How to do the frog kick?

[amsalem]

I'm a recently certified PADI Divemaster, but still find some difficulty in doing the frog kick. I've tried watching some videos on youtube but that didn't help much. Does anyone have any good advice or can refer me to a good link to help me out? As a DM, mastering the frog kick is quite important for a number of situations and conditions. Thanks in advance for your advice!

 

[g1138]

What part are you stuck on? There's 3-4 phases depending on who you talk to.
First you get into a ready position, legs bent at the knee and the soles of your feet parallel with your horizon. Meaning if you're flat with the ground, so too are the soles of your feet. Your entire body's trim should be within 10 degree of your intended horizon (or parallel with your direction of travel), otherwise it's hard to perform the necessary movements.

Next, spread your legs slighty, slightly tilt your feet so the soles begin to point toward each other, and extend your legs. This should be done smoothly without you feeling like your really tweaking your ankles (so really you soles will be nowhere near facing each other; don't get hung up on this).

Fully extend your legs, then sweep your legs together (feet should still be tilted). This is your power stroke and is what thrusts you forward. As you finish your full extension, return back to the ready position in a very slow manner, allowing yourself to glide.

This is a normal frog kick. A modified frog kick is kicking just with your ankles and is much harder to learn as your first frog kick, IMO. Same as above except you don't extend your legs.

If you can get someone to video tape you that would be extremely helpful. Getting a side view and a behind view of your kick would be ideal.

 

[Sleepdr]

Videos and still images make it look similar to the "whip kick" taught with breaststroke or elementary backstroke. Someone on the site here described it the same way. I tried that combined with imitating the UTD videos on a couple occasions, and got severe knee inflammation for several days afterward. Hopefully my mistakes will save the OP and others some pain. We used to sit by the pool doing the swim kick by numbers: bend the knees with feet together, cock the feet heels in, whip the feet outward and back together while straightening the legs, then glide. ("drop, cock, whip kick, glide" chanted over and over. I still hear the instructor 30 years later)

For those that know the frog kick well, is there a significant circular movement with knee extension? It seems that the torquing whip/rotation and simultaneous knee extension against stiff fins caused the problem. It was either very painful synovitis or ACL inflammation. Given that so many divers can do the kick painlessly and long-term, clearly there are right ways to do it. Feel free to consider me a cautionary example of kicking harder, not smarter.

 

[g1138]

Videos and still images make it look similar to the "whip kick" taught with breaststroke or elementary backstroke. Someone on the site here described it the same way. I tried that combined with imitating the UTD videos on a couple occasions, and got severe knee inflammation for several days afterward. Hopefully my mistakes will save the OP and others some pain. We used to sit by the pool doing the swim kick by numbers: bend the knees with feet together, cock the feet heels in, whip the feet outward and back together while straightening the legs, then glide. ("drop, cock, whip kick, glide" chanted over and over. I still hear the instructor 30 years later)

For those that know the frog kick well, is there a significant circular movement with knee extension? It seems that the torquing whip/rotation and simultaneous knee extension against stiff fins caused the problem. It was either very painful synovitis or ACL inflammation. Given that so many divers can do the kick painlessly and long-term, clearly there are right ways to do it. Feel free to consider me a cautionary example of kicking harder, not smarter.

You don't want to whip your feet out. You want to spread them without any forceful whip; you shouldn't feel any great water resistance when doing this motion, however slow or fast that needs to be, just keep it a fluid motion. It's called a loading phase for a reason. Whipping them out will put a lot of torque on your knees because the fins create a big resistance on your feet.

The forceful exertion is during your extension and combined closing of your legs to provide you with thrust; this is your power stroke and your only stroke where you're aiming to push water. All the other strokes: ready phase, loading phase, recovery phase,
those you're aiming to move your legs/fins through the water, and not push the water.

Consider it as so:
Phases: Ready - Loading - Power stroke - Recover
Speed: slow - slow - forceful (this can be fast or slow) - slow
Speed wise it should all be slow with exception for the power stroke. But even then that power stroke doesn't have to be fast; it just has to be forceful so you're pushing water. All other phases have to be slow so you can move through water. You can in fact do the entire frog kick at the same slow speed.
The whole motion of the frog kick should be fluid however. So for starters it's best to take the whole motion slowly.

I can't explain how to make your movements forceful to push water and how you just move through water. It's something that you have to understand for yourself by spending time in water. Just swimming around in a bathing suit without any swim aids is a fine way to understand this. I'm not talking competitive swim strokes either. Try to dive down and perform arm pulls and breast stroke kicks to propel you in the water. Perform sharp turns and just get yourself used to maneuvering in the water rather than just heading in one direction constantly.
With enough experience you'll understand how your body movements work with water.

 

[TSandM]

To the OP: What kind of fins are you using? It's a difficult kick to learn in splits, a little easier to learn in floppy paddle fins, but by far and away easiest to learn in a stiff paddle fin. I know this because I was trying to learn it in floppy paddle fins and couldn't get it, and in one day in Jets, I had it solid.

It's a simple kick. You start with the knees bent and the fins parallel to the bottom. You separate your feet. You turn your ankles so that the soles of your feet are aimed at one another, and then you clap the soles of your feet together. There is very little of the motion that involves the knee joint at all, although I will confess that two or three HOURS of frog kicking will make the insides of my knees kind of sore.

The biggest mistakes I see people make are either not accomplishing the action of turning the soles of the feet toward one another (inversion of the ankles), or actually reversing it, so that they are trying to bring the tops of their feet together (or one foot is top, the other is bottom). Having someone pattern you through the kick in the water can help you sort the proprioception out.

 

[Maples]

Glad I'm on the 8th floor of my hotel, or I'm sure someone would have wondered exactly what I was doing laying on the floor infront of the television with a pair of fins flapping about.

 

[miketsp]

I'm a recently certified PADI Divemaster, but still find some difficulty in doing the frog kick. I've tried watching some videos on youtube but that didn't help much. Does anyone have any good advice or can refer me to a good link to help me out? As a DM, mastering the frog kick is quite important for a number of situations and conditions. Thanks in advance for your advice!

Purely out of curiosity why do you consider the frog kick important as a DM?

I agree that the frog kick has its merits but it only really becomes important in silty conditions generally related to penetrations or caves, neither of which should be applicable to DM activities with students.

If you had said that mastering helicopter turns or swimming backwards was important to a DM so as to allow accurate maneuvering in the water, fine. But frog kicking as an important OW DM skill doesn't seem logical.

 

[danvolker]

Purely out of curiosity why do you consider the frog kick important as a DM?

I agree that the frog kick has its merits but it only really becomes important in silty conditions generally related to penetrations or caves, neither of which should be applicable to DM activities with students.

I think this is a mainstream agency misconception ( probobly caused by the economics of what they can cut out of training, to keep costs down).
If you are diving in an area with any significant currents, then there is a huge advantage to swimming very close to the bottom--where skin friction drag reduces the drag from the current that interferes with the diver. If you want spectacular fish congregations, you want currents...the currents concentrate the fish near structures. Get 2 or 3 currents to converge near some reef structures, and you really get a marine life spectacle ( as in where 3 currents meet at one spot off of Tobago).

So open water divers, or AOW divers, on a reef off of Cozumel, or Palm Beach, may very well need to be near the bottom to dive comfortably and without effort....However, if the training agency has left out the frog kick in the tool box of skills these divers have, they will be using the flutter kick, and most will be leaving a trail of silt behind them...not to mention potentially kicking the reef once in a while.
Teaching the frog kick to them would help them experience good versus bad trim--the long glide phase in the frog kick requires decent trim...so they are less likely to be head up and feet down, the worst scenario for being close to the bottom. And with the frog kick done properly along the bottom, they will hide from the current, be better on air consumption, and they wil not silt up the bottom ( which even off of the sand off the ledges of the reef, they will kick up if they flutter into it).

 

[Doppler]

Purely out of curiosity why do you consider the frog kick important as a DM?

I agree that the frog kick has its merits but it only really becomes important in silty conditions generally related to penetrations or caves, neither of which should be applicable to DM activities with students.

If you had said that mastering helicopter turns or swimming backwards was important to a DM so as to allow accurate maneuvering in the water, fine. But frog kicking as an important OW DM skill doesn't seem logical.

Could not disagree more and standards bear that out.

I rarely teach OW sport diver classes, but ironically am just getting ready to drive out to the river and wrap-up an IDC for three instructor candidates.

One of the skills they will demo for me today is frog kick... it's right there on the instructor slate.

FROG KICK is as necessary as any other kick and without it, graduates from OW programs are being sent on their way with an incomplete tool kit.

 

[OldNSalty]

My wife just got her OW certification through SEI and the Frog Kick was most certainly a skill that was taught. If you are going to be a DM you must be able to demo all the skills in the class...Maybe some agencies have removed the kick but I don't know why you would want to do that.