Does More (exercised) Muscle = Better Efficiency?

[TuckerIdaho]

• Your improved cardio will lower your resting pulse and allow your heart rate to recover more quickly after exercise and during exercise after momentary spikes in level of effort.

Halfway there, cardiovascular fitness also improves oxygen uptake efficiency.

Also frog kicks are a slow twitch muscle activity. Bulking out will do nothing for you, low weight high reps will.

 

[Scraps]

Halfway there, cardiovascular fitness also improves oxygen uptake efficiency.

Also frog kicks are a slow twitch muscle activity. Bulking out will do nothing for you, low weight high reps will.

"Bulking out" is a mischaracterization of strength training. Just because an activity doesn't require explosive strength doesn't mean strength training can't be of some benefit.

 

[NothingClever]

Legs are a little sore after a weekend of frogkicks. Got me thinking about whether it would make sense to work on those muscles. But would more muscle mean more metabolism and more breathing? Asking mostly out of curiosity.

Sounds like you just need to get on with some form of regular exercise. That will get you past the curiosity phase and help you learn how to develop, maintain and employ your body like a machine.

I’m going to offer a contrasting opinion to @Angelo Farina ’s assertion in this thread about the greater efficiency of flutter kicking over frog-kicking.

For me, I find frog kicking allows full and relaxed diaphragmatic expansion thus enabling ideal breathing while maintaining good propulsion. The frog kick isn’t meant for speed, it’s meant for endurance for a sustained period of propulsion and reduced oxygen consumption. When you frog kick, your stable platform is produced by your posterior chain. The contraction of these muscles does not interfere with ideal breathing.

Conversely, flutter kicking puts a much great demand on the abdominal muscles thus interfering with ideal (diaphragmatically-induced) breathing. One MUST engage the external obliques, internal obliques and rectus abdominis muscles to create a stable platform so the legs can hinge up and down at the hips while flutter kicking. When engaging your anterior muscles, you are inhibiting your most efficient breathing. I did not say stopping, just inhibiting.

Roger Williams down in Mexico does 4-5 hour dives in the cenotes. I’m bold enough to bet he doesn’t flutter kick much at all during those long dives.

Again, just get on with some form of exercise and tune in to your body.

 

[Angelo Farina]

I’m going to offer a contrasting opinion to @Angelo Farina ’s assertion in this thread about the greater efficiency of flutter kicking over frog-kicking.

For me, I find frog kicking allows full and relaxed diaphragmatic expansion thus enabling ideal breathing while maintaining good propulsion. The frog kick isn’t meant for speed, it’s meant for endurance for a sustained period of propulsion and reduced oxygen consumption. When you frog kick, your stable platform is produced by your posterior chain. The contraction of these muscles does not interfere with ideal breathing.

Conversely, flutter kicking puts a much great demand on the abdominal muscles thus interfering with ideal (diaphragmatically-induced) breathing. One MUST engage the external obliques, internal obliques and rectus abdominis muscles to create a stable platform so the legs can hinge up and down at the hips while flutter kicking. When engaging your anterior muscles, you are inhibiting your most efficient breathing. I did not say stopping, just inhibiting.

Roger Williams down in Mexico does 4-5 hour dives in the cenotes. I’m bold enough to bet he doesn’t flutter kick much at all during those long dives.

Again, just get on with some form of exercise and tune in to your body.

That's very interesting. One of the reasons dolphin kick is superior to flutter kick (which is NOT the most efficient kicking style) is that finned swimming athlets synchronize breathing with the cycle of kicking.
As in dolphin kicking all the muscles of the body are involved, such synchronization has two benefits:
1) It allows deeper respiratory cycles with lower effort, hence improving oxygenation and removing CO2.
2) the diaphragm and the other muscles in the chest become active for propulsion, and not just for breathing.
When I have to do a long path, against current, or carrying equipment, I always switch to dolphin kicking, not to flutter kicking.
However it must be said that, while flutter kicking more or less works also if the fins and the kicking style are badly optimized, instead dolphin kicking works only for trained athlets, with perfect fins (or monofin) and perfect kicking style.
On the other side, what you said for frog kicking is also subjected to similar constraints: very few people make the correct leg movement, making a super-wide kick, a strong squeeze of the straight legs after the kick, and rotating the ankles so that the fins are almost vertical, followed by a long pause with legs united, with knees and ankles perfectly straight, arms packed along the body, for travelling by inertia without effort for a couple of meters.
I remember that, at the finned swimming courses, we did manage to teach such an efficient frog kick only to 10-20% of our students.
I must admit that my own frog kick is not so good. My wife instead has an excellent frog kick.
Most divers I see nowadays, instead, cannot kick this way. They keep the knees permanently flexed at 90 degrees, and paddle with their fins moving only the lower part of the legs.
The hips, that is where the correct movement should originate, are kept immobile.
The correct frog kicking is disappearing, most divers watch those videos about cave divers keeping a position totally against hydrodynamicity, and learn just that inefficient "modified" frog kicking style, which is actually much easy to learn for everyone.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I look at freedivers and learn from them what the most efficient kicks are. They have to dive on one lung-full of air so oxygen efficiency is everything. They don’t have the option to huff and puff from a big tank.
Do they do any other kick besides a slow full standard kick with long freediving fins that originates from the hip, and also a full body dolphin kick? ...usually on ascent

 

[NothingClever]

I look at freedivers and learn from them what the most efficient kicks are. They have to dive on one lung-full of air so oxygen efficiency is everything. They don’t have the option to huff and puff from a big tank.
Do they do any other kick besides a slow full standard kick with long freediving fins that originates from the hip, and also a full body dolphin kick? ...usually on ascent

There’s no doubt the flutter kick is powerful but freediving is a different activity conducted over two minutes without any substantial equipment versus two hours with equipment. What is the state of the freediver when breaking the surface? Recovery breathing, not ideal breathing. This is like comparing the breathing techniques of a touring cyclist compared to a velodrome racer. Both are on bicycles and exerting themselves but they’re clearly applying themselves differently.

 

[NothingClever]

That's very interesting. One of the reasons dolphin kick is superior to flutter kick....

I didn’t include dolphin kicking in the comparison so you sort of lost me after that.

I belong to the US Masters Swimming organization so I routinely seek and receive coaching. My coaches seems to think I’ve got the breaststroke kick down and I’m going to stick with personalized coaching over the advice of the SB virtual community. When I apply the breaststroke kick to diving (thus making it the frog kick) I keep my arms up front in the Superman position to keep an eye on depth, runtime and my decompression obligations. I don’t ever foresee myself using the dolphin kick while diving at recreational, normoxic and eventually hypoxic depths with ST, twinset or a RB rig.

@Addison Snyder - you came here looking for advice on how to improve your frog kick. My recommendation is to just get in the water and find what works best for you. Learn (properly) the various kicks and figure out what your body is inclined to perform most efficiently.

I’m headed out to the sea to swim 4,000 meters along the coast. You guys have fun here.

 

[Angelo Farina]

When I apply the breaststroke kick to diving (thus making it the frog kick) I keep my arms up front in the Superman position to keep an eye on depth, runtime and my decompression obligations.

I see, you are one of the few capable of employing true, highly efficient frog kicking. It is not so easy, nor so common...
The arms in front of the head can improve significantly water penetration, this is what is done when dolphin kicking.
The problem, again, is that just 15% of people have shoulders so mobile to allow to align perfectly their arms with the direction of propulsion. Most people cannot extend their arm properly, so they stay halfway, creating a terrible drag, and working as a "flap" causing a force which push down the arms.
As said, keeping the arms properly extended in front is of utmost importance for dolphin kicking, It also help frog kicking. It is generally counter-productive for flutter kicking, where instead keeping the arms along the body causes less drag.
Dolphin kicking is quite unused by scuba divers for a number of reasons:
- it requires long and flexible fins (or better, a monofin), which are not the best ones in certain type of environments
- it requires a perfect matching between position, kicking style and equipment
- it provides little control on the direction of motion
- you cannot look forward while dolphin kicking
Most instructors do not teach dolphin kicking at all. I have seen it used only by people with a previous experience as finned swimming athletes. And, exactly as the true, correct frog kicking, a number of people have limitations of movements in their joints who impede to perform it correctly...

 

[boulderjohn]

When I dive, it is a very rare moment when I need to get anywhere in a hurry. In fact, it is usually just the opposite--I am far more likely to be doing everything I can to minimize unnecessary motion while I explore the environment. Dolphin kicks? I wouldn't give them a thought.

My last pre-Covid dive trip was to Palau, where we did many wall dives led by a DM. I was very frustrated by the DM's apparent need to reach some personal best in terms of distance traveled along a coral wall. I assume he had seen it all so many times that he had no interest in looking around as he swam. As for me, I would produce a slow power stroke on my frog kick and let it glide while I examined the coral and the fish around me--the reason I was there, after all. Then my legs would s l o w l y recover for the next lazy power stroke. The only times I needed speed were when I saw that the rest of the group had gotten far enough ahead of me that I needed a burst of speed to catch up with them.

When I dive a reef in South Florida, it is generally a gentle drift dive, and my kicking is the same s l o w frog kick style, often not kicking at all as I examine the reef in search of items of interest, items that the fast swimmers are zipping past without noticing. Yes, the lobster hunters are moving quickly, hoping to get from one hole to another in search of a maximum number of prey, but I don't do that.

Much of my recreational and technical diving is done in wrecks, and, once again, moving from silty room to silty room calls for gentle frog kicks with stiff, short blade fins. I once did one of my favorite wrecks with an instabuddy with long free diving fins. I let him lead the way, unfortunately, and he flutter kicked with those massive fins all through the wreck, and I followed vaguely aware of him in the gray fog in front of me.

 

[Addison Snyder]

@Addison Snyder - you came here looking for advice on how to improve your frog kick. My recommendation is to just get in the water and find what works best for you. Learn (properly) the various kicks and figure out what your body is inclined to perform most efficiently.

Not quite. Just was frogkicking for 3 1/2 hours over two days.. Maybe I'm not the specimen of perfect health, but is it so uncommon to be a bit sore after that (serious question)?