We’re almost to the catch. Just one or two issues remain. I’d like to recap what we discussed in the previous posts about the recovery and move on to blade placement. We’ll undoubtedly spend a few posts talking about the catch, as it’s perhaps the most challenging part of the stroke to get right.
We talked about recovery timing, and using a guideline of 1-2-3-4 (1=hands away, 2=body angle, 3=half slide, 4=blades in the water) to help lengthen the amount of time it takes you to roll up into the catch. This past week, I was working on this with my friend Annette, and we came up with a nice variation on the counting theme that worked even better for her. You might want to try it, too.
Instead of thinking about the whole recovery, think instead about just the slide portion of the recovery. Once you’re in your body angle position, give yourself a count of 1, 2, 3 to get to blades in the water. Repeat as needed: Body angle, 1, 2, 3. Blades go into the water on “3”. This variation can make you feel less robotic, and it still gets the idea of ratio across.
It’s important to think about ratio in two ways: First, and most obviously, is the idea that the ratio between time you spend on the drive and time you spend on the recovery should be around 1:2 (at steady state). But it’s equally important to think of a ratio on the recovery between the time it takes you to get to the body angle position and the time it takes you to get from body angle to the catch. This you can think of (again, at steady state) as being more like 2:3. When you are getting it right, you’ll feel like you spend most of your time during the stroke in the body angle position – you just flick open on the drive and then flick right back into body angle for the recovery.
I’ve also seen that, for many of the scullers I work with, the idea of relaxing their legs almost completely on the recovery and allowing just the pressure of the heels in the heel cups to draw the seat toward the foot stretchers creates an excellent ratio between the body-angle and the slide portion of the recovery. It almost seems backward: how can using your hamstrings to actively draw you into stern make the recovery more relaxed? It happens because actively using your hamstrings regulates the speed at which you approach the catch. Using them prevents your hamstrings from being uninvolved, and if they are uninvolved then you will tend to fall into the catch with no resistance whatsoever.
Another friend, Marisa, had a breakthrough as she practiced this. We had been talking about how coaches have told her for a long time that on the recovery you need to move into stern at the same speed as the boat moves through the water. This was hard for her to gauge and it didn’t make sense to her. But as we played around with drive/recovery ratio and body-angle/slide ratio, things began to fall into place. It might have helped that we were rowing together on a nice quiet afternoon when we could hear the bubbles underneath the boat. But all of a sudden she turned to me and said, “I get why you have to slow down as you approach the catch! It’s because the boat is slowing down.” This was an excellent insight, and one I hadn’t thought of before. But it seems to work. If you aren’t moving sternward faster than the hull is moving bow-ward, then you won’t have to counteract the movement of the hull scooting forward underneath you when you start the drive. In other words, you won’t check the boat when you change directions.
Well, we’ve spoken about what you do with your body as you approach the catch and practiced some drills to polish up this aspect of the recovery. But we haven’t spoken yet about what you do with your blades. And this is important, of course, because blade placement is half of an effective catch.
So let’s talk about blade preparation.
You know that you have to have your blades off the water so you have room to square up before placing the blades in the water. But how high off the water? Optimally, a blade-width off the water. So that, when you square up, the bottom edge of your blade is right there, ready to drop into the water. Of course, a lot of scullers don’t do this. A lot of scullers have their blades on the water, and they have to lower the handles in order to have room to square up, and only then place the blades in the water.
But that’s sooo much work.
If you have trouble keeping your blades off the water, try one of the drills I recommended a long time ago: Lazy Square. This time, you’ll be thinking about the height of your handles as you keep those blades skimming across the water ALL THE WAY until the catch. If they lift off the water just before you place them in the water, you’ll have something to work on. If you alternate 10 Lazy Square with 10 regular rowing, then you'll more effectively integrate the optimal handle-height into your normal sculling.
I occasionally see scullers who carry their blades very high off the water, 6 inches or more. I think this is okay, as long as their blades go into the water in a way I’ll describe in a bit. That is, as long as the blades are right at the surface of the water when you’re getting ready to put them in, I personally don’t care how high they are off the water before then. In fact, I think that every sculler should develop the ability to intentionally vary the height of their blades off the water. I used to have a coach who coached a group of women’s eights in the afternoons. Every evening during my second row, we’d cross paths and he’d wake me. Not intentionally, of course; he was driving a boat with a v-shaped hull that put up a large wake and no matter how careful he was every other boat on the water would bob up and down for a few strokes as he went by. Since I couldn’t avoid these wakes, I turned them into a “pop quiz” for myself. When I heard the sound of his engine, I’d know I had a few strokes where I would have to press my handles down especially far to get my blades up and over the waves. At first I wobbled around and sometimes got stuck in a wave if I wobbled too far. But eventually I got used to it and could row through the wake like a knife through butter. And except for the occasional shot of water onto my kidneys, I was good with those pop quizzes. (Now that I'm a coach, I do sometimes intentionally wake my scullers -- precisely for the purpose of having them practice rowing in chop).
So, now that you’ve practiced the Lazy Square and you’re used to carrying your handles at a height that keeps the blades about a blade-width off the water, we can talk about squaring up. Again, we’re going to recall some of what we said about grip. If you’re carrying the handles with your wrists bent, you’re going to have to flatten your wrists before the drive, and generally this means that you’re going to flatten them as you square up. But think about what happens if you hold the handle in your hand, bend your wrist up, keep your forearm at a constant height, and then bend your wrist down. The other end of the oar, the blade, flips up as your hand flips down.
This is unfortunate, because flipping the blades up as you square is moving them in exactly the wrong direction. You want the blades to go down toward the water, not up in the air.
Luckily, you’ve been practicing the grip drills I listed earlier, so you now have the handles under the big knuckles on your hands, stabilizing them with your finger pads. And your wrists are nice and flat. So what you’ll do to square the blades up is roll your fingers down into your hands. My friend Jenny compared this action to how you roll up the neck of a paper lunch bag. You sort of curl your fingers down and into your hand when you do that, and the motion you use to square the blades up is similar.
The most important part is that both your wrists and the handles stay at the same level when you’re doing this, all other things being equal. If you want to, you can think of the isolated squaring motion as keeping the handles at a constant height, and your wrists rotating up and over them, as if you were trying to show someone off your stern the face of your wristwatch.
Of course, all other things are not equal when you’re squaring up, because not only are you squaring the blades, you’re also getting ready to put them in the water. You want to square up early enough so that they’re fully square before they enter the water, but not so early that you’re rowing square blades. (Unless you want to row square blades, of course.) So what you’ll do is square by curling the handle into your hand, and at the same time place the blades by lifting the handles. When you place the blades, it’s by hinging your arms at the shoulder, not by opening from the hips or waist. This can be difficult for some scullers, and will be its own topic in a post or two.
But for now, we’ll just concentrate on the square-and-lift feeling. My old rowing friend Ted liked to compare this motion to how you open a door with a doorknob. You turn the knob and push the door around in an arc at the same time, and the motion is a little like square-and-lift.
This motion has to be timed perfectly with another event in the stroke. You have to make sure that the squared blade goes into the water just as your seat stops in the stern. That’s part of the magic of the catch, and we’ll discuss it next time.
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