Kick technique

[setesh]

Originally Posted by Gombessa

What about modified frog and flutter kicks? From the "smaller, less effort kicks" marketing, sounds like these kicks should be right up their alley.

Definitely, flutter kicks are exactly what Biofins are best at.

[Kirwan]

It's a shame, they obviously did a lot of work to generate that study, but the report is very poorly written. They do jump back and forth between measurement schemes, never being clear if the lower number is better or worse. For example, one asterisk means better in one table, but it means worse in the other.

What I am getting from this is that you need to adjust your technique to match your fins. Looks like I've got to do a bunch of swimming before I'm ready to declare something to be a good fit. That is, spend enough time with each fin to get a feel for the best type of kick for it, and see how my hips and knees like it.

Where's the pool?

[meesier42]

I hate to correct you, but I read the study and it makes perfect sense to me. It is a scientific study that was meant for peer reviewed journals not for Rodales Scuba Diving. In all of the charts one * means better, two ** means worse. The interesting piece comes from page 14, and it states that no fin is able to produce power on the recovery phase and that 50% of time is spent in the recovery phase for most of them. It goes on to say that infact the lack of power actually contributes to the drag that the diver must overcome, putting additional load on the diver increasing VdotO2 (aka O2 consumption rate). and then finishing with that the knowledge of, and models used to develop fins need further development to lower drag (kick depth-rigidity) and maximizing effciency (kick frequency-flexibility).

Although forcefins were left out of this study, its very interesting that these are the principles that Bob Evans has been working on improving since the inception. The fins were designed to minimize the drag on the recovery and maximize the thrust achieved in the transition phase.