# The importance of earnestly doing your kick drills.



## Chris Hobson (Aug 27, 2022)

For most of my life swimming meant going along to the pool and doing sixty lengths of breast stroke. My breast stroke technique was reasonable due to my being taught how to do it by a proper swimming teacher as a kid. I could do the front crawl but not remotely correctly. It wasn't until my diagnosis in 2013 when I started doing triathlons that I started attending swim classes and trying to learn to do it properly. This then is the point when me and my long suffering legs were introduced to the concept of kick drills. Swim coaches emphasise them quite a lot but I'm wondering if even then they aren't stressing their importance enough. Proper swimmers aim to get about a quarter of their forward propulsion from kicking their feet, the other three quarters coming from their arms, but that is only half of the story. Poor leg technique doesn't just not propel you along very well, it actually holds you back by creating drag. So, we hate doing the bloody kick drills because they take ages and our legs hurt. The upside is that we get to swim sedately alongside the guy who is swimming really hard but progressing more slowly.

The basic kick drill involves holding a kick board, or other buoyancy aid in front of us with outstretched arms. Our knees are straight but not locked, our toes are pointing although not rigidly like a ballerina but more relaxed. We try to kick from the hip so that the whole of our legs move up and down and we keep the kicks relatively small and neat. What do we acheive from all this? Well, much of good crawl technique is about punching the smallest possible hole through the water as this reduces drag. So we don't want massive flailing kicks as those will increase drag. We also need to keep our body horizontal. This is acheived partly by keeping our head down and turning to the side to breath without lifting our head. We also need a reasonably vigorous kick action without which our legs will tend to sink. Swimming at an angle to the horizontal will obviously cause a lot of drag and our poor old arms will then have to work twice as hard to pull us along. Poor kicking technique therefore means that we have to work much harder to make progress and this has a knock on effect on our breathing. With most exercise we can just breath in and out and grab as much air as we need, fit chest and lungs permitting. Not so with swimming, our breaths have to be synchronised with our swim action so getting enough air meets an additional challenge. Efficient technique means that we are not constantly gasping for breath.

I started out by forcing myself to do 500 to 1,000 metres of kick drills once a week. I've since realised that doing a few every couple of days means that the weekly sessions are less painful on the legs. One additional bonus is that they are very good at toning up the abs and glutes. Do you want a flat tum and pert bum as well as good crawl technique? Then get those kick drills done in earnest.


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