Throughout my years of coaching, I have concentrated on turns, and breakout kicks.  Today, I want to take you through what I have used in the past as my kick progression.

Vertical Kick

1. Keep your arms across the chest through the first round of kicking, and progress to arms in streamline for the second round of kicking.
2. Concentrate on keeping the movement to the lower core and maintain stability in the upper body
3. Start with 4 – 6 reps of just fly kick at :06 intervals with :06 rest.  The goal is to get around 12 kicks throughout the interval.  Run the second round of these in streamline
4. Progress to 4 – 6 reps of just free kick at :06 intervals with :06 rest.  Again, maintain upper body stability. The goal is to hit 20 kicks in the interval. Again, run the second round of sets in streamline.
5. Simulate the breakout behavior of the kick. Tie in the fly kick and the free kick into one :12 burst.  Run this 4 – 6 sets with the arms across the chest and then 4 – 6 sets in streamline.  You really want to push them through this set as they are definitely going to be tired at this point.

Underwater Turns

1. The goal of this is acceleration and the “getty-up” in the fly kicks
2. Start in a position 11 front float.  On the coaches “go”, the swimmer does a head first surface dive (obviously in the deep end) and accelerates their legs to full speed sprinting to the bottom and staying in streamline
3. At the bottom they perform an open turn (touching the bottom with 2 hands), but try to maintain as tight as possible to reduce drag.  This is great for swimmers who open up in their breaststroke and butterfly turns as they are better able to feel the drag caused by opening up.
4. After the open turn they explode off the bottom and drive their legs through the surface of the water and until they fall back into the water.  Make sure the swimmers stay in streamline throughout!

15 Meter Blast

1. Again, the goal of this is acceleration and drive from the streamline dolphin kicks (sdk’s).
2. Pushing off the wall the swimmers accelerate and drive their dolphin kicks to and through the wall.  This can get fun as you get team or group records going.  We will actually be adding this as a record on our board for the upcoming season.
3. Swimmers have to stay under the water the entire 15 meters
4. Typically, there is around a :10 rest between rounds

Race Simulation

1. With fins, it is a 25 yard sprint with underwater fly kicks directly into the flip turn
2. Following the flip turn they have to accelerate their arms and legs to full speed (showing you their torque) and finish with that momentum.
3. We run the race simulation 5 or so reps depending on how many swimmers we have on the day.
4. For the rest, we typically give the swimmers around :30 between the rounds.

For me (and my swimmers), this kick progression has evolved into one of the most anticipated sets throughout the week.  They know that we will cover it at least twice throughout the week, and it has yielded significant results in their acceleration off of the walls and into their freestyle breakout kicks.

I encourage you to try it out and let me know what your results are!