I could have sworn freestyle swimming styles looked different in Olympics in the ‘90s. It looks like now freestyle is mostly upper body with fewer kicks. Why is this? Why the change?
In: Physics
The freestyle is has what is a called a flutter kick. Which means almost constant little kicks, versus something like the frog kick in breaststroke. It’s a very small kick, leading to more aerodynamics in the movement of the back half of the body.
What events have you watched? Some of the middle distance racers don’t have much of a kick till the last stretch. You’ll see some real whitewater in the 100m finals today though.
The flutter kick provides a lot of power and speed, but also isn’t very energy efficient. Your leg muscles are large and use quite a bit of energy and oxygen, so you run the risk of burning all of your energy if you kick too hard, too early.
For the longer freestyle events, swimmers tend to slow down their kicks to be able to maximize efficiency and maintain their endurance and only ramp up to full speed near the end. The slower kicks often look irregular at first glance, but they’re still on some sort of rhythm (e.g. a 2-beat kick, or 2 kicks per arm stroke).
A sort of aside, “freestyle” is not a stroke. Freestyle just means you can swim however you want in order to win. The stroke is called the front crawl and is used almost exclusively because it’s the fastest. There have been some changes in how people do that stroke based on new information about efficiency.
Freestyle is a category where swimmers typically choose to swim the front crawl. Legs are generally really inefficient for swimming the crawl.
Kicking isn’t as efficient as pulling; it produces less speed per unit of energy. In the longer races, swimmers pull back on kicking for the sake of muscle efficiency. In the shorter races, it’s worth the loss in efficiency to gain extra speed. Katie ledecky (best distance swimmer of all time) has a ridiculously small kick. It’s just enough to help turn her hips and keep her legs aligned with her body, but it doesn’t use much power from the quads which have huge energy demands. Watch any heat of the 50 freestyle and you will see the opposite kicking style.
Swimming is always progressing by learning how bodies move more efficiently through water; dolphin kicks off the wall weren’t always a thing in the Olympics, but we now know that’s the fastest part of the entire swim, and you won’t see a top swimmer who doesn’t dolphin kick off the wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if swimmers in the 90s had a bigger, stronger kick, because it wasn’t well known that a weaker kick could result in faster swimming.
Any short distance swimmers will be kicking like mad. They are smallish, rapid kicks, with a goal to keep your feet submerged below the water. AKA, difficult to see.
Despite what some have said in the comments, your kick is the most powerful part of the stroke. When submerged under water, many will use a dolphin kick instead.
I was a pretty good sprint swimmer in highschool. I only swam freestyle and 200y or shorter. I was climbing a horizontal ladder in the water (figuratively) and that made me very quick. But I had a cross-kick, where every time my body rotated, I’d kick twice, my legs would cross at the ankles once.
In practice though, all of the “kicking only” drills I was almost the slowest. It’s more about keeping the body in position for the least amount of drag possible imo.
Swimming is all about efficiency. In short races like the 50-200m, you can sacrifice efficiency in exchange for extracting every bit of power.
For longer races, the rapid flutter kicking and high stroke pace is not sustainable. So the strokes become longer and kicking transitions to slower, but more controlled kicks. A very frequent style is essentially kicking with the alternate leg to your arm stroke. This helps maintain body position and provide some power during your stroke to help lengthen put and maximize your distance per stroke.
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