Most women think a harder leg kick equals more speed, but for most adults and triathletes, it actually equals harder and slower progress and being more exhausted at the end of your lap. So if your legs are feeling heavy and your heart rate's really high at the end of each lap, let's take a look at these main reasons why your kick might be slowing you down and what you can do about it. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford. Mistake number one is kicking from the knees. Now what does this mean? You've probably heard the term before. Kicking from the knees really implies that you are bending at your hips and your knees too much. If we look at your body line, so where your body is in the water, if your quads and your knees are coming much below that line, that's kicking from the knees. That is going to create a lot of additional drag with your body in the water. And when you're kicking harder, it's actually going to be slowing you down and causing your heart rate to go up. So we want to make sure that we're not kicking like we're trying to kick a soccer ball or ride a bike. This is something I see quite often when we run our freestyle clinics and when people send in their videos for our analysis inside of the Effortless Swimming membership. What we want to do instead is have the thigh bones, think of the thigh bones at the top here, moving slightly back and slightly forwards from your hips. That will create enough of a movement of the legs that it's not going to

break your body line. It's not going to come outside of your torso there, but it will still give you a little bit of propulsion, but it will help you with your balance and your timing. So that is the biggest mistake we see with people's legs, kicking in a way that's actually slowing them down if you're kicking from the hips. Meaning you're kicking where your thighs and your quads and your knees are coming below your body line. One way that we actually get people to help make that change, we start them off by doing 25 freestyle with a really big kick, an exaggerated kick. And you will likely notice that you are exhausted at the end of that lap. Then we get to do a little bit of vertical kick where you're vertical in the water. You can hold on to the wall or the lane right with the hand just to keep you upright, and then we get them to just move those thigh bones back and forth from the hips ever so slightly. And that will help you feel the correct movement of the kick. Then we go on to 25 freestyle with that smaller narrower kick, and you'll likely find that the speed goes up, the effort goes down. Mistake number two, kicking too much. Often people will kick small, which is good, but kick really fast and a lot in order to try and keep their hips and their legs up. And this is a mistake because yet uses more energy and it's not actually going to support you at all. The kick is then dominating the stroke, which is not what we want. So if you feel like you're doing small kicks, but they're very rapid and very fast, then you're likely kicking too much. A lot of swimmers, especially those

that are somewhat new to the sport, they can go a long way with just a two-beat kick, which is one kick per arm stroke. Not to say you can't do a what we call a four-beat kick or a six-beat kick, but a lot of swimmers will have enough speed and balance to have a good two-beat kick which keeps the effort level down. So if you're kicking rapidly and it's causing you to tire, or it's even like a 12-beat kick, which would be six kicks per arm stroke, that's just too much. So don't let the kick dominate the stroke. If you can learn how to hold your body well in the water, so long through the body, you lean on your chest a little bit to let those lungs support you, you'll find you'll be horizontal in the water and you can be well balanced when you do that. Then the kick can just help you rotate from one side to the other and that's kind of all you need from the kick, because the upper body is the thing that's actually going to move you primarily forwards. It's that 20% of the stroke where 80% of your propulsion comes from. So let the arms be the things that move you forwards, not your legs.

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yourself? Get 15% off your first pair of hydro clear anti-fog goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. That's 15% off your first pair of goggles with the code podcast at shop.effortlesswimming.com. We also have a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're not happy with the goggles for any reason, you can simply return them for a refund. Don't let foggy goggles ruin another swim. Try hydro clear today and experience clear vision from start to finish. Mistake number three is stiff ankles. If you have run since you've been a kid and you've developed these stiff ankles from running, it can be good for running but it's not so good for swimming. Now mobility takes a long time to make changes to for most people but you can improve on your ankle flexibility or your mobility. So it's important to be able to point your toes. One way that you can not fast-track that improvement but you can make some better changes to the way that you kick, if you point your toes and turn your feet slightly inwards almost like a little bit of pigeon toad that can give you a bit more flexion in your feet because something that I see fairly often with adult swimmers and a lot of guys have a tendency to do this I think more so for balance. They'll point their toes but then occasionally when they're kicking their foot will turn outwards and that outward turn of the foot creates a lot of drag

on the outside of their body with the top of that foot and even though it doesn't look like much surface area it is killing your swim speed. So a good approach for that point the toes turn the feet slightly in and it's okay to have your big toes brushing past one another at least to develop that way of kicking. Now I don't want you to point your toes so much that you're cramping in your feet and in your calves that's not sustainable that's no good. So we need to keep the ankles loose and floppy when we're doing that kick so it's all within reason. If you want to improve on that ankle mobility there's a number of ways you can do it sometimes wearing fins something like a damn sea fins some good fins or the fins that we've got you can point the toes with those and it will actually give you a little bit of a stretch there you know if you're kicking because you've got that extra weight or extra resistance of the fins that will force you to stretch a little bit through that movement. You can also sit on the top of your feet that can help stretch it a bit and there are other exercises some with therabands as well that can help you with that. So if you want those comment below and I can link you to a video with those exercises that you can use with the theraband. Mistake number four is using your kick for propulsion. Now if you're trying to kick yourself forwards instead of when your arms move you forwards then you are going to be fatigued after 25 or 50 meters so remember the kick is not to help move you forwards but more to keep you

balanced and help you with your rhythm in the stroke so don't try and use it as the primary method of propulsion let the arms do that. So you've got to work on good body position first so eyes somewhere down, lung through the body and a small narrow kick and lean on your chest a little bit to let the lungs help keep you up in the water then you can let the legs kind of just do their thing and you can have that easy two beat kick after that. Now bonus tip here is fishtail feet so imagine that your foot is this fishtail at the back when you kick down it's like this whip of the foot or this flick of a fishtail that lets you get that little bit of propulsion and lift from the kick so if you're trying to be very stiff and rigid with it it's not going to help you we need to have that looseness and floppiness through the feet. Another good analogy that I heard is it's almost like you're trying to kick off a sock so if you've got this movement of trying to kick off a long sock off your foot that's a similar way of how you should kick in the water. If you enjoyed these tips grab our seven tips in seven days how you can swim easier over seven days I'll send you an email every single day with a small tip that you can try next time you go to the pool and this can help you relax more in the water be very comfortable and start to increase your swim speed as you're going get that in the link below if you'd like to get the full breakdown of freestyle click this link above. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast if you'd like us to help you become a

faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com