How to Kick in Freestyle Swimming

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to Expert Village. I'm Phillip Toriello from the Avila Bay Athletic Club. The freestyle kick is really quite basic. I like to suggest that people use straight legs and pointed toes. The pointed toe is going to look a little bit like this with the toes slightly curling at the end. So, you get a nice straight line from the knee cap all the way down to the big toe. As you can see, my leg is totally straight. I like to exaggerate this leg position simply because if you start over exaggerating the bend in your knee you are going to have this "push, pull" factor that comes into play. That's going to prevent any sort of propulsion forward. So, I'll give a small example of what the straight leg, pointed toe looks like. As you can see, there is a slight boil on top of the water where my heels just broke the surface. You didn't see my feet come all the way out and my knees didn't bend at all either.