Serious Sculling

You Must Be This Curved To Benefit From This Post

(Not really -- hopefully everyone can benefit from this post)

Today we’ll think about some ways that can help you with better posture, but first let me say that if your back is very curved when you row, and if you’ve been rowing that way for a long time, you’ll probably have to seek the assistance of a physical therapist who understands the rowing stroke in depth in order to make changes in your stroke.  That’s because the muscles that you’re going to be using to maintain good posture are very weak and underdeveloped, and they won’t be able to stand working for very long during even a regular steady state workout that wouldn’t faze your legs a bit.  If you try just rowing differently without first spending some time reactivating and strengthening those atrophied muscles, you’ll spend most of your time on the water getting back into your old habit, and thus getting better at it instead of the new way of rowing, and that will lead you down a path of diminishing returns.  But if you take the time away from rowing to build up those muscles while staying fit in other ways, then when you come back to the boat you’ll be able to maintain those changes during a practice (with the help of a good coach) and you’ll get out of the cul-de-sac you’ve been rowing yourself into. 

As always, of course, if you experience pain (not the kind due to the acidosis of exercise), you should also see a physical therapist.  And though I’m fairly knowledgeable when it comes to good rowing, I’m not at all knowledgeable when it comes to rehabilitating injuries.  So don’t take what I say at face value; research it yourself.  Discussion is always welcome. 

One of the best tools you have at your disposal is the erg, plus a mirror in which you can see yourself from the side.  (Visual cues tend to be the most robust, so try to invent them for yourself when possible.)  Start out at the catch, but don’t hold the handle.  Just watch what your lower back looks like when you’re compressed to the point that your shins are vertical.  If you want a really nice image of how to and how not to look, check out this picture* of the Greek lightweight women’s double from the Olympics that Sportgraphics took.  See the outline of the stroke’s back, from just above the gunwale to the white part of her uniform?  Curved!  It’s not the worst I’ve seen (sadly), but not what I would like if she were my sculler.  But take a look at the same region of the bow seat’s back.  It’s obscured a little by the oarlock and collar, but you can still get a sense of how much straighter her back is.  That’s what you want to aim for. 

To achieve it, start by leaning forward from the hips, not the waist with your legs straight but not hyperextended.  If you really want to challenge yourself, put a 12” ruler down the back of your shorts to act as a guide.  Just make sure you do it in complete isolation, or you’ll never live down the mocking.  With your back in that position, pull your heels toward your seat.  You’ll need to contract your butt and your hamstrings to keep your lower back in that position.  When your shins are vertical, you’ll also benefit by imagining that your belly button is snapped to your thighs.  See if you can move your seat back and forth on the rail, keeping your back (from the butt upward) in the same position.  

Memorize how it feels to keep your back in that position. It might feel like you're arching your back a little, if your back is used to being curved in the opposite direction.  But if your back is guided by the ruler or your eyes so that you make sure it's straight, it won't actually be arched. 

Now, pick up the handle.  At, like, zero pressure, very gently, slowly, and precisely do the same thing (roll your seat back and forth with your back in body angle position, with your lower back like the Greek bow seat).  You might want to close the vent on the erg to make the load lighter.  You can work yourself through a hierarchy of pressure, gradually increasing it, but still maintaining your perfect posture.  If you can maintain it, try taking a few full strokes.  On each recovery, now, you’ll have to check your posture and adjust it if it’s not good.  Feel, as you do these light movements and check your posture, how your abs, hamstrings, and glutes work together to stabilize your pelvis as you sit on the front edges of your “sit bones”. 

If you’re having trouble keeping your posture, something I’ve been meaning to try is this:  You know those back braces they make Home Depot workers wear?  They look sort of like short, industrial bustiers.  If you have access to one, wear it with the stiff part in the front while you try the previous exercises.  It doesn’t have to be tight; it just has to be rigid in front so you won’t be as tempted to bend your waist.  If you don’t have one of those braces, try a weightlifting belt – again, if it’s one of the ones with a wide part that most people wear in back, turn it around so the wide part’s in front.  It’ll feel uncomfortable if you bend forward at the waist, which is the point.  (You can also wear your weight belt this way, only tight, when you lift.  The function of a weight belt is to stiffen your abdomen to make it less likely to bend forward as you lift and to enable you to get higher intra-abdominal pressure as you do the val salva maneuver, which also stiffens your midsection.)   

Memorize how the posture feels when it’s right – get up take a drink, get back on the erg, and row a few strokes eyes-closed.  Then check yourself in the mirror.  Invent a way of self-monitoring that you can take into the boat, and test that out.  Get someone to look at your posture on the water and compare it to the Greek bow seat. 

I hope that helps, y’all.  Lots of fans said that Maria Callas’s voice was excellent, but the way she sang probably gave her vocal fold damage and ended her career early.  So if you like rowing and want to do it for a long time minimizing the risk of injury, working on your posture sure will help. 

 

* I had a hard time getting a good url for this photo, and the one I include up there only gives you a small version of the picture.  Here's a more complicated way to get a larger version:  go to www.sportgraphics.com and click on "Olympic Games - London" in the list on the left.  For "Schools" choose "Greece", and "Events" choose "Women's Double".  Scroll through with the little double arrows at the top till you're at the 4th page of 6; the first picture on that page is a larger version of the one I linked to above.  Its PhotoID is 2012-OG002-585. 

Why You Should Care About Posture

...Even Though There’s Not Much at the Olympics

I was recently reviewing some Olympic races online, and one thing that struck me was how few of the athletes have good posture on the second part of the recovery and the first part of the drive.  This disturbs me.  It seems to be part of what I call the “Maria Callas” style of coaching, where coaches will aim for short-term results without considering the effect of not changing a maladaptive rowing style because that would mean postponing competition for an otherwise promising athlete.  Or not emphasizing good posture more may come about because coaches don’t understand the implications of poor posture. 

A snippet of a conversation I had a few years ago might serve to illustrate my point:  I was talking to a local coach who heads a large rowing organization and coaches elite rowers as well.  He and I were shooting the breeze as a group of his scullers was launching.  He told me things were generally going well, and pointed out one sculler in particular who was excelling.  “However much work you give him,” said the coach, “he just keeps improving.”  Despite that, though, the sculler was having some back problems.  And as soon as the guy started rowing I could see why:  He rowed with his back in a ‘C’ shape.  “You should tell him to row with his lower back straight,” I told his coach.  “No!” he replied.  “I don’t want to make it worse!”  While I respect this coach’s desire not to make his sculler’s back pain worse, I questioned his conclusion that allowing his star athlete to continue rowing with a very curved back would be the way to not make things worse. 

Let’s investigate why rowing with a curved lower back predisposes a rower to injury.  There are several reasons, which I’ll express in both intuitive and in more technical ways. 

When you sit with a curved lower back (flexed lumbar spine), you’re not using the muscles near your backbone and in your abdomen to keep your vertebrae in a neutral position.  You’re relying mostly on the connective tissue, tendons and ligaments, to do the job of keeping your back from collapsing like a deflated balloon.  When you then apply a load to your back, as when you initiate the drive, you’re still not engaging those supporting muscles.  The tendons and ligaments are what take the force of your drive.  But connective tissue doesn’t have nerves, so you don’t feel pain if these tissues are damaged.  You only feel pain if neighboring structures impinge on (pinch or press on) muscles or nerves – at which point innervated tissue becomes inflamed.  That can happen if the neighboring structures change position over time as a result of abnormal muscle activation on one side or the other. 

Connective tissue also doesn’t respond to exercise like muscle does:  it gets stronger and thicker, yes, but slowly and not much.  But exercise will make the muscles you do use stronger, and they will get stronger faster than the connective tissue that’s taking the brunt of the muscles’ force.  The muscles that aren’t being used stay weak, and you will end up either relying more on smaller muscles to do large jobs, or on muscles to do jobs they aren’t really in a good position to do.  Over time, poor positioning and the adaptations your muscles make to it will increase your chances of experiencing pain and injury. 

Bubble wrap is another reason why rowing with a curved back predisposes you to injury.  Think about it:  when you pop the bubbles in bubble wrap, you don’t press your finger down directly on top of the bubble.  That would just spread the air inside uniformly to the edges, and it wouldn’t create enough pressure to break the plastic anywhere.  If you really want to pop a bubble, you squish all the air to one side so that it makes the plastic bulge out on the opposite side, and then you keep pushing the air into the bulge until the pressure bursts the plastic with a satisfying pop. 

Something similar happens with your vertebral discs.  They’re made of a concentric series of ring-shaped connective tissue with gel inside.  Again, that connective tissue has no nerves – so when you repeatedly squish the discs’ contents to the back, extruding the gel through one of the inner rings, you won’t feel anything.  Only when the outermost ring starts to bulge or when it breaks will you feel it.  If the bulge presses on a nerve, you might not feel pain but numbness or tingling.  If the gel squirts out, you’ll definitely feel it – because the herniated disc releases something called “tumor necrosis factor”, which causes inflammation, pain, and further disc degeneration. 

But even if you’re not currently experiencing pain, rowing with a curved back still isn’t doing you any favors.  Instead, it’s sucking speed out of your stroke.  If your hips are curved underneath you, your gluteal muscles aren’t in a position to help you open, or extend, your hip joint.  So, instead of taking advantage of these powerful muscles to give your stroke that good swing in mid-drive, you’re letting them stay dormant and allowing them to atrophy.  Your drive won’t be as powerful as it can be.  If you’re bending back and forth at the waist to create body angle and swing, it’s as if your trunk were six inches or so shorter than it really is.  Furthermore, over time, moving repetitively in the slumped position will cause your quads to shorten – and that will decrease their maximum power output. 

Finally, because connective tissue doesn’t actively resist being stretched like muscles do (muscles contract!), a lot of the force you generate with your legs on the drive will now just go into stretching tendons and ligaments instead of being transferred to the water.  In other words, by not having good posture, you’re more squishy and a less efficient transferrer of your own power to the water. 

I can’t explain to you exactly why elite coaches allow their rowers to row with curved backs, though I do know that not all of them pass it by without comment.  Of the athletes you see at the Olympics, you don’t know what they are all working on, technique-wise.  You also don’t know their history of injury – whether their rowing style has really caused them injuries. So concluding that rowing like they do will get you as fast as they are, or will allow you to be as healthy as they are, isn't justified. 

Because there are rowers in the medal rounds who row curved, we might guess that the difference in speed between good and poor posture isn’t large.  If it were, all the good-posture rowers would be winning consistently, right?  But that’s a very hard point to prove, because it’s so difficult to find perfectly-matched control rowers.  If you could find 20 or 30 of them, pair them up, and teach one of each pair to row with good posture while keeping everything else about their training regimens the same, you might be able to show a significant increase in speed for the good-posture group over the course of a year or so.  But it might well take that long.  When you make a technical change of that magnitude, you won’t row faster right away, and you might actually be a little slower for a while.  The long-unused muscles are relatively weak and take a long time to gain strength and endurance to be commensurate with the muscles you have been relying on.  This long lag between change in technique and increase in speed acts as a big disincentive for the coach to make such a dramatic change before the Olympics -- especially when his job depends on results that can be achieved within that season and not at all on the rate of back injury in middle-aged alums. 

I’m not saying that rowing with good posture will mean you’ll never be injured.  Nor am I saying that rowing with poor posture guarantees injury (though others might; see here).  What I am saying is that poor posture during rowing increases your chances of certain types of injuries, injuries that are extremely painful and potentially debilitating; and that the more you row, the harder you row, and the older you are, the even more likely these injuries become.  Rowing slumped is a habit that can be reversed, and changing it will decrease your chances of back injury in the same way that wearing your seat belt decreases your chances of becoming severely brain-damaged or even dead when you’re in a car accident. 

Next time, we’ll talk about how you might go about correcting your posture as you row.