Serious Sculling

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. 

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! 

Ratio within ratio within ratio

Been thinkin’ about ratio recently.  “Ratio” usually means “the amount of time you spend on the drive, compared to the amount of time you spend on the recovery,” and it should be small – that is, it should feel like you spend more time on the recovery than on the drive, at least at moderate-to-low pressures and ratings.  “Ratio” is also used to refer to a sensation of having enough time to do what you need to on the recovery, without feeling rushed or hurried. 

But of course I  think there’s more to it than that.  (I’m pretty reliable like that.)  In addition to the drive:recovery ratio, I actually like to think about the ratio of time spent getting into the body angle position to time spent on the recovery as a whole.  And I like to think about the ratio of time on the first part of the slide vs time on the second part of the slide.  I’ll discuss each of these in turn, then speculate as to their source.

Just to tack things down a little and make things (slightly) simpler, let’s imagine a low stroke rating – say, 22 or so.  Things change as the rating rises, as we know. 

I like to get into the body angle position pretty fast on the recovery.  I think of handle speed into the body as determining handle speed away after the release.  Actually, pressure and/or rating determine handle speed into the release, which then determines handle speed away.  And handle speed away just after the release determines how fast I have to get to body angle.  All of this is written with the proviso that the hands lead the body.  Just as the hands finished off the drive, they begin the recovery.  The amount of time it takes me to get to body angle on the recovery is shorter than the amount of time it takes me on the slide.  I like to think that the quicker I get to body angle (without exaggerating things) the more time I have to roll into the front end. 

Then there’s the slide itself.  Because I want as little momentum going in to the front end as possible, I want my slide speed to end up being very slow, so I have very little deceleration to do before I stop.  Momentum, of course, is mass x velocity.  I can’t change my mass on the recovery; I only have velocity to play around with as I adjust my rowing.  So I imagine my seat as rolling uphill on the second part of the recovery, coasting gently to a stop as my wheels come to a halt.  That’s where the sense of ratio within the slide comes from:  The first part of the slide happens faster than the second half.  This has a lot of benefits – less force needed to slow myself down, so less sternward push needed when my blades aren’t in the water yet; more time (mentally, if nothing else) to feel for blade placement and lock-on.  All this makes it feel as though the time I spend going from body-angle to half-slide, say, is shorter than the time I spend going from half-slide to the catch. 

Here’s a little graphic illustrating the stroke, which might help.  The top is the recovery; the bottom is the drive. 

 

There are two ways to think of this diagram:  On the recovery, if the time it takes to get to hands-away takes a time unit of 1, the time it takes to get to body angle will be another 2 units, then yet another 2 units to half slide.  Finally, it takes another 3 units to get to the catch, for a total of 8 time units on the recovery.  Compare that to the 4 time units on the drive: 2 for the leg drive and 2 for the swing.  Or you can think of the drive as having a beat of two – first beat is legs down, second beat is swing body over.  In that same cadence, give yourself a count of four or even five on the recovery. 

But where does all this come from?  Why should it be that way? 

I think it comes from handle speed.  I imagine, though I’m not positive, that a constant angular velocity (i.e., speed around the arcs) of the handles results in the lowest momentum for your body weight coming in to the front end.  I’m not that great at physics, having been a humanities major, so I’ll have to leave it to someone else to do the equations.  (If they come up with a different result, I’ll have to rethink the theory, ack!). 

Next, you have to imagine that, while the handles go around those arcs at a constant speed, they don’t have the same speed along the length of the hull as they go from release to catch.  Instead, think about them this way:  If the handles move toward or away from the long axis of the boat, they aren’t going to be moving along the long axis of the boat as much.  Imagine the handles’ shadow on the seat deck of the boat.  That shadow moves fastest along the deck when the handles are perpendicular to the boat and slowest when they start to spread apart at the catch. 

Feeling this is possibly the trickiest of all.  It might be relatively easy to think of getting fast hands away, but getting into the body angle position lickety-split is less intuitive and hard to square with the idea of not rushing.  That’s because, for many people, “not rushing” means “slow movements”.  So achieving the kind of movement I’m talking about on the recovery might require a re-evaluation of what you think “not rushing” is. 

I remember when I first started learning this.  I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew there was something difficult about following my friend Anne W., who was really good.  She was faster than me, so I tried to make my stroke match hers exactly.  At first, I made sure my slide started at the same time as hers.  But I kept noticing that when I did that, I’d only get to about 3/4 or 7/8 slide before she was at the catch and putting her oar in the water.  So I’d recalibrate on the next stroke and try to get my oar in the water at the same time as she did.  But then I found I had to start my slide before she started hers, and I felt like that was rushing her.  I finally managed to get it right by not thinking about it too hard but just absorbing her rhythm, and only after that did I start to understand and be able to articulate what was going on.  The feeling of being assertive, shall we say, with my slide speed was novel and a bit unsettling.  It really called for careful use of my hamstrings on the recovery in order to consciously regulate my slide speed. 

What drills are there to help yourself learn this rhythm? 

First just try rolling up and back on your slide, with your blades flat on the water.  Try to get the feeling of rolling uphill and alighting to a stop, not falling downhill and landing at the bottom.  You’ll need to actively use your hamstrings to control and adjust your speed.  You can make the speed back as fast as you want; your blades won’t be in the water, so it won’t matter much. 

This one I think I’ve listed before, but bears repeating.  Use the drive cadence to determine the recovery cadence:

1.  Take a few strokes to get up and going at a 20-22 spm.  Then count “one… two” to yourself on the drive, where “one” is the leg drive and “two” is the swing.  Memorize that beat. 

2.  Now, on the recovery, you’ll count “one… two… three… four” to the same beat.  Here, “one” is hands-away, “two” is body angle, “three” is half-slide, and “four” is blades in the water.  Better yet, have someone else count it for you – someone in a launch or on the dock as you go by. 

If you really want to push yourself, try a 5-count on the recovery to the same beat:  hands-away = “one”, body angle = “two”, half-slide = “three”, three-quarter-slide = “four”, and blades in the water is now “five”. 

You can also try bringing the rating down by 2 beats every minute or so, staying at a constant pressure, but keeping the time it takes you to get to body angle the same, and letting the slide portion of the recovery stretch to accommodate the lower rating.  This is hard, though; you’ll be tempted to achieve the lower rating by pausing at body angle, which is the opposite of what you want.  Instead, think of making a micro-pause (like a flash photograph) at half-slide and then at three-quarter-slide as you row.  You could even imagine that time itself stretches and slows down as you get closer to the catch. 

Let me know how it goes!