Dave Mullins swims 234 mtrs DYN - new NR

[ADR]

I know some English athletes (no names to protect them) laughed at Ant's technique when they saw him training at the Cyprus comp 3 years ago. This Kiwi unknown with the strange kick/glide style almost stole the show coming second to Herbert! If not the first to use the style he sure must be up there with the original innovators in this space. We are all copying him now

 

[Kman]

Hi People, Just thought I would add my 2c for what its worth. This is a very interesting thread.

As Dave mentioned before I do use the double kick, glide technique which seems to suit me at this stage in my free diving career.

I have had a few discussions around this with Ant Williams who does a single kick, glide technique which I believe he introduced to the sport a few years back.
Ant has pointed out to me that if I am doing 3 sets of double kick to a length, and he is doing 3 single kicks to a length, then he is doing approx 1/2 the work I am per length.
In theory this makes sense, but in practice I find that I am not co-ordinated enough to do an effective single kick and glide therefore I find I am getting more tired attempting to single kick and glide.
I think as I improve my monofin technique I will eventually get down to a single kick and glide as I feel its possibly the best technique for energy conservation as long as the kick is effective. Key here in my opinion is the up kick (of which I have little).

Walter from Australia also found the double kick glide technique effective in the pool, but found lactic a big issue on the longer swims.
I also suffer from lactic build up, but it does not appear to be as much as others have indicated to me. I don't know why this is.

My monofin is a Leaderfin Hyper Professional built specifically for the pool. I requested some differences to it when it was being built which leaderfins accommodated. I had some additional buoyancy added to assist with the up kick / pre-load and I have also got some vortex generators added for stability and hydro efficiency. I am about to add some "wingletts" to it to to arrest spill. Blade is "soft"

I used to use a Leaderfins Monofin Advanced with Wings, which has no angle and is a very basic fin. It was very difficult to use this fin for distance swims as it does not lend itself to good technique.
If I were to recommend any one thing to consider when looking at getting a monofin it would be that an Angled Blade is a must have. What type from there, then thats up to you.

 

[ADR]

Hi Kman,

You must be on the right path with training, technique and equipment given the awesome progress you have made over the past 12mths!

respect

Andy

 

[Kman]

Thanks Andy,

Keep working from what Ant told me in the beginning, "Don't worry about distance, work on technique and as you improve, distance will come"

I still think my technique is shocking, but I keep trying.

Would love to see you over here in September Andy!

 

[Walrus]

I didn't actually see her do this in person but heard that Natalia was using a kick-kick glide technique at least 3 years back when she first started. I don't know if she has been doing this over the last couple of years or has also changed her style. I did finswimming for a couple of years so the kick-glide didn't make sense to me at first, I used to swim quite fast dynamics. Something like 150m at about 32s per lap, the lactic was bad, my legs would totally be spent by the end.

Something that convinced me the most to play with kick glide was that I was getting big distances in no-fins where you have to use gliding techniques. For about 1 year I focused mostly on no-fins and got around the 155m mark, my dynamic in comparisson was only 170m or so, there should have been a bigger gap between the two. I saw a video of what Ant was doing at the time but didn't work for me at all, ie 1 kick then glide. I tried 4 kicks glide, 3 kicks glide, 2 kicks I found was the minimum that worked for me. If you have good technique I think the kick-kick glide enables you to use smaller kicks and in turn better streamlining compared to a single kick glide. So you can still use "classic" finswimming technique for those 2 kicks. When I first started using it I wasn't convinced it's more efficient since you are actually going slower. For me one benefit was it delayed the lactic build up compared to just swimming flat out from the start.

I started doing the kick kick glide with a waterway fin, it can be done but is not ideal. You have to point your toes and use a lot of knee bend to flatten the blade to actually glide properly, takes practise. It is much easier with an angled fin, I use a leaderfins and this doesn't actually have as big an angle as the Hyper or Kerhsov type fins but suits my style so happy with it.

Chicken or the Egg ?
I started playing with kick glide end of 2005, only people I heard of using it at the time where Natalia and Ant. I used it in comp for the first time in Feb 2006 in Taupo NZ, I know Ant was doing it, I thought Suzy used a type of kick glide also but not sure. I remember Dave did 176m or so in that comp, not sure if he was using gliding or not.

Who knows who copies off who, after changing techniques over time sometimes I find myself going full circle and going back to something I was doing 2 or 3 years ago. :t

Cheers,
Wal

 

[jome]

I'm not sure about others, but for me single kick and glide is pretty much how we all started diving. The reasoning was that if you want to go far, then you want to glide as far as possible.

After Peter Petersen's record the trend was continuous kicking. The reasoning behind that was that it takes less energy to maintain movement than to come to an almost halt and start again. With kick and glide you needed one explosive kick (and it was very hard to do with old fins without slipping sideways etc) but with continuous swim, you could maintain a constant, relaxed speed with little effort. So for a while we all did that and results improved (by we I mean me and people around me). At the time the "stars" were Peter, Stig, Alexey etc and all (at least as far as I could tell) were using this style at the time.

When I first heard about Henning passing 200m, I thought that naturally, being a Dane, he must be diving a similar way. But when I saw the video it was very surprising. That was the mother of all kick-n-glides I had ever seen. With a really explosive one kick, then a long, long glide almost to a halt. Exactly the thing that I had just convinced my self was not optimal. Well ok, different styles suit different people...But then also Peter and Stig started doing it so I figure there must be something behind the idea - other wise they would not abandon an already good style I recon. Unfortunately before now I had never the pleasure of seeing Ant or Walter swimming.

For me the single, explosive kick did not work very well. I find putting enough power to one kick to be quite excerting. But I think this double kick might work pretty well for my style so certainly I'll give it a try.

Well, what have we learned? So many different styles, fins (monos, bi-fins), materials...so many impressive results...I believe there is no single "absolutely right" style. It all depends in so many things. Personally I like trying a lot of things and also having a big "bag of tricks". For one to keep things interesting and also to be able to adapt to different circumstances (for example I know now a pretty good mouthfill, but for the heck of it I often dive with negative packing frenzel to keep in touch with that because mouthfill in very cold water is next to impossible because the lips get numbed)

Nice to see new things and have something to play with. But I would urge anyone not to fall into the trap of thinking "longest swim must equal the only good style". It is so very much more complicated than that

By the way - has anyone tried swimming dyn with CNF technique, but using paddles or something? Would that be allowed by the rules if you consider the paddles "fins"?

Or doing a monofin kick-glide-handstroke-glide...Something like that (it's fun at least, if not impressive in results)

 

[Bill]

I first noticed Annabel using a small cycle, big cycle, glide over four years ago. When she switched to the angled blade it became more like cycle, cycle, small glide.

 

[monkeyhatfork]

I did try the kick-glide-handstroke-glide, was fun, don't have it worked out smoothly enough to call it a viable style yet, but have only tried it a few times. Have no Idea weather that would be allowed in a comp. or not

I primarily use the continuous kick style,cause it seems to work best with my model1 mono but I've started using the last 3rd of my dyn sessions to play around with these new techniques, its a blast, breaks up monotony and I've gotten some of my best performances just playing around.

 

[OceanMan]

I did try the kick-glide-handstroke-glide, was fun, don't have it worked out smoothly enough to call it a viable style yet, but have only tried it a few times. Have no Idea weather that would be allowed in a comp. or not

Of course it would be allowed in a comp. Several freedivers, including Larsen, actually finish their dynamic with that style because their legs are totally wasted.

 

[monkeyhatfork]

sorry, my phrasing was sloppy, that last sentence I ment to refer to Jome's suggestion of using paddles

 

[OceanMan]

Oh ! Ok, sorry.

I am pretty sure that Bill said once that paddles are not allowed for DNF or CNF.

 

[Goran Colak]

I think he ment paddles fod DYN.

 

[efattah]

Canadian Greg Fee often did his dynamics with short fins, doing dolphin kick, glide, handstroke, glide. He managed up to 115m, which was pretty good since using normal plain kicking about 85-90m was his max.

 

[ant williams]

I first saw Natalia swim in 2004 over in Cyprus. I was amazed with the fluidity of her style - a constant swim technique. I have no idea who was the first to use the kick glide effectively. I began using it in 2002 as it just felt natural. Back then I was swimming max's of around 170m with a soft Waterway M1 (and no neckweight). All the sports science boffins at the local university talked me out of the kick glide as they insisted the cost of accelerating after allowing myself to slow on each kick was making a very basic technical error of efficiency. After 8 months of constant swim technique I threw in the towel and went back to what felt right for me.

The kick glide style doesn't really suit the WW M1 fin as it is easy to spill water and doesn't have enough floatation. I bought a Russian Hyper fin that is super-floaty and have changed my technique to suit the fin. The main change was using the floatation (as Kerian mentions) to "pre-load" the fin in to my next kick at the end of the glide phase. I initiate this by relaxing the hips and knees. Coupled with the floatation of the fin, it sets you up for your next kick with almost no physical effort (but takes a whole lot of practice).

For me, the key has been to understand what functional time I can swim while holding my breath and adjusting my swim technique to suit. Using Dave Mullens as an example, he can swim 200m+ using a variety of techniques. But the styles he uses are relatively slow when compared to a freediver like Peter Pederson (Dave's 234m swim took around 3mins 40secs). Swimming slowly I run out of breath by 3mins 30secs - and travel around 200m. So increasing my speed seems to be helping at the moment. I still swim at a pace slow enough for me not to accumulate much lactic acid. And when I see (or hear about) guys like Walter, Stig, Alexey, Henning and Dave swimming so far using a kick glide variation I think that it is at least as competitive as using a constant swim style.

 

[pehtran]

Here is a nice example of an exelent kick/glide technique from last years MadCup... I am always impresed by it (minus the finish of course... )

podvodni video posnetki | foto / video | freediving competition Maribor Apnea Days MAD CUP 2007

(Klick on the athlet Mitja Stampfer DYN.)