By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
An explosive kick is one of the hallmarks of sprint freestyle.
Behind every elite sprinter is an absolute rooster-tail of white water shooting up into the air as they motor down the pool.
But a powerful freestyle kick does more than just put more horsies under the hood when sprinting.
It also stabilizes the body, giving the arms a solid platform to crank up max power without the stroke falling apart like your favorite set of goggles from your age group days.
Here’s why the kick is so essential to sprint freestyle performance and how the sprint-obsessed freestyler can bolt on a more powerful kick to their stroke the right way.
Why the Sprint Freestyle Kick Matters
A study by Strzala et al. (2021) took a group of 27 competitive swimmers—regional to international level—and put them through a variety of tests to see what stuck to the wall in terms of predicting sprint freestyle performance.
They looked at:
Tethered freestyle swimming Tethered freestyle kick Arm cranking test (on land, obviously) Set of 10 countermovement jumps (ditto)Out of these tests, the strongest predictor of sprint freestyle speed was the max and average forces generated in the freestyle kick test.
The biggest boosts in performance came at the start, turn, and finish.
Makes sense—these parts are all leg-dominant.
Off the start, we are ripping out of our underwaters and charging to the surface under the power of our kick. Out of the turn, our legs carry us back to the surface. And at the finish, the shoulders and arms are white-knuckling through fatigue, but it’s the legs that are sustaining stroke length and body position.And while the role of the kick on direct swimming speed is always a hot conversation—it’s essential at all distances and strokes but for different reasons—where it pulls its weight with sprint freestyle is its role in stabilizing the trunk when swimming all-out.
At max freestyle speed, our body is engaged in organized chaos:
Stroke tempo is teetering on the edge of losing control The shoulders are rotating at a much higher speed than submax speeds Max power is shooting through the shoulders and arms The hips are rolling less, increasing torso twist between the shoulders and hips And of course, you are exerting and straining to get every little piece of propulsion possibleThe kick is part of what is holding everything together.
Those little leggies of yours are kicking like mad, generating propulsion while helping hold everything together so the arms can go into turbo mode and unleash PB-busting force.
Building a Sprint Freestyle Kick
Okay, now that you’re sitting there thinking about how a sprintier sprint kick will help you go faster on race day, here’s how to go about building it.
High-tempo, narrow amplitude
The sprint freestyle kick is narrow and super high frequency. Gatta et al. (2012) was able to clock frequency through all that white water and saw that the legs were speeding at 150 kicks per minute.
This high frequency is necessary as six-beat kicking while using an arm tempo of ~60 stroke cycles per minute pretty much demands it. Hard to do a big, loping six-beat kick when your arms are churning up a storm.
Train a kick that is high tempo but narrower than your standard kick. Tighter and faster than a tech suit.
Resisted kicking
Grab your resistance tool of choice—DragSox are a great option. Resistance tubing for peak force development. Drag chutes if you like getting your feet tangled up (kidding, sort of).
Resisted kicking is my favorite way to go about building force in the legs. Amara et al. (2022) did a resisted kicking intervention with a group of swimmers (paired with leg-focused dryland) and saw big jumps in kick performance, and more importantly, in sprint swimming performance.
Also love resisted kicking for the fact that it also highlights propulsion gaps in your kick—if you coast or slow-walk parts of the kick, these tools can give you that feedback.
Start light so that you can better replicate sprint kick mechanics (see above point), mix in some heavier force stuff, and charge up your kick.
Plug the kick into the stroke
Isolated kick strength/power is awesome, but we want that cocktail of excellence to land in our full-stroke swimming, too. This becomes a timing/coordination issue.
Lots of swimmers can kick/pull really fast but struggle to see that performance in regular swimming. Overkick drill—where you slow the arms but kick like mad—is one way to challenge your coordination skills.
By all means log time on the kickboard, but make sure you are stuffing that improvement into your swimming.
Don’t let the legs start to overtake the arms.
A challenge with adding a booming kick to your full-stroke swimming is not letting the legs overtake the global timing of the stroke.
Instead of the kick supporting what the arms are doing, you shorten, lengthen, or rush the pull to keep pace with the legs.
One way to work this is with a tempo trainer—plug in your race tempo and then do 25s fast with a 2-beat kick, then a 4-beat kick, then a 6-beat kick. This “locks” the arms into place and forces the legs to work within the context of what the upper body is doing.
The moment you change the arm stroke to “fit” the kick, back off. The arms set the global timing in the freestyle stroke; the legs support it.
Our goal is a bigger kick supporting a powerful arm stroke, not a rooster-tail kick forcing the arms to play catch-up.
Wrapping Things Up
Building a more powerful freestyle kick can have some nifty effects on your sprint freestyle.
You’ll capture more stroke length with each pull. You’ll “die” a little less at the end of your races. Get out of your breakouts faster. And be able to exert more oomph with the arms as a result of the increased stability in the hips and trunk.
Work the kick, remember to make all that new horsepower lands into your full-stroke swimming, and uncork more white-water on race day.
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.
If you’re working hard in the pool but still struggling to find those missing tenths, The 50 Freestyle Blueprint was built to help you get after them.
Across 220+ pages, the book breaks down the biggest opportunities for swimming a faster 50 free, including evidence-based strategies to boost your everything from starts, underwaters, and breakouts to stroke rate, technique, turns, kicking, dryland, and sprint-specific training.
The book also includes 20 ready-to-go sprint sets, plus a bonus guide to training and racing the 100 freestyle like a pro.
Unlock Your 50 Freestyle Here.
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