Backstroke Kick: The Complete Guide

Flutter kick performs many small, important functions that allow you to swim faster and more effectively. These include creating propulsion, improving your body position, and helping with rotation. If you’ve ever had your legs fatigue in a race, you know how bad that can be for your technique.

During your up-kick, or when your leg moves up toward the surface of the water, your hip flexors and quadriceps work hard. The fitter and stronger these muscles are, the more likely you’ll be able to create and sustain a powerful kick because your up-kick provides most of the propulsion you get out of your kick.

The down-kick, or when your leg moves down, is powered by your hamstring and gluteal muscles. What differentiates flutter kick on your stomach (freestyle) from flutter kick on your back (backstroke) is that these muscles work a lot harder when you’re on your back. If you’ve haven’t been doing much kicking on your back, you’ll definitely feel it during backstroke.

Your abdominal muscles are also important in your kick because they create stability in your hips. Your hips need to be stable so that the muscles of your legs can do their work. Otherwise, it’s like trying to shoot a cannon in a canoe. Your rectus abdominis and oblique muscles are working hard to create that stability. The muscles of your shins are also important in that they need to be as supple and flexible as possible to allow for your foot to optimally push against the water.

Dual Role of Your Kick

The most obvious role of your kick is to create propulsion to help you move through the water. Although the propulsive nature of backstroke kick is not huge as it is in breaststroke, it does make a difference. The challenge for kicking is that it’s hard to get your foot to point backward for large periods of time, which is why your kick doesn’t produce a ton of propulsion. Flexible ankles can really help here.

Your kick also helps you maintain a great body position. A good body position can reduce how much resistance you encounter as you move through the water. The more resistance you create, the more drag you create, which slows you down.

When most swimmers are in the water, their hips and feet tend to sink slightly, and some swimmers’ hips and feet sink significantly. An effective kick can help keep your hips up at the surface, reducing how much drag you encounter as you swim, which allows you to go faster.

Your kick can also help with body rotation. This rotation is important because it allows your arms to be in effective positions to push backward against the water and to recover smoothly over the water. Your kick can shift your hip position, which allows you to use your kick to help facilitate side-to-side rotation. A lot of energy and time are required to shift from one side to the other, so any extra help you can get makes a big difference.

Two Phases of Your Kick

The first phase of your kick, the up-kick, happens when your leg moves from behind your body to in front of your body, or up toward the surface of the water. The second phase, the down-kick, occurs when your leg moves from in front of your body to behind your body, away from the surface of the water. Many swimmers assume that these kicks are simply the same kick moving in opposite directions, but this isn’t the case.

Your up-kick provides the majority, if not all, of the propulsion you get from your kick while swimming backstroke. This is because it’s much easier to get your foot facing backward while kicking up than kicking down. Your foot needs to face backward to push against the water with as large of a surface area as possible so you can move down the pool. You use your stronger quadriceps to power your up-kick, and your weaker hamstrings to power your down-kick.

During your up-kick, your hip moves first, which bends your knee. When your knee bends and your foot stays still, your instep, the top of your foot, is now facing backward. From that position, your knee straightens, and you push against water to propel you. The movement of your hip sets up your kick, and the movement of your knee executes it.

The purpose of your down-kick is to set up your up-kick. Although some believe that this kick creates some propulsion, it’s likely only happening in very skilled kickers who have tremendous flexibility in their knees, allowing the bottoms of their feet to push backward against the water. For most of us, the down-kick is about recovering your leg for your next up-kick.

Perform your down-kick with a straight leg. Your knee shouldn’t bend, and all the movement should occur at your hip, creating the best position for an effective up-kick.

The Size of Your Kick

Backstroke kick should be done over a relatively small range of motion. A bigger kick might create a little more propulsion, which can be helpful, but it also produces more drag, which slows you down.

A good way to think about proper backstroke kick is to adhere to this mantra: Kick within the shadow of your body. In other words, your feet shouldn’t move too much outside of the profile of your body. You don’t want a big kick in which your feet are coming well through the surface of the water, and you don’t want to create a big kick where your feet are moving well behind (underneath) your body. Keep your kick small and fast to optimize your speed in the water.

Common Kicking Mistakes

The most common backstroke kick mistake is kicking from your knees. Although your knees should bend during backstroke, it’s one aspect of your kick, not the entire kick. Kicking almost entirely from your knees prevents your leg from being in position to create as much propulsion as possible, and it creates a lot of drag.

Instead, your leg should be almost completely straight during your down-kick. Start your up-kick from your hip, and then bend your knee slightly. This whole movement creates a whipping action more so than a kick, and it’s a lot more effective at creating propulsion.

The second major issue is kicking too big, which leads to extra drag with little to no extra propulsion, which means more work for less speed. Sometimes a big kick can feel strong, but it’s doing more harm than good. Focus on the optimal kick size, not the maximal. A kick that’s too large slows down the speed with which you can move your arms.

Backstroke Kicking Rhythm

Backstroke kick rhythm is all about the timing between your arms and legs. Although there can be some variation in kicking rhythm in freestyle, with most swimmers using a two-beat or six-beat rhythm, and occasionally a four-beat rhythm, most backstrokers will use a six-beat kicking rhythm. That means for every two strokes, they perform six kicks. Although this can seem complicated, most swimmers will tend to settle into this rhythm in time. It’s not something to focus on or that has to be actively learned. But several circumstances can prevent swimmers from developing this kicking rhythm.

The first is bad body position. If their hips and legs are sinking, swimmers will instinctively kick to keep them up at the surface. This is often a very fast, almost panicked kick. If you do this, you’ll have trouble establishing the right kick timing because your legs are moving too fast. Address your body position to improve your kick rhythm.

A second issue is trying to time your kicks perfectly. Most of your kicks occur at precise moments to compensate for changes in your body position that happen with your body rotation. They’re instinctual. Ironically, by trying to consciously improve your kicking rhythm, you’re likely to disrupt it by overriding your instincts.

Finally, if you’re just moving your arms as fast as you can, this will disrupt the overall timing of your stroke, making it much more difficult to kick effectively.

Address these issues, and you’re much more likely to establish the correct kicking rhythm as opposed to trying to learn it through extended focus practice.

Using Your Kick Strategically

Your legs require a lot of oxygen for fuel and they can get worn out in races. When they do, your legs are going to be a lot less effective at kicking, which means you’ll lose all the benefits your kick provides.

You should do a steady six-beat kick (take six kicks for every two strokes) in all of your backstroke races. What you should change based on the race distance is how you use your kick, or what effort you’re putting in.

You can choose to put a lot of effort into your kick, working on keeping your kick speed up, or you can keep your kick light and effortless, almost letting the kick just happen. The first strategy will create as much as speed as possible, and the second strategy will allow for more endurance.

During sprint backstroke races, kick to your fullest throughout the race. For longer races during which endurance is more of a concern, kick lighter during the first third of the race, build your effort with your legs during the second third of the race, and kick with full effort during the last third of your race. This will allow you to sustain your kick the whole time and ensure you get the benefits of kicking throughout your race.

These same concepts apply to training sets as well. With longer training sets, you’ll want to use a more subdued kick, but you can keep your intensity up during shorter and fast sets. Workouts are the best place to learn how to adjust your kick intensity to create as much speed as possible for the complete race distance.