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. 

Comments

[Bill]

Karen;
Great to see you back writing again. I really enjoy it.
Bill