Vertical Kicking (VK)

Most adult swimmers waste a great deal of energy on kicking. They tend to use the kick for the wrong reasons, which encourages incorrect leg motions, such as bicycle kicking or kicking mainly from the knees. Vertical kicking will help teach you effective kicking motions while it conditions precisely the right muscles. As you are learning this drill, use full-size training fins.

As the name indicates, this is a kicking drill in a vertical position. Go to a deep section of the pool where your feet cannot touch the bottom. Place one hand on top of the other on your chest and start kicking. The goal is to keep your head above the surface, with the water just below your chin and with your nose pointed straight forward (figure 4.5). Check your aquatic posture—tall and tight, just as you practiced while walking on land. Keep your hips directly under your shoulders; do not lean forward or backward.

The standard kick used for freestyle swimming, and for this drill, is called flutter kicking. The word kick refers to the action of driving your leg forward from behind your body plane to an equidistant point in front of your body plane—like kicking a ball. As one leg kicks, the other leg recovers—that is, the recovering leg moves from in front of your body plane to behind your body plane, thus putting it in the correct position to kick. The legs alternate their opposing kick and recovery motions in a continuous rhythm. Each kick should come predominantly from your hips, allowing the knee to yield slightly to the pressure of the water as the leg kicks forward. There should be no knee bend at all on the recovery portion of the kick cycle.

Figure 4.5 Vertical kicking drill.

Kick mainly from the hips and keep your ankles loose. A small, fast kick is better than a larger, slower kick. Kick in this manner for 15 seconds and then rest (hold the lane rope or side of the pool). Start with small doses of this drill, perhaps just a few repetitions of 15 seconds, followed by 15 seconds or more of rest. After you gain confidence, add more and longer repetitions with less rest.

Though it is physically demanding, vertical kicking is an excellent drill to do early in your training. Survival instincts will quickly tell your neuromuscular system which motions are most effective for keeping your blowhole dry.

Once you master VK with full-size fins, particularly the tight-line part, you can try short fins. Eventually, you should work toward doing VK with bare feet. In moving to bare feet, you may find that holding a small, floating object (a pull-buoy works well) against your chest will give you enough extra buoyancy to allow you to avoid tilting your head back to keep your blowhole dry. Be careful not to lean on the float; instead, hang from it.

Feedback Tools

• If your nose is pointed anywhere but straight forward, horizontal to the surface, then you have tilted your head off your tight line.

• If you find yourself bobbing up and down a bit with each kick, then your kicks are too large—keep the kicks compact.

Experiment a Bit

After you have spent some time with the VK drill, using good abdominal and neck tension to keep a tight line, purposely relax into a schlumpy posture for a while and note how this affects your position and efforts. Then draw yourself back into good posture. You will likely find that with schlumpy posture you feel less supported, perhaps having to spend more energy to keep your blowhole dry. You will also likely find that reorganizing your head, torso, and hips back into tall aquatic posture quickly solves those problems. You can increase the difficulty and training value of the drill by holding your hands just above the surface of the water, on top of your head, or in full streamline position (arms extended straight above your head) during the kicking. Each of these positions will require you to kick faster to keep your head above the water.