Hi John,

How many dolphin kicks do you take off the wall?

If you answered "three, and I know that's not enough" — stop. That number tells us almost nothing, and the guilt attached to it is misplaced.

Here's what most Masters swimmers get wrong about underwaters: they treat kick count as the goal. Five kicks is better than four, four is better than three, and if you're only getting three you must be doing something wrong. So they push for more. Six kicks off every wall, holding the streamline, feeling productive.

But watch those swimmers from the side and something obvious happens. Kicks one, two and three are fast. Kick four is slower. Kick five is slower still. By kick six they're travelling below the speed they'd be swimming on the surface — and every metre they hold underwater past that point is a metre they're actively losing.

The wall isn't rewarding effort. It's rewarding speed.

So the question was never "how many kicks should I do?" It's how many kicks can I do before I slow down? For some swimmers that's three. For others it's five. Three fast kicks and a clean breakout beats six decaying ones every single time — and the swimmer doing three is not behind, they're just honest about where their speed ends.

Find your number this week. After a full warmup, swim 6 x 15m from a push, fully underwater, with long rest between each. Two reps at 3 kicks, two at 4, two at 5 — same effort every time, timed to the same marker on the pool floor. Somewhere in there your time stops improving. That's your ceiling, and that's how many kicks you should be taking off every wall right now. Not more.

Then extend it. Once you know your number, the training goal isn't to swim more underwater — it's to hold maximum speed for one more kick than you can today. Take one session a week and do your breakouts at your ceiling plus one. It will feel slower at first, because it is. That's the adaptation. When ceiling-plus-one stops feeling slow, it's your new number, and you've just gained real time on every wall in every race you swim.

Kick count follows speed. Never the other way around.

Of course — underwaters are one piece. How they fit alongside your speed work, your race-pace sets, your recovery, your progression from week to week... that's where training gets genuinely hard to structure on your own.

That's what the SwimRehearsal community is for. Inside you'll find video lectures on technique, training, racing and physiology, programs for every stroke and event, weekly updating training plans, and live coaching Q&As where you can ask me anything — including "is my kick ceiling really only three?"

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