I constantly "go to school" on my various Masters
colleagues. I'm afraid some of the women probably think I'm
"oogling" them underwater. But my intentions are academic
... okay an ocassional oogle.
Anyways, a new fellow showed up. Trim, young, and kicking
like the blazes. So most people that make kicking the
cornerstone of their stroke can ... well, you know, KICK.
So I casually time him on some 50 yard kickboard sets by
watching the clock out of the corner of my eye, and he's
taking nearly a whole minute to go each repeat! That's not
very fast in my book. I swim at a college, and when the swim
team shows up, they can go high 40s pretty easily.
So I did a couple things.
First some math. I couldn't figure out how he was a good
swimmer utilizing a weak kick. But the numbers DO add up. He
swims in the lane that goes 1:20 base. That's 80 seconds a
hundred. So if he can do 50 yards repeats on a minute,
that's 120 second base for 100 yards kicking.
That's our "magic" swim/kick ratio of 1.5. The data was
taken from sprinters, but why not apply to more general swim
distances?
The second thing I did was decide (again!) to try and
develop a 6-beat kick. Not a rooster tail, but something I
could use lightly at distance, and "heat-up" during an all
out effort. And I'm finally getting somewhere!
So here's my point: working on a kick is a lot of fun
because it's great to finally develop some "dark" muscle
tissue - namely the lower body. That's a reference to
Larry's oft quoted turkeys versus ducks. We have turkey
breast meat up top which is white, non-vascular, low
mitochondria, etc. If you were lucky enough to be an age
group swimmer, then as a developing adolescent you spent
thousands of hours in the pool, and all that work has
developed an upper body musculature that a "johnny come
lately" will just never match.
But legs are different story! We all have God Given or
evolutionarily developed lower bodies that helped us run
down Ice Age Mammals. The large vital capicity of our heart
and lungs are designed to feed those big, vascular muscles.
So by all means, if your swim to kick ratio is anywhere near
1.5, I highly encourage people to work on a 6-beat kick.
It's utterly brutal at first. A hundred yards with even the
lightest kick left me panting at the wall, while before it
was nothing. But the legs respond quickly to the added
stress, unlike the upper body. I've also been doing the
"gold standard" of exercises in the gym twice a week.
Namely, squats. They help temendously and the strength gains
are quick and dramatic. And that's a lot of fun to
experience.
Plus, we can argue on the group ad infinitum about why a
kick works, but the fact that it works is not debatable.
Smooths out the velocity everywhere. For the first time I
can understand "bottom up swimming" a little. That's a
phrase which means that the hips and legs are setting tempo
in the stroke and not the upper body. When you want to swim
faster, you think about kicking and core body rotation
instead of arms. Larry also mentioned that his father told
him, "your kick will bring you home." I'm starting to
understand that a little in the pool. Your upper body cannot
handle the stress of lactate in the blood. It just gets so
tight. Legs are much better at handling that stress. When
the chips are down, you can keep those babies pumping even
as your arms feel like lead.
Being an average sized male, I was buying into the theory
that stroke rate with minimal kick was the way to go given
that elite females often employ that strategy. But I'll
never be as strong as Brooke Bennett. And elite male swimmer
Erik Vendt is only 5'10" yet competes with the best because
of a huge kick. I wasn't an age-grouper like Erik, which
means my upper body will never match his. But when it comes
to leg muscles, the playing field is much more level between
him and me. We all share a few million years of development
to run long distances at speed. Maybe it's better to try and
apply that to swimming than bemoan the fact that I didn't
start swimming seriously until I was 40 years old.
Eric