FINIS Tip Of The Week: Vertical Kicking

Welcome to the “FINIS Tip of the Week.” Swimming World will be bringing you a topic that we’ll explore with drills and concepts for you to implement with your team on a regular basis. While certain weeks may be more appropriate for specific levels of swimming (club, high school, college, or masters), each tip is meant to be flexible for your needs and inclusive for all levels of swimming.

This week’s tip is vertical kicking, an awesome complement to traditional kicking that adds another dimension to training your lower body.

Most swimmers have encountered vertical kicking at some point in their career, but few may realize the benefits this drill has for their kicking. Best used for flutter of dolphin kick, vertical kicking first and foremost forces you to kick from your core and recognize the amplitude, or range, of your kick.

This is especially useful in dolphin kick, which ideally engages your whole body is generated from your middle. On a kickboard, it can easy to just focus on the down kick and use the kickboard as stability instead of finding balance through your core and proper body position. Vertical kicking will allow you to practice a more balanced and even kick that will also generate more power.

There are also plenty of ways to modify vertical kicking to challenge swimmers of all ages and abilities. Novices can start by working to :20-:30 of kicking with just their hands out of the water, before progressing to forearms, elbows, and eventually a full streamline out of the water.

As you get more advanced, you can set kick counts based on ideal underwater kick tempos (i.e. – 25 kicks would be a goal for :10 vertical kicking at a .40 tempo) or pair them with fast underwaters or board kicking to set up correct kick technique. And maybe best of all, vertical kicking requires only a small sliver of lane space, so it is something that can be incorporated regardless of group size.

All swimming and dryland training and instruction should be performed under the supervision of a qualified coach or instructor, and in circumstances that ensure the safety of participants.

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Melissa Reeber Grosenstein

5 years ago

❤️❤️❤️