Using Your Two-Beat Kick to Improve Your Body Line

By Terry Laughlin



We’ve published several articles in Total Swim on the advantages of the
2-beat kick in Freestyle and how to make it work better for you, including: How I Learned the Two-Beat Kick and Discovered Flow by John Frigon in January and Swim with Terry – A “Diagonal Power” Breakthrough in August.

As I’ve written, the 2-beat kick is the one best adapted for effortless swimming over long distances and has allowed me to swim with great success in open water events and in distance races in the pool. It helps me achieve a relaxed rhythm that I can use to maintain a strong, steady pace without tiring. In this article I’ll focus on how I use it to also examine and improve my balance and body alignment.

Recently on the TI Discussion Board, in the Freestyle forum, Garry Dawson wrote: “The trick is not to do too much with (your legs). This made a big difference to my swimming. In using the 2-beat kick, I am able to adjust at will the spacing of my legs i.e., from touching to inches apart.”

Paying attention to the spacing between your feet in the 2-beat kick is indeed a very useful single-point-focus exercise. I often do this, endeavoring to feel the toes of both feet touching as I drive one hand in, then comparing how well I do that as I drive the other hand in.

This focal-point-exercise accomplishes two things:
1) It makes me more aware of drag reduction – how effectively I'm slipping my body line through a smaller "hole" in the water. If I can't create that toe-touching feeling, my feet may be trailing outside the "tube" that my torso and legs travel through. Earlier this year, while paddling a surfboard, I became aware of how much drag that seemingly-minor stroke flaw can cause. When I tucked my feet atop the tail of the board I traveled noticeably farther with each armstroke, than when they were hanging off the sides of the board.

2) It can also be a measure of how balanced and symmetrical my stroke is. I can easily touch my toes as I slice my left hand in. It takes a more concentrated and mindful effort to make that happen when I slice my right hand in. That tells me that breaks in the sleek profile I endeavor to maintain are more likely to occur during my right hand extension and the mindful focus on touching my toes as I do is a valuable exercise in improving that profile.

AND, as was true on the surfboard, when I do get my toes to touch, I can feel the forward-energy, created by my hand slicing in, increase when my toes touch, compared to when they do not.

This picture illustrates how I streamline my feet as I slice my left hand in to complete a sequence of ZipperSwitches. I learned to achieve this degree of sleekness first in drills, before being able to match it in whole stroke.

And this picture illustrates the same action as I slice my right hand in, while swimming whole stroke. I’ve had to focus more mindfully on making this happen on my right hand entry, but mastering it has paid big dividends in my swimming.

Both of these pictures are taken from the brand new TI Drill Cards,
which we hope will prove the axiom that one good picture is worth a thousand words of article-writing. Or at least bring a higher level of understanding to that article. Watch for a special message from us next week with lots more details about the new FME Drill Cards.