by
Olivier Poirier-Leroy
The kickboard is one of the most common swim tools on the pool deck. Here are seven ways to get the most of the old school kickboard for improved swim workouts and faster swimming.
Recently, a swimmer asked, “What’s the point of a kickboard, anyway?”—a fair point given that a lot of the kicking advice I give revolves around non-board kicking.
We spend a lot of time on kickboard alternatives such as vertical kicking, streamlined kicking with a snorkel, fish kicking, kicking against a short resistance tube underwater, and reps on reps of trying to improve the underwater dolphin kick.
The question stuck with me. The kickboard has been part of my swimming life from day one, first as a learn-to-swim aid and later as a tool for developing an elite kick. But I’d never really stopped to think of the ways the kickboard can be used to improve kick and swim performance.
With this guide, we discuss seven different ways that swimmers and swim coaches can use the old school kickboard to help overall swim performance.
Whether that’s for general warm-ups, active recovery, kicking drills for better technique, or even power development, there will always be a role for the kickboard in the water.
Let’s dive in.
Ways to use your kickboard for better swim workouts include:
Next, we will look at each mini-strategy in more detail and offer some tips and ideas for how to implement them for mega-super-duper success in the pool.
A smart warm-up is one of the sneaky things that elite swimmers focus on. Why?
Because a proper swim practice warm-up not only increases blood flow to target muscles and helps you brave the cooler pool waters, but it increases your focus, intensity, and physiological capacity to swim at a high level later in the workout.
Adding kick on a board to your warm-up wakes up the big muscle groups in the legs, preparing them for an epic main set. Because the kick is less efficient compared to the pull, swimmers have to work harder to generate propulsion.
Which is why the cheeks can get rosey and the sweat starts rolling faster from 200m of kick versus 200m of swimming.
Sprinkle some kickboard kicking to wake up those legs during the warm-up, increase overall body temperature more quickly, and your performance later in the session will skyrocket.
In the words of the legendary David Marsh, a multiple NCAA and Olympic winning coach, “Fast swimmers are fast kickers.” While the kick is not as directly responsible for propulsion (10-30% depending on the study), a well-conditioned kick is essential.
Kick endurance provides you a more stable foundation for the pull, can increase some distance to your stroke, give you a strong finishing kick on the last lap of the race, and more.
See also: How to Develop an Unstoppable Freestyle Kick
Building a large aerobic base requires tons of kicking, and your trusty kickboard is the perfect tool for the job.
There will be time for more swim-specific types of kick later, but logging a bunch of time on the kickboard early in the season or training cycle is an excellent way to develop a strong moat of leg endurance for more intense training and racing later.
The kickboard completely isolates the legs when in the water. (Well, “completely” depends on how many pulls you take into the wall with each length when doing kick…)
With a kickboard, you don’t need to worry about turning the head to breathe, disrupting stroke rhythm. Or arm placement and the pull. Or rotating the hips and shoulders for a more effective pull.
You can just focus on kicking.
Which is why I love doing kicking drills with a kickboard.
Drills like:
Improving kick technique is something a lot of swimmers don’t think about much—particularly when it comes to freestyle kick—and using a kickboard promotes fuller concentration on the task of better efficiency.
The kickboard is also a great tool for developing more power in the kick.
One method to do so is grab a kickboard and either a drag chute or DragSox and do short (15-25m) all-out efforts with plenty of rest. Big fan.
The second, is called Tombstone kicking. (Or Snowplow Kick, for my Canadian and Nordic country brothers and sisters.)
Here’s how it works: Swimmers push off the wall with their kickboard, and then grip it sideways, so that the top of the board is facing the other end of the pool.
This creates a ton of increased frontal drag (the bigger the kickboard, the more frontal drag), and swimmers are forced to exert more force to overcome it, activating more muscle fibers and “self-organizing” the body in the most effective posture possible.
Set: 16×25 freestyle kick with board, as 12.5m Tombstone kick, 12.5m fast kick. When you transition to “normal” kick you’ll get a post-activation potentiation benefit, which is just a fancy-pants way of saying that it will feel like you are being shot out of the side of a submarine.
Tombstone kicking is also a great tool for swim meet warm-ups, when you want to fully activate the leg muscles but you, like the hundreds or thousands of other swimmers at the meet, don’t have access or space to use typical resisted swimming tools.
Readers of the blog and newsletter, and my local lifeguards, know that I am a huge proponent of kick/swim sets. By mixing kick and swim in a set and even within repetitions (e.g. 100s of 50kick, 50 fast), swimmers have the opportunity to transfer a desired kick tempo (whether it’s 4 or 6-beat kick) to their regular swimming.
Kick/swim sets are also a heck of a workout.
This type of set can be configured to “pre-fatigue” the legs before a fast swim effort, promoting better lactate tolerance and resistance to fatigue when swimming.
Here’s what this might look like:
8 rounds:
The short break gives swimmers a chance to catch a couple of quick breaths but not recover, forcing them to pursue fast swimming speeds with tired legs.
Perfect for simulating the demands of the back-half of a race in competition, when the legs tire and begin to feel like cement.
Using a kickboard for the fast 50 kick also means swimmers can gulp down a ton of oxygen to send to the legs, bolstering overall output and performance.
Active recovery, also known as “cool down” or “warm down” or “yeah, yeah coach, I definitely did the whole warm-down,” is a tool to clear lactate and metabolic waste, return muscles to normal length, and power down at the tail end of a brutal swim workout.
Active recovery, in some senses, can be as important as what you are doing in the main set.
Using the kickboard is a great option here, too.
Swimmers frequently skip or flop through the warm-down. Which is fine. But if the goal is lactate removal and recovery, swimmers need to motor around at an aerobic level (Strozberg et al., 1998) for around 10 minutes and ease off from there.
Because kicking is more taxing than swimming, and it doesn’t mean logging more yardage on the shoulders, and because those big leg muscles collect a ton of lactate over the course of high-intensity swim practices, making a point to kick with a board during active recovery is 4D-chess levels of swim training.
So instead of doing 500 choice to warm down, try something like:
8×50 cruise (HR 130-135), alternating ODDS: 50 swim, EVENS: 50 kick, with 10s rest between repetitions + 100 choice easy to get the heart rate below aerobic.
Alright, not everything has to be so darn high-performancey. Using a kickboard is also a great way to increase the sociability of a workout.
Yes, I’m talking about Social Kicking: Kicking at a slow/moderate pace with a kickboard and catching up with teammates (friends) over the lane rope or black line.
Where coaches and swimmers elect to use social kick will vary.
Some coaches put it in the warm-up so that swimmers get the chatting out of their system, while others will use it as part of the warm-down as a way to encourage team bonding (nothing unites swimmers more deeply than tacking challenging swim sets/workouts together and then talking about the experience).
Social kick is an excellent tool for team culture, promoting the social aspect of the sport, logging some relaxing time working the legs, and it’s not possible without that trusty kickboard.
Kickboards are made of floatable EVA foam that helps keep swimmers horizontal when kicking. That’s the simplicity of the tool.
That said, they come with a variety of little comfort and performance features that can make them more suitable to specific types of swimmers.
Two of the best kickboards on the pool deck include:
The Speedo Team Kickboard is as basic as it gets but also has some subtle performance features that make it the best everyday kickboard for training.
The kickboard has a grippy underside to keep arms from sliding off, a contoured bottom so that swimmers can sit the sternum comfortably on the board, and ridges on the side make for easier handling.
For more advanced swimmers looking to refine body position and bridge the gap between the fixed hip position of kicking on a board and exploring different hip rotations (for increased transfer and training specificity), the FINIS Alignment kickboard is the perfect tool for the job.
It has a small arrowhead design, a strap for your hand, and can be used with both hands outstretched or with one arm out in front.
The kickboard, all two ounces of EVA foam of it, is one of the “classic” types of swim gear. While plenty of other form of swimming aids and tools have come and gone, the kickboard maintains its place at the end of the lane.
While doing swim-specific kicking (e.g. kicking without a board and more closely simulating the body position used when swimming) will win out when it comes to the principle of specificity, the kickboard has plenty to offer the enterprising swimmer.
Grab your trusty kickboard, use it to help achieve your goals in the pool (which include added enjoyment of the pool and your teammates), and happy kicking!
Olivier Poirier-Leroy Olivier Poirier-Leroy is the founder of YourSwimLog.com. He is an author, former national level swimmer, two-time Olympic Trials qualifier, and swim coach.
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