I’m considering spending the vast majority of my pool time wearing FINS with the objective of strengthening and improving my kick (along with doing an assortment of kicking drills).
Is there a downside to wearing FINS for 90% of all my pool swims?
Will it significantly improve my leg strength and ankle flexibility?
Has anyone done this?
Thanks in advance for your input
Fix your body position and you won’t need a kick of any consequence. I thought like you do for a good 20 years until I finally relented and fixed my body position maybe 3 years ago. Now all I have is a small amplitude 2 beat flutter and my butt breaches the water at all times in the stroke. You may even find you can and might need to reduce the amplitude of your kick else your feet will breach as well. My kick provides little to no propulsion of consequence directly, but is just there to help create torque across my torso for my pull through. It’s also a great way to ween people off pull buoys!
I’ve never done so much work with fins, but i do believe they are the best toy for technique work because they allow you to swim faster. when you swim faster and you will get a better feel of where the drag points are and you can try to figure out how to reduce that drag. and yes they will help you kick which probably isn’t good since you started a thread on this topic. i would never advocate more than 50% of a workout be with toys though.
What did you do to fix your position?
Lot’s of little things that all added up to one huge improvement. Activate spinal stabilizers and erector spinae…those two things are HARD to ingrain b/c we use them so little, most of us anyway. Worked my ass off all winter and by spring it was doable, 6 months and it was something I didn’t have to think about. Play with head position and learn where you own ‘trim’ setting is…different for everyone.
It’s the stuff no one wants to do, but it works. Most people want to try and emulate Yang’s EVF while their feet drag 3 feet under water.
My body position is pretty solid. This is about weak legs.
I’m a dead leg swimmer. Think about someone swimming who is paralyzed from the waist down. (Using 100% upper body).
I have been swimming this way for the past two years (completed 3 IM’s this way).
However, this off season, I’m looking to incorporate a kick. I’ve noticed that when I do, I swim much faster. However, since I’m not use to kicking my legs are incredibly weak.
I swim about 300 yards of a set yesterday with FINS and today my hip flexors and ankles are ridiculously sore.
I’m not sure if fins would help - I swam for 10 years, and every time we used fins, I found I could go ridiculously fast whether or not I was kicking well. With fins on, it didn’t matter if I was a mediocre kicker, because pretty much any spastic movement of my legs would give me massive forward propulsion.
Fins are great for working on your arm technique, since they let you simulate having your whole stroke working well, so you can get your arms technically sound without worrying about using your arms to compensate for your sinking legs. When I was 13 or so, I pretty much went from a 40-second 50m fly to a 29-second 50m fly in a couple months thanks to fin workouts letting me figure out what good upper body butterfly technique should look and feel like.
They’d probably give a good ankle stretch and would probably strengthen certain muscles, but probably the best way to get better at kicking is to just grab a kickboard and do lots of normal kick.
Oh ok gotcha. 9 out of 10 triathletes hammer kick sets b/c it’s the only way they have a prayer of attaining a decent body position…spaz kick.
Will be interested to see how it pans out for you. I used to use a 6 beat, small amplitude kick, but figured out with a little rhythm and timing change how to go the same speed with a 2 beat. 1/3 less kicking meant a HUGE reduction in energy spent for me.
There’s this old fart that swims at my pool who uses fins all the time. He doesn’t use them for training, but just to make himself look faster than all the other swimmers. He forgets that we can all the the fins. And then he struts around on the deck like he’s Phelps or something.
We have that guy in our masters group. He’s wearing full length fins 100% of the time and always asking for the intervals to be shortened. The few times he has taken them off he suddenly has leaky goggles on the first 100m and needs to stop becuase he can’t keep up with the interval. He then puts the fins back on.
OP, no, do not wear them 90% of the time. Do some drills with them (<10% of total swim time) then take them off. Do some more kicking drills with NO fins. Then swim and focus on keeping your rear up and your legs close together. Two or six beat. Whatever feels more natural.
Body position is everything, that is the purpose of the kick. That’s why people swim faster in wetsuits, they are higher in the water, hence less drag. There is a reason why top distance swimmers can swim sub 1min LCM pace with a two bear kick.
A very strong kick is only beneficial in the opening 100-200m of a race to get a good position.
In short, look at improving your kicking technique, good flexibility in the ankles. Legs staying close together not splaying out. If you want to get better tie a band around your legs and swim. That’ll teach you body awearness.
I’m surprised we’ve gotten this far without anyone wondering whether this is a troll.
No one who swims well does this. You can do a bit of swimming with fins to work on body feel, but it won’t fix your real problems.
Others have suggested kicking and swimming with a band. I’ll throw in kicking, no board, face in the water and swimming with a pull buoy some to give a sense of where your body position should be.
I swim with PADDLES the majority of my workouts.
You should try PADDLES, and not the FINS.
They’re a tool not a crutch.
I’m adding fins to my list of triathlete crack along with pull buoys & paddles.
Fix your body position and you won’t need a kick of any consequence. I thought like you do for a good 20 years until I finally relented and fixed my body position maybe 3 years ago. Now all I have is a small amplitude 2 beat flutter and my butt breaches the water at all times in the stroke. You may even find you can and might need to reduce the amplitude of your kick else your feet will breach as well. My kick provides little to no propulsion of consequence directly, but is just there to help create torque across my torso for my pull through. It’s also a great way to ween people off pull buoys!
poor ankle flexibilty leads to poor body position.
Put him in my lane and he’ll get a taste of his own medicine…
If you have this “dead leg swimmer” syndrome that causes waste down paralysis you don’t have pretty solid body position. As tigerpaws said, it doesn’t take much of a kick, just a synchronized and well balanced one. I actually think that a lot of the Total Immersion video clips of Terry swimming do a nice job of showing both the timing and balance, albeit with monstrous amplitude.
My thoughts exactly!
The kick serves four functions: propulsion, lift, stabilizing force for the end of the underwater pull and inertia. To get all of these, one has to use a 6 beat kick. To get much propulsion and lift from the kick, one must also have great flexibility in the anterior ligaments of the ankle and ideally, hyperextension of the knees. The problem with a 6 beat kick is that there is no recovery…the legs are working in both directions all the time. No one…not even Sun Yang, can sustain a hard 6 beat kick for 1500 meters.
So when it comes to your swim, you need to make a decision. Either commit to making your legs much fitter and your ankles more flexible…or stick with a two beat kick and rely on your arms, preferably with a high stroke rate and a two beat kick. Dragging your legs is a bad idea because they will sink and lead to a poor body position.
The two beat kick will provide some lift and a stabilizing force for your pull but little or no propulsion…and won’t obey the law of inertia. If you want to get seriously faster, then you probably will need to develop a better kick and put some serious effort into doing that.
With regard to fins, my general rule is no more than 30% of your freestyle should be done with fins, while 60-70% of fly and backstroke can be done with fins. Fins make us all feel better and swim faster than we really can…so get used to swimming without them…unless they start to allow us to use them in races.
Gary Sr.
Yes I have sort of done this in that before triathlon I came from a sporting background that involved a lot of swimming with fins. Somewhat bigger than swimming fins, so my technique may be (most likely is) different than a pure swimmer using fins. At peak, I’ve swam up to 8km day (2 sessions) and maybe 20-30km per week, and a lot of this was sprints.
In both squads I am now in, I swim faster than anyone else there when in fins (I normally swim in the 3rd fastest lane without fins). When we do kickboard, no fins, I really should move down a lane as I am really slow. So for me, being a strong ‘fin’ kicker has absolutely no bearing on my freestyle kick no fins.