Picking up as if I'd never been away...

Thank Steve from Ohio for today’s post, in all senses.  Feeling a vibration in the ether that apparently told him how I stammer and get all awkward when someone gives me a compliment and how I then gush and shower the person with tokens of appreciation, he emailed me to say that he’d sure enjoy it if I started blogging again (my words, not his, but the sense is the same).  Well, I asked, is there anything you’d like to hear about?  Turns out there is, and that’s the topic of today’s post. 

Steve, like many of us, was interested in the catch.  Specifically, he wanted to know how to get the blades in the water without missing water or tipping over – both excellent questions and difficult skills to master.  –-By the way, the fact that the catch is difficult shouldn’t discourage you if you’re working on the catch.  Instead, it should make you feel better for having it take a long time.  Because it will, and that’s OK.  That’s just how it is. 

So let’s think about the catch in reverse and in slow motion first.  While our trusty filmographer is rewinding the tape, let’s define a few terms, too.  What does “missing water” mean?  I take it to mean that you use some of your leg drive (i.e., move your seat away from your heels) before you get your blades fully buried in the water.  As long as I’m at it, I’ll also define the catch as that moment when the blades become fully buried:  perpendicular to the (ideal) surface of the water, with about ½” to 1” of water over the top edge of the blade.  And maybe I’ll call the interval of time it takes for the blades to go from completely out of the water to completely buried “the entry”.  [Boy, I really hope this is consistent with things I’ve said before.  Maybe someone with more energy for research can check?]

So:  Set your mental video on the catch, pause it, and let’s think about all the elements that are present.  Blades are fully underwater with the right amount of water over top of them.  Your body is all compressed up there at the front end – you’re up on the balls of your feet (most likely), your belly button is pressed firmly to your thighs, and you’re squeezing your hamstrings to keep your seat stabilized during the entry.  Your chest is open, your arms are extended and wide, and your chin is high (because you’re looking at the horizon, not your speedcoach). 

There are a couple of other things in there, too, that aren’t obvious from the picture.  One, of course, is that your boat is actually moving through the water.  This is important, because if it weren’t, the catch would be a whole lot easier.  Rowing would also be a hell of a lot less fun, too – oh, but you already knew that, because you’ve erged.  Yeah. 

The thing about your boat moving through the water that makes the catch so danged hard is that pesky entry.  It takes a while for your blades to enter the water, right?  But your boat is moving the whole time.  So once the bottom edge of your blade enters the water, the movement of your boat is going to mean that the water sort of pushes on your blades, which means that you’re going to feel resistance in your hands, arms, and shoulders.  So if you’re holding all your muscles sort of clenched while this happens, then the second your blades start their entry, you’re checking the boat down and, as likely as not, initiating not the drive but instead the much more humiliating process of falling into the water. 

Luckily, however, this is a mental image, and as long as we’re imagining things we might as well imagine them all excellent and superior.  So the other part of this freeze-frame image that you can’t see is how your arms are kind of relaxed, not clenched; and how the pressure of the water on your blades and your blades in your hands is actually making your shoulders feel like they’re coming more into their joints. 

Phew!  There’s a lot there, and we haven’t even really started working backward yet.  We won’t for a while, either, because there are a few things we need to understand first, like:  When I say “your arms are actually kind of relaxed,” what do I mean?  Because if your arms were relaxed, they certainly wouldn’t be holding oar handles and extending out from your body.   Nope, they’d be in a hammock, maybe even clasped behind your head, and waiting for the Sandwich Turtle to arrive [30 Rock reference.  Possible picture here]. 

So let’s take a moment and construct a spectrum of arm relaxation.  In the hammock is one end.  At the opposite end, let’s say you’re doing a pushup and pausing at the top.  (Leaving aside why anyone would want to do this.)  A little below that is how relaxed (or not) your arms would have to be to push open a really heavy door.  Below that might be how your arms would feel if you were pushing your plate away at the end of a lengthy and filling Thanksgiving meal.  Below that, how they’d feel if you were pushing aside a gauzy curtain.  Below that?  Pointing like God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  And below that, pointing like Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 

How should your arms feel, then, as your blades enter the water?  I’m leaning toward a region somewhere between God and Thanksgiving.  Just enough tension in the deltoid muscle to keep your arm extended out from your body so it stays there, and just enough reciprocal tension in your biceps and triceps that your arms is more or less straight but your elbow’s not locked out.  Like, if I were to inexplicably pull a prank on you by pushing your handles toward you all of a sudden, I’d encounter some resistance and your arm would push back into your shoulder (gleniohumeral) joint. 

By the way, have you ever done that? Pull your am into your shoulder joint, I mean.  Actually, wait:  don’t answer that – I feel like either answer is just as incriminating in this context.  But do try it.  Find a private place.  Lock the door.  Point to a spot directly in front of you with one or both arms.  Now, make your arm move as if I’d just pushed your hand toward you, or like you’re a mime pretending that the invisible glass wall that your fingertip is resting against just got an inch or so closer to you.  It’s sort of like pulling your shoulders back.   A quick visit to Wikipedia suggests that what we’re thinking about is actually very much like “scapular retraction”.  What it looks like is that your arms are straight out and your shoulders just kind of go back and forth, or in and out.  So do that a few times, until either someone knocks on the door and asks what the hell you’re doing in there with the door locked, or you get sick of it. 

These two things – being relaxed at a point between God and Thanksgiving, and having your shoulder come more into joint – are what your arms are going to do during the entry.  (The amount of movement won’t be as much as you did when you were practicing just now, and there will be some involvement of the lats, too, but it’s helpful to think of the previous exercise as you’re placing the blades.)  So go back to your freeze-framed catch image.  Now, rewind slowly to just the beginning of the entry, and mentally watch your arms.  They’re extended, they’re stabilized but relaxed at the elbows, and all the back-pressure of the water on the backs of your blades while the blades enter the water does is to push your arm back into its shoulder joint a little. 

So cool. 

Because, think about it:  What, really, are the other options for how to “use up” that little bit of distance that your boat travels during the blades’ entry?  Well, if your elbows were hammock-relaxed, the handles pushing at your hands would make your elbows bend.  And that would suck because when you started the drive, you’d either have to let your arms straighten out again (ineffective) or clench your elbows  to keep them in that slightly bent position for pretty much the rest of the drive (ineffective and tiring).  Or maybe your arms are really rigid.  And nothing, but nothing, is going to bend those elbows.  In this case you could let the back-pressure of the water open up your body angle a little for you.  But that would make your blades go too deep, I bet.  Plus, it’d use up some of your body angle at the front end, when it could be put to much better use later on in the stroke.  So really, the only other option left is for your whole body (except your hamstrings) to be so rigid during the entry that the back-pressure of the water just pushes your seat away from your heels.  And now we’re right back where we started, before we defined terms.  You’ve just missed water.  You used up some of your slide, or leg drive, while the blades were getting buried. 

Let’s recap for a little bit.  We were thinking about how in the Sam Hill a person could place the blades into the water at the front end without either missing water or tipping the boat over.  Two very important pieces of this are that your arms and shoulders are relaxed between God and Thanksgiving, and that you compensate for the movement of the boat by retracting your scapulas just a little bit.  Next time we’ll continue thinking about this process, and I’ll try to invent some drills for y’all. 

 Cheers!  As always, questions and polite dissent welcome. 

Comments

[Eugene Beatty]

Karen, welcome back. We've been waiting and rowing with bated breath, and relaxed shoulders. Actually, we've been:

(1) getting the grip right,

(2) letting the weight of the oars determine their depth at the catch so as not to press the blades deeper than they should be,

(3) trying to keep the upper body upright on the recovery and at the catch,

(4) trying to keep pressure against the pins on the drive and recovery,

(5) toggling between the Karen Chenausky method of just letting the forearms relax and the Gordon Hamilton method of acting like you’re raising yourself out of a pool with your arms to accomplish the release,

(5) debating whether the heels should be flat on the foot board at the catch,

and (6) following the authors’ advice in Younger Next Year and using a heart monitor when rowing, erging and biking.

I’ve had the most success with (1) and (6).

Thanks.

Gene Beatty
Arley, AL

[Morgan]

Ah, I can't wait to try this out. Finding that firm catch with a bit of backsplash seems like cake in an eight now. The beast I am after is doing it in the single and your article here is excellent. First of all, it is hilarious, so even if I didn't find it technically useful and physiologically explicit (which I did), at least I am now in a chipper mood about the catch.

Thanks!
Morgan