Drills to increase turnover?

When I try to speed up my turnover (especially free, but back and *** to a lesser extent, we'll forget about fly since I can't even swim that slowly) my stroke mechanics fall apart. I'm a skinny guy (well, my arms are), so given my strength I don't think my pull is going to get much faster. That means I have to recover faster, right? In my experience it doesn't work well to speed up just one part of my stroke because if I do it isn't synchronized with the rest of my stroke. A faster recovery won't help if you don't pick up the tempo of your roll. Depending on your current style you may be able to switch to a different, higher tempo stroke style, for example reduce the time your leading arm is extended before the catch to produce a more symmetric kayaking style. The Race club videos talk about three styles of freestyle, hip driven, shoulder driven, and body driven which are used at different tempos. Check out their youtube videos. In general I have found it works better to concentrate on picking up the speed of my body rotation than speeding up my arms. Picking up my kick tempo will also tend to pick up the tempo of the rest of my stroke. It is actually kind of hard to explain, and to do, I've been experimenting with tempo a lot lately, especially with butterfly, all I can really say is that when I get it right it is when I work on increasing the overall tempo and NOT on pulling "harder".

When I try to speed up my turnover (especially free, but back and *** to a lesser extent, we'll forget about fly since I can't even swim that slowly) my stroke mechanics fall apart. I'm a skinny guy (well, my arms are), so given my strength I don't think my pull is going to get much faster. That means I have to recover faster, right? In my experience it doesn't work well to speed up just one part of my stroke because if I do it isn't synchronized with the rest of my stroke. A faster recovery won't help if you don't pick up the tempo of your roll. Depending on your current style you may be able to switch to a different, higher tempo stroke style, for example reduce the time your leading arm is extended before the catch to produce a more symmetric kayaking style. The Race club videos talk about three styles of freestyle, hip driven, shoulder driven, and body driven which are used at different tempos. Check out their youtube videos. In general I have found it works better to concentrate on picking up the speed of my body rotation than speeding up my arms. Picking up my kick tempo will also tend to pick up the tempo of the rest of my stroke. It is actually kind of hard to explain, and to do, I've been experimenting with tempo a lot lately, especially with butterfly, all I can really say is that when I get it right it is when I work on increasing the overall tempo and NOT on pulling "harder".