Breastroker wrote:
> by doing drills to speed up the limbs, the pull and kick can be made
> faster, decreasing the time component. More POWER is the result!
This was in the context of breaststroke, but I'm sure it applies to other strokes as well. What drills are there to work on RPMs? 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?
Thx,
Skip
Parents
Former Member
as he said in that post, power is strength times distance divided by time. distance is a fixed constant. you feel that you've capped your strength. it seems to me that the only other things that affect time are reflexes and form. you're looking for some golden drill that will magically improve those rpms and thereby improve your overall power, but i think the emphasis shouldn't be on particular drills so much as studying form and working to emulate the best while at the same time while swimming being ever vigilant and mindful of your effort to improve your reflexes. it's a matter of research out of the water and self-discipline during in-water practice.
in terms of improving form through drills, the breaststroke with a butterfly kick has already been discussed, but you could also try swimming ***-***-fly-fly, wherein you swim two full cycles of breaststroke and then convert to two full cycles of butterfly. butterfly evolved out of breaststroke, and nowadays breaststroke is increasingly borrowing more and more from butterfly. you may also want to increase the amount of glide drills that you do, because an inefficient glide will mean less distance traveled and, therefore, more arm cycles. if your arms are already weak, then the increase in arm-strokes will severely slow you down at an exponential rate as your arms begin to tell your body that they've had it.
--Sean
as he said in that post, power is strength times distance divided by time. distance is a fixed constant. you feel that you've capped your strength. it seems to me that the only other things that affect time are reflexes and form. you're looking for some golden drill that will magically improve those rpms and thereby improve your overall power, but i think the emphasis shouldn't be on particular drills so much as studying form and working to emulate the best while at the same time while swimming being ever vigilant and mindful of your effort to improve your reflexes. it's a matter of research out of the water and self-discipline during in-water practice.
in terms of improving form through drills, the breaststroke with a butterfly kick has already been discussed, but you could also try swimming ***-***-fly-fly, wherein you swim two full cycles of breaststroke and then convert to two full cycles of butterfly. butterfly evolved out of breaststroke, and nowadays breaststroke is increasingly borrowing more and more from butterfly. you may also want to increase the amount of glide drills that you do, because an inefficient glide will mean less distance traveled and, therefore, more arm cycles. if your arms are already weak, then the increase in arm-strokes will severely slow you down at an exponential rate as your arms begin to tell your body that they've had it.
--Sean
