By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Fast sprinting is a blurry combination of high tempo arm movement, rock-solid trunk stability, and a kick that can churn chlorine pucks out of the pool water.
The kick’s role in sprinting is interesting in that power output actually goes down as swimmers start flirting with maximal speed.
Why?
When you’re sprinting with a six-beat kick and your arms are white-water turning over at full speed, there’s less time to generate force with each kick. Instead of taking big, sweeping kicks, sprinters have to use a kick that’s tight, fast, and timed perfectly within the constraints of the arm actions.
The goal isn’t producing the biggest kick possible but producing the most force you can in a very small window of time.
Which means they need to be trained this way.
And one of my favorites is to give them an “anaerobic spike” immediately before a sprint effort.
The Anerobic Spike Kick + Sprint Set
After your standard warm-up and a sprinty pre-set, here’s the main set:
2-5 rounds:
25m kick all-out with a board – focus on a high frequency, “tight” kick window 10s rest 25m swim all-out 3:00 restWhy This Set Works
Isolated kicking loads the anaerobic system faster than pulling or full-stroke swimming does.
A study (Ogita et al. 2003) with swimmers had them do efforts across a range of distances doing kick, pull and swim while researchers tracked how much of the energy came from the anaerobic system.
The kick maxed out its anaerobic tank fast.
By around 30 seconds, the kick efforts had already hit their anaerobic ceiling, while the pull and full-stroke conditions kept climbing towards theirs at the 2-3 minute mark.
That makes this set a great way to build sprint-specific kick capacity. The all-out kick–focusing on the same kind of high tempo and narrow kicking window used when swimming–sets the stage, pre-fatiguing the legs. A quick break at the wall, and then coordinate that same kick into your full stroke.
It’s a simple way to train the kind of fast, compact, and high-tempo kick that sprint freestyle swimming requires.
Load em up and let em rip!
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of several books for swimmers, including YourSwimBook, Conquer the Pool, The Dolphin Kick Manual, and most recently, The 50 Freestyle Blueprint.
The book is a beastly 220+ pages of evidence-based insights and practical tips for improving freestyle sprint speed.
It details everything from how to master stroke rate, technique, build a thundering freestyle kick, improve your start and underwaters, and much more.
The 50 Freestyle Blueprint also includes 20 sprint sets to get you started and a bonus guide on how to master the 100 freestyle to complete your sprint preparation.
Learn more about The 50 Freestyle Blueprint here.
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