Swimming fast. It's the feet.
Swimming fast. It's the feet.
There is a lot of talk about dolphin kicks and underwater swimming on The Athlete Village.
Here's a great piece from 2008 talking about why swimming underwater and using dolphin kicks can be so effective.
1) Swimming underwater is faster. No wave drag.
2) 90% of the propulsion is coming from the ankle down.
"Mittal says swimming underwater is the fundamental secret of why the dolphin kick is so effective: The more a swimmer can swim below the surface, the more efficient he or she can be.
A swimmer can control various factors, Mittal says, including the frequency of the kick and its amplitude, or height.
But how the athlete moves his or her feet in the water is most important, Mittal says. "Our simulations and animations have shown that almost 90 percent of all the thrust — the propulsion — for the swimmers is coming from the part of the foot beyond the ankle."
- The Athlete Village's blog
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Comments
try this, and you'll agree
Get in the pool. Strap on a mono fin. Do two underwater 25's. On the first one, try big powerful kicks. Use your core, legs, entire body.
On the next one, use tiny little, fast flutters of the mono fin. You will be flying.
It's in the feet.
Ankle Flexibility, what about everything above the ankles?
Ankle flexibility seems to be important here, but the one part of this quote that seems to be missing (IMHO) is how the force is created. Seems to be connected. If you don't have what it takes above the ankles to produce the power, it does matter what you do from the ankles down. Additionally, you won't be able to maximize the power produced from the rest of the body without proper ankle flexibility and technique in that smaller portion of the body. I have several examples of both cases in my age group program, particularly in pre-teen/teenage boys who are growing faster than their musculature and ligments/tendons can keep up. Gret flexibility in ankles, no rythm or strength in the core and vice versa.
great point
Big feet and nothing to back it up is like putting a tiny engine in a race car. Wouldn't work so well. Have you ever put a mono-fin on the pre-teen boys? How do they do?