Why Your Swimmer's 100 Freestyle Stops Improving (It's the Kick)

I am David Karasek, Olympic finalist and Swiss record holder in the 200m IM, and founder of Swimpros. Our head coach Yul Munger and I record a weekly show for swim parents, and a recurring question comes up every season: why did my swimmer's 100 free stop dropping? More often than the pull, the stroke rate, or the turns, the answer is the kick.

The 50m kick test that reveals the real problem

In freestyle, the kick is the motor. From 50m all the way through 200m, a swimmer who cannot hold a real six-beat kick when it matters is capping their own race, no matter how strong the pull is. Watch any elite freestyler in a 400 and the six-beat kick is still there deep into the race — it does not switch off just because the arms are tired.

Here is the exact test we use on camp: swim a 50m flutter kick on the back, no pull, timed. Then compare it to the swimmer's 100m freestyle split. We've seen swimmers going 58 to 59 seconds in the 100 free come back with a 50m kick time around 53 seconds — which is disproportionately slow. If the kick can't move the body fast on its own, it is quietly setting a ceiling on everything the arms are doing.

The fix is not more yardage. It is targeted kick sets, ankle flexibility and mobility work, and treating the kick as a strength to build rather than a weakness to tolerate. Swimming has gotten too specialized and too fast for “I'm just not a kicker” to hold up anymore.

Why swimmers quit the habits that were working

There's a pattern behind almost every plateau, and it isn't unique to swimming: we do the hard thing while it hurts, feel better, and then quietly stop doing it. Visualization is the clearest example. Swimmers who visualize consistently see real results — and then, because things are going well, they stop. Months later the results fade and the first question is always the same: “Have you been doing the visualization?” “On and off.”

If something is producing results, the habit that's serving your swimmer should keep running — not just until the pain or the plateau goes away.

Your tapered PB should be the new normal

The second trap is a standards problem. A swimmer tapers for a big meet, drops a personal best, and then quietly resets to their old, slower pace for every meet in between — waiting for the next taper to “allow” another fast swim. That PB from the tapered meet should become the new baseline they expect from themselves, not a number reserved for one race a season.

Going back two or three seconds and waiting for the next taper meet to swim your best again is a mentality, not a physical limitation — and it's exactly the mentality we work to change.

Standards are learnable. A swimmer who expects to swim close to their best in a regular dual meet trains differently, races differently, and closes the gap between practice speed and race-day speed — which is the whole game.

The 7-out-of-10 rule from Bob Bowman

Legendary coach Bob Bowman describes effort on a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 is the workout of your life and 1 is drowning. The swimmers he coached to the very top — Michael Phelps, Leon Marchand — rarely hit a 9 or a 10. What they do consistently is sit at 7s and 8s, day after day, and when they have a bad day, they find a way to bounce back the next one instead of sliding into a losing streak.

That is the real skill: not chasing heroic sessions, but refusing to let a bad practice become a bad week. Combined with a real six-beat kick and a standard that doesn't drop the moment the taper ends, this is what actually moves a 100 freestyle forward.

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