Swimming Techniques: Leg Movements

Front Crawl: learn the kicking movements

In this video, you will learn how to correctly kick your legs during the front crawl swimming stroke

It allows you to maintain balance and to ensure a more efficient swimming technique

The leg movement can be broken down in two steps.

Firstly the descent, or downswing, of the leg

The movement should come from you hips and not from your knees

Continue the downward kick from the hips all the way to your feet.

The knees will bend themselves naturally in response to the movement from the hips.

Don't try and bend them even more: this will create resistance and you will slow down.

Keep your legs horizontal, close to the surface, but not completely out the water

The efficiency of the the kick comes from the flexibility of your ankle.

In order to do this, keep the ankle loose and orientate your foot towards the bottom of the pool.

Secondly, the upswing of the legs

In front crawl, both legs have to work as hard as each other

Put as much force into the descending leg as into the raising leg.

In order to maintain your speed, do not bring your leg out of the water but keep it just at the surface.

The ideal is to produce 6 leg kicks for one complete cycle: the right arm and the left arm

one common error is to accelerate this rhythm in the hope of swimming faster

In fact, accelerating the rhythm of your kicks doesn't really increase the speed - but it will tire you out fast.

Since the speed comes mainly from the arm movements, work them harder instead if you want to speed up.

To recap, in front crawl, the leg movement breaks down into two steps: the downswing of the leg and the natural upswing which follows

over to you!