- Morning, Trainiacs, that was a sizeable swim.
You're a little smudgy, I'll clean your face.
Beautiful.
4500 meters, pace of 148 per 100,
and about an hour 41, new record.
Longest swim on this watch.
A lot of that swim was focused on
staying nice and horizontal, like keeping
your bum cheeks and your feet close to the water.
I'm gonna explain that.
Fortunately, I have cameras everywhere
and I took a bunch of footage of what to focus on.
We're gonna do that back at the cavern
after I go for a one hour hell run, okay?
Race you there. (upbeat music)
That morning was a bit of a bear.
That 4500 meter swim and then 12 1/2 K one hour run,
all kinds of hills.
I'm tired.
Okay, so what we've got here
is kick footage from me today.
I'm gonna preface all of this by saying
I am not a good kicker.
Do as I say, not as I do.
However, I'm a good listener and I'm a good yapper,
so a lot of these tips that I'm gonna give you
are from Jerry Rodriguez, Tower 26,
he's probably the single best triathlon swim coach
in the world and I'm gonna say triathlon swim coach,
because swimmers who are flexible
and have the time to swim six, seven, 13 times a week
are not triathletes who are time crunched,
who are inflexible, who don't have a swim background,
who didn't swim as 12 year olds.
We require different coaching,
so here's how to kick as a triathlete.
So let's start this off with what you absolutely
do not wanna be doing.
Looks like this.
You do not wanna be grabbing yourself a kick board,
putting your hands way out front
on the end of that kick board, throwing up your goggles,
and sticking your head out of the water.
Why you don't wanna do that is because it's critical
when you're swimming to have three touch points.
As you're going across the water,
you want the back of your head, your butt cheeks,
and your heels to be touching the surface of the water.
Doing that ensures that you're gonna be
skimming across the surface of the water
with as little drag as possible.
If you're down, your butt cheeks are under
the surface of the water, and your heels are
under the surface of the water,
you're gonna be creating a ton of drag,
and doing this, sticking your head out of the water
pushes your butt cheeks down.
As you can see, mine are under the surface of the water.
I'm pushing water and I'm reinforcing
those really bad habits.
Here's how we train to get around that.
You grab yourself that kick board,
you get yourself a snorkel, and you kick
with your hands on the back of the kick board.
You put your head in the water, facedown with your nose
pointing straight down at the bottom of the pool,
snorkel over top, and you focus on those three touch points.
My head, butt cheeks, heels touching
the surface of the water, and what that results in
is a nice, straight line across the surface of the water
with as little drag as possible.
Look at that from underwater.
You can see the same thing, that back of the head,
butt cheeks, heels are just coming out
of the surface of the water and I'm creating
as little drag as I possibly can.
There's a couple of things that you shouldn't do,
mimicking what I do.
Number one, see how much my upper body
is moving side to side?
You can see it better from out of the water.
You see how my shoulders and my upper body
are moving from side to side?
Essentially, what you want is from that point forward
to be completely stationary.
You want it to be a nice, tight core.
You don't want that kick to be causing
vibration going up your body.
You want all of the movement to be from that point back,
and that's gonna ensure that you've got
that nice, tight core and you're not creating
turbulence in the water with your kick.
You're just sending as much propulsion forward
as you possibly can.
Now, second thing that you don't wanna be doing,
most of you are gonna have a tough time avoiding this,
because we're triathletes, we run a lot,
which makes our ankles inflexible, but what I have here is
I've got a fair bit of drag basically acting as a windsail
in the water that I'm dragging.
If you are a elite swimmer, your foot
would be more like this.
Now, there's one way that we can help
at least loosen up our ankles a little bit
and also help lift up our legs,
make it a little bit easier to get those butt cheeks
and the heels at the surface of the water.
If you're new and you're really struggling with that,
you get yourself a set of fins,
and you'll see how fluid my kick is.
It just looks really nice, if I do say so myself,
and what you can see right there, boom,
hip to ankle, and it's nice and straight.
And what you want is the tear cross blade fin.
I will put a link in the description below to thekit.com
with the only fin that Jerry Rodriguez recommends,
because you don't want short fins,
you don't want super long scuba fins,
you want a little bit supple, but you want
a rigid enough side so that it counter balances
our really stiff ankles and it puts them in a position
where they're forced to plantar flex.
Point, finally, there's one spot back here
that I wanna show you.
You can kinda see it here, how close together my feet are.
Essentially, you wanna get your feet nice and close together
to the point that your big toes are hitting each other.
You do that by just pointing your toes a little bit inward.
If they're out and if your legs are splayed out,
on the side of your body, you're gonna have drag,
and it's gonna initiate a bit of a scissor kick,
so you want your legs nice and tight together
with your toes just pointed in slightly
and your big toes almost passing
and rubbing against each other.
So now, all of this said, a few things to recommend
and to especially understand.
Number one, we don't kick for propulsion.
There wasn't a point in there where I talked really at all
about making our kick better to go faster.
Why we kick and why we practice kicking that way
and getting our body aligned on the surface of the water
is to reduce drag, getting a nice balanced body position,
and to have a nice, long, taught frame.
It's not to create propulsion.
Even the best swimmers in the world
only get about 15 percent of their propulsion
through their kick, and our legs are so big
that it sucks a ton of the oxygen out of our body
making it very difficult to go on a 15, 20,
two hour swim in our races, so it's low return on investment
to work on the kick for propulsion.
We wanna just work on the kick from the standpoint
of alignment and balance in the water.
So a few things that you need to focus on and remember,
starting from here down, you want your head,
your butt cheeks, and your heels
touching the surface of the water
at all times, to reduce drag.
Here you want your upper body from basically
your belt line up to be completely stationary.
I gotta work on that.
Down at the feet, you want your toes pointed together,
touching each other just slightly,
and if you need a little bit of help
on your ankle flexibility, get yourself
the tear cross blade fins, and there will be a link
in the description below to all of the
very specific triathlon tools that we use
that are very different than a lot of the things
that are recommended out there,
but these are for triathletes,
and that's what we Trainiacs are.
So there you go, Trainiacs, that is how you kick.
If you aren't yet subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
If you are subscribed and I blew your mind
with some of these kick tips, hit the like button,
and check out the Triathlon Taren Podcast.
It's the most reviewed triathlon podcast in the world,
and that's how we actually got to meet
Mambo Jerry Rodriguez from Tower 26.
It's a good one.
Later.