmers will learn. However, it's a difficult stroke to get right. As a linear stroke, there is a lot of long movements and body rotation that can throw you in the water. So today's lesson is on how to create stability during those rotations.
When learning how to properly kick in Freestyle, a common mistake most novice swimmers are making is that they are executing their strokes with large kicks as they think bigger equals more power. In fact, the opposite is true. If you want to generate a strong propulsive kick, you need to think smaller and faster.
Another mistake I see a lot from swimmers is that they only kick from the lower part of their legs. Basically, their thighs don’t move and all the motion is from their knees to their toes. This type of kicking will cause your lower half to be heavy and sink to the bottom.
Beyond the misconception of trying to achieve power through larger kicks, a lot of novice swimmers think kicking is all about your legs. They make the error of trying to kick with their feet flexed in conjunction with generating the kicking motion with their knees. This usually causes them to move backward or not at all. Your foot, like your hand, should move backward relative to the water. During the beginning of the down kick is one particular instance of the kicking cycle where this occurs.