Having a good frog kick is a super useful skill for diving. It lets you swim without kicking up silt from the bottom, and the glide phase of the kick makes it very efficient. It’s also a prerequisite to learning the helicopter turn and back kick. Unfortunately, learning the frog kick is something that a lot of new divers struggle with. This is weird to me, because the frog kick is the only kick I’ve ever been good at, with or without fins. Why do so many people have a hard time learning the only kick that feels natural to me?
Every summer, my extended family rents a few cabins on a lake in northern Wisconsin for a week. That was this last week, and with everyone there I was able to run an experiment. I asked everyone to swim a few strokes however they wanted to without fins while holding their breath underwater. Just about everyone (there was one exception) used a frog kick. However, as soon as they put fins on, they switched to a flutter kick.
I got my answer when one person asked to see what a frog looks like with fins. Since my fins were in the car, I threw on his – a very flexible pair of US Divers. Compared to the Dive Rite fins I normally wear, frog kicking still worked, but was not nearly as efficient. However, flutter kicking, which is very tiring with my fins, was easy.
I think this may be another case where a skill issue becomes much more of an uphill battle than it needs to be because of equipment configuration – just like trying to learn neutral buoyancy while overweighted. I wonder if more new divers would gravitate toward frog kick if they started with stiffer fins like I did. In the mean time, I’m going to the lake to see if I can finally learn how to flutter kick without fins.