Serious Sculling

Feet-Out Drill

In response to my last post, about what I’ve come to think of as the “Mosquito Drill”, where one person in a double sits out with her oars off the water while the other rows, reader Michael writes (in part):

“…I guess the goal is to maintain consistency from stroke to stroke.  I’ve been working on my finish the last couple of weeks on the water, giving special attention to how it can help me maintain the set of my boat.  I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the “feet out” drill and if you have any advice on incorporating that into one’s drill repertoire.” 

As usual, when someone’s asked a question or brought up an interesting point in the comments, I got all obsessed with it and then had to go off and think about it and play with it.  So here’s what I came up with. 

First, Michael, I’d like to gently correct you on one point.  Yes, it’s good to maintain consistency from stroke to stroke – but remember, it’s a dynamic consistency.  Because you will be subject to all sorts of perturbations, and because you are a person, not an automaton, it will not be possible for you to be perfectly consistent from stroke to stroke.  I know you know that, but I mention it in the service of leading up to my next point. 

The goal – well, one goal – of developing good technique is to become able to have what you might call “dynamic self-correction”.  You’d like to be able to row in such a way that you maximize your output for a given level of effort, while at the same time not being beset by excessive irrelevant movements.  This is what you do when you learn to ride a bike, for example (or walk, or drive a car, or any number of other motor activities.)  As you ride your bike, you might lean this way or that to avoid the anticipated trajectory of that car door.  Or, as you walk, you’ll adjust the length of your steps so you won’t step in that puddle.  It’s like that in rowing, too:  You adjust how exactly you take the blades out of the water so as to damp down little wobbles as you feel them happening. 

To move to the feet-out drill:  this is not the easiest drill out there.  It’s not the hardest, either, but it has a special challenge:  Not flying out of the frickin’ boat, heels over head, as you do it. 

A main point of the drill is to practice a certain kind of posture at the release.  It is a release position during which you are balanced, trunk vs. lower body, on the back of your bum, so to speak.  In that sense, it’s like sculling situps, where your shoulders and feet are both off the floor the whole time, but you’re alternately extending and retracting your legs (and so your trunk has to rock back and forth to compensate and keep your balance).  It’s unlike them, though, because in actual sculling your feet are lower than your seat.  If you have a rock wall or sturdy bench available, try this:  Sit on the edge of said wall.  Lean back a little, extend your legs, and don’t use your hands to steady yourself on the wall.  Keep your back straight so you feel your abdominal muscles, all tensed up like cords running from your ribs to your hipbones.  That’s the feeling you want as you release the blades from the water. 

How does this help you have dynamic self-correction?  It helps because you are using the large muscles of your body to stabilize larger movements of the boat.  You aren’t changing where your center of mass is as you release the blades and make the turnaround, so you won’t be directing any force downward into your hull, bouncing or creating large bow waves.  And your hands and lower arms will be relaxed enough so that they can take care of the fine-control issues they are good at – like minutely adjusting the timing of the release to counteract wind, waves, or your double partner; and yet not letting the oars get stuck in the water or feather under water. 

If you’re new to feet-out, try it with just one foot out of the shoes.  You’ll still get a lot of the feeling of the drill, without the abject fear that comes from the certainty of going man-overboard.  Some things that will help you do this drill well:

1.  You won’t be able to do this drill unless you’re sitting up nice and tall.  If your back is all curved at the finish, you’re going to have to curve over even more to avoid shooting out of the boat.  In other words, you’ll end up absorbing the force of the handles into your gut. 

2.  So that you don't sit with your back all curved, create your body angle and compression by pressing your belly button to your thighs as you roll into the catch. 

3.  Open your chest wide at both the back end and the front end of the stroke.

4.  Assertively use your swing on the drive, but only lean back as far as the weight of your legs allows you to.  

5.  Now, so that you don’t absorb the handles, make sure your sternum comes to meet the handles subtly as you finish off the arms-only part of the drive. 

If you do these things, your nice firm midsection won’t absorb the force of the handles, sending your flying overboard.  Instead, it will reflect the force of the handles, giving the water a last little push just before the blades come out.  And, miracle of all miracles, you'll find that you can make an almost normal release even with your feet out. 

Here are a couple of hierarchies to try out.  With one foot out,

• row ¼ pressure, < 20 spm for several strokes,
• at same rating, go to a solid ½ pressure for 5 strokes,
• then to ¾ pressure for 5 strokes,
• and then to full pressure for 5 strokes. 

When you feel comfortable with that, try going both feet out. 

If you don’t feel comfortable with taking both feet out yet, try rowing one foot out, starting at a 20 and ½ pressure, and then increase the rating every 5 strokes to a 26 or 28. 

If you really want to push yourself, try one or two feet out, square blades.  Talk about developing a quick release – that’ll do it for you. 

Enjoy! 

Shoulders, Entry, Catch

I've gotten a couple of comments in response to my post about where and how to "take up the slack" when you're placing the blades in the water, and they've caused me to screech to a halt and do some more homework.

I proposed that the slack – the slight movement of the handles toward you – as the blades enter the water should feel like it’s getting taken up by having your shoulders feel like they’re coming more into joint.  Steve from OH pointed out that videos like that of Zac Purchase and other technically proficient scullers don’t show evidence of a fore/aft movement of the shoulders, like I describe. 

It’s a good thing he pointed this out, too, because it raised some useful issues that needed to be discussed.  One is that I don’t necessarily mean to say that how I describe the way sculling feels to me should be taken literally.  Fine:  but how would you know this?  Especially when I do quick web-searches to try and justify my intuitions.  Well, you have to ask (like Steve); or rely on me to self-police, -educate, and -correct. 

In the spirit of providing accurate information for you all, then, I thought I’d check with my friend Denise Frost, who’s a physical therapist and sculler.  She works at Spaulding Rehabilitation in Boston and has a private company, Coordination Dynamics, as well.  Though she and I have clients in common and often refer people to each other, I have no stake in the financial success or failure of her company, nor she mine. 

She's written a paper called “Cuffs and Slingshots” (sorry; I'm not able to link to it today, but I will do when I see that the website is up again.  Either that, or I'll ask Denise if it's OK to link directly to the pdf).  It describes a common set of problems that scullers and rowers encounter.  It’s also what we’ve been trying to think about!  Its largest point is that when you initiate the drive, the rest of your body has to be firm, and your joints well-supported, in order to transfer the force you’re generating with your legs through your body, to the blades, and out to the water.

The next important point is that the small muscles of the shoulder that I mentioned last time aren’t up to this task by themselves.  It’s the larger muscles around the shoulder that should be taking care of this, muscles like the trapezius, the serratus anterior, and the latissimus dorsi.  If those large muscles aren’t engaging properly, whether because of injury or habit, your posture as you come into the front end will look curved, not upright.  As Denise says, you’ll have “rounded forward shoulders and a slumped upper back.”  The muscles that stabilize your shoulder blades will be elongated, which puts them into a position where they can’t effectively stabilize the joint and transmit the load from your legs to your blades.  Instead, your powerful leg drive will just make the muscles and connective tissue stretch more.  You may feel like you're hanging on the oar – but because tendons and ligaments are not well suited to the task of stabilizing joints, you might also feel like your shoulders are stretching out of joint, almost.

Muscles are perfect for stabilizing joints, as long as they’re in the right position. If you’re over-reaching or slumped coming into the catch, instead of having the large muscles extrinsic to the shoulder stabilizing your shoulders, the small, deep intrinsic muscles of the shoulder will be trying to do so.  That’s not efficient from a rowing point of view, and it will greatly increase the probability of injury, which may give rise to symptoms like the ones Denise describes in another of her documents: 

• numbness & tingling in hands and fingers
• radiating or shooting pain throughout your arm
• elbow pain
• neck and/or upper back pain
• shoulder pain due to the “ball” of your upper arm bone mashing your rotator cuff muscle (the supraspinatus) against the acromion, which is next to your collarbone and above your humerus. 

One of the technical corrections that Denise recommends is: “at the commencement of the drive, ensure that the scapula is engaged against the rib cage and that the latissimus dorsi is engaged.”  That’s the clue that we were trying to figure out, and it seems so obvious because “use the lats” is such a frequent refrain in coaching. 

If you look at the video of Zac Purchase that Steve showed us, you can see (faintly, because of the lighting) Zac’s lats jump out at each catch[1].  I think that it’s this feeling which I’m calling “feeling your shoulders come more into their joints”.  My previous shoulder movement example, with the invisible glass wall, was a way of trying to evoke the sensation for you all, but emphasized the action of the wrong muscles. 

Let’s recap:  Steve asked how you get your blades into the water without either (a) checking the boat down and flipping or (b) missing water.  I said, among other things, that you need to have your arms and shoulders relaxed and taut as you place the blades, to a level somewhere between God and Thanksgiving. Your belly-button is pressed against your thighs, and your chest is up and open. 

You also need to be stabilizing your seat in position (I have this down as a future topic) so that, as the water you’re moving past takes your blades, you’ll be able to absorb some of that feeling of movement of the handles toward you by getting a good grip with your lats – this is the feeling of your shoulders coming more into joint.  Maybe a better term would be “the feeling of your shoulders stabilizing themselves”.  If your hands are gripping the handles only as much as needed to prevent the oars from rotating as you lock on, and if your biceps and triceps are equally balancing each other out but not clenching – again, if you’re stabilizing your elbow joints, not immobilizing them, per se – you may feel the oars bump against the sides of the oarlock.  First you’ll feel them bump against the sternward side of the oarlock, then against the bow-ward side.  At least, you might feel this at steady state, when it’s calm, you’re not steering, there aren’t too many sunspots, and Mercury is not in retrograde. 

If you were peeking at your blade on one side, you’d see a pretty symmetrical splash, as long as you weren’t initiating the drive yet.  Only once the blades are fully under the water, and you’ve felt the oars moving around in their sockets, are you allowed to start the drive.  That’s what we’ll talk about next time. 

---

[1] Or at least near the catch.  Since for the majority of the video we can’t see both the shoulder and the blade, we don’t know much about the timing of the two.  Let’s be charitable and assume that they happen at the same time. 

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. 

Reader Response 1

In order to directly address some of the comments I received on my first couple of posts, I have decided that I will occasionally put up a response specifically to them.  I have tried to address the same issues, at least briefly, in other posts as well.  A detailed discussion is too cumbersome for inclusion in a regular post, but certainly warranted. Thus, this post. 

Reader Caustic brings up some excellent points.  First: “…It is definitely possible, and directly observable, to see the oar feather just slightly while still fully buried. The reason is because as the oar face turns in the water, less force is applied to keep it square (since both the rower cannot pull as hard with just the arms, and because the face of the blade is now at an angle to the direction of intended motion). As a result, since the hands are pulling the handle in while resting on the top of the hangle, a slight torque is now proportionately larger than before (due to reduced force of water keeping the blade square). End result, a slight tilt of the blade while still buried. Advantage? A smoother and cleaner release than a purely square "drop & go" finish.” 

I have seen what Caustic describes, but do not agree that it is universally an advantage.  That is, allowing the blade to “feather” while still buried and while you are still pulling on the handle does allow for a smoother release.  However, I think it also reduces your speed.  An Olympian friend of mine (who preferred anonymity) told me:  “I consulted the Blue Book ("The Sculler At Ease", by Frank Cunningham).  Frank advocates a finish that is initiated solely by downward forearm pressure, in which the velocity of the water beneath the bottom of the blade feathers it for you.  In deciding whether this is the most efficient finish, however, you need to ask:  is the amount of speed you will gain by saving that energy of feathering greater than that you will lose by allowing the boat to slow down when the bottom lip of the blade catches the water rushing beneath it?  For most people, the answer to that is... No.  And I believe that, for everyone in rough water, the answer is Always No.  So although I agree with Frank on many things, the finish is not one of them.  That said.... when I really think about it, I admit that at the very moment when I'm extracting the blade, it's probably not coming out completely square.  However, I instinctively DON'T do this in rough water... So, I'd say, teaching people to do that might be doing them a disservice, at least until they understand when and how to do it properly.  If they learn to do it on their own, it's not the end of the world, provided they alter their finish in rough water.”

My own feeling is that keeping the blades fully square until you run out of room gives you the best propulsion. Allowing them to feather after you have begun to release the water gives you a cleaner finish, generally (though does render you vulnerable to slicing into a wave with your feathered blade).  Exactly when to initiate the feathering action is not only a consideration of conditions, as my friend says, but also a personal preference. Yesterday when I was on the water, I carefully watched my blades at the release.  I do start feathering as I am releasing the water.  I am one of those scullers who tends to flip up a little jet of water as she feathers, so I continually have to make sure I extract more before initiating the feather.  BUT:  my blade does not show above the top of the water until my hands are at my body and until I decide to put a little more weight on the handles.  That’s a big part of what I mean to communicate. 

To address the issue of variations in rowing technique:  I am a firm advocate of rowing in a way which makes you happy, unless I feel that you are putting yourself at risk of injury.  And even then, all I can do as a coach is recommend that you change technique.  I can’t change it for you.  I work with many scullers who have some physical difficulty that interferes with their ability to row “perfectly” – from the top masters sculler who has two fused disks in his back, to the returning masters sculler who has such bad arthritis in one hip that he has to row with his knee outside of his elbows at the catch.  In these cases, I let the sculler tell me what’s possible or feasible for him, and work at increased efficiency from there. 

Caustic’s second point is that what happens at the handles is about 1/3 of what happens at the blade.  If the blade is 8” deep, then we ought to need to lower the handles almost 4” in order to get them enough out of the water to start feathering.  But if you watch video of elite scullers, you won’t see a motion anywhere near this large.  Norm Graf, esteemed director of Craftsbury Sculling Center, likes to call the release a “non-motion” and underscore that it shouldn’t feel large and square. 

I think both gentlemen are right.  I think that the “magic” of the release happens in that flexing of the hands.  That gives you about an inch of downward handle motion without actually moving any other part of the hands.  (There’s three inches at the blade right there).  The other few inches on the blade come from that quick downward bobbing motion of your handles. 

Next, reader Mark brings up an excellent point, supported by information from Dr. Volker Nolte in the pdf to which Mark has kindly given us a link.  Mark says: “There is no "tap down" in the sense of keeping the blades completely buried until they reach the end of the arc and then removing them from the water. It's mostly a coach's white lie used in teaching and not really what happens. It's a physical impossibility - the handle must still be moving around the arc while the oar lifts out.” 

I have seen Dr. Nolte present this very information at a conference and was quite interested in his methods.  Watching the video associated with the handle track he showed there, it was clear that that particular sculler did wash out before the release.  That is why the handles he showed at the conference traced out a different path around the finish than around the catch.  The handle-track in the pdf looks similar, so with no video evidence I would predict that the pdf sculler, too, is washing out.  I have not had the opportunity to video other elite scullers to determine to what extent, if any, they are washing out; so I don’t know how common washing out really is, even among elite scullers.  I do know that some elite scullers don’t appear to wash out, while others do.  For the non-elite sculler, it is more common than not that I see blades washing out. 

Mark’s point that the handles continue to move around in an arc as the blade is releasing the water is also correct.  I don’t usually bring this point up to scullers I coach because I’ve found that it confuses people, but the handles really trace out a complex three-dimensional curve through the stroke.  Imagine drawing a flattened oval on the surface of a balloon.  That’s more like what the handles do in reality.  However, it is also useful to think of the handles’ trajectories as they would appear if you only looked at, say, the X-Y plane, or the X-Z plane.  In other words, you can imagine the handles’ traces on a horizontal plane, or a vertical one parallel to the long axis of the boat, or a vertical plan perpendicular to the long axis of the boat.  Understanding the ideal and actual paths of the handles in all of these projections is useful. 

Mark continues: “Coaches use the these sort of ideal images all the time, but they should also understand that they are simplifications or distortions, and in a written piece that will be read and used by coaches as well as athletes, you should indicate that you have that understanding too.” 

Indeed, Mark’s advice is well taken.  This is not an issue I would lead with – pedagogically speaking, it’s just too confusing.  But when a sculler brings it up (and Mark is certainly not the first to do so), it is important to acknowledge and discuss. 

In that spirit, then, when I refer to the “tap down” at the end of the drive, I mean to speak about how the motion feels to me.  I also want to communicate how the motion, when performed more efficiently, may feel to someone who is used to letting his or her blades wash out.  Coaches, including me, also refer to trying to maintain a constant handle speed on the drive – though this, too, is not possible.  Of course the handles must decelerate and achieve zero velocity in one direction in order to change direction.

Realize that when I coach scullers to correct inefficiencies, I often present an exaggerated version of the stroke because I know they will settle somewhere between what they are currently doing and what I am describing.  I adjust my description so that they will settle on the right place – which means sometimes even describing something that’s physically impossible.  (You think the finish is magic?  Wait till we talk about the catch).  When you change from washing out at the finish to keeping the blade buried all the way through, you probably will feel like the finish is a huge square movement for a while in comparison.  As you begin to be more facile at the movement, it will begin to be and to feel more smooth. 

Coaching language is a large-enough topic for its own post, at some future point. 

Keep those questions and comments coming.  We all learn from them.