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. 

Wiggling Around at the Finish

My friend Sam and I were doing a double together.  She wanted to practice being bow, because she was going to be steering during a race that coming weekend.  So I was stroking and she was following – following, and steering, and trying to figure out how to be a good bow seat. 

One thing about rowing bow in a double or quad is that practically everything is your responsibility.  It may or may not be your fault, but it sure is your job to fix it.  That’s because, in that seat, you’re able to see what’s going wrong in front of you, and you can see behind you a little more easily than stroke can.  Also, you’re farther from the skeg and therefore have more leverage and more influence on the boat’s set.  It’s as if stroke was trying to open a door whose doorknob was in the middle of the door, while you’re doing it with a knob in the usual place.  It’s a lot easier for you. 

Having more influence over the set of the boat is a “whole ’nother sock full of worms”, as a friend of mine (not a native speaker of English) so eloquently put it one time.  Because while there’s really very little you can do to make the boat set, there sure is a lot of stuff you can do to make it not set. 

Many, perhaps most, of the things you can do to make a boat not set happen around the release, too, which is soemthing I was trying to get across to Sam.  I started with the general things:  You want to be sure your own blades aren’t washing out (that almost always makes the boat wiggly) and that they are coming out of the water at the same time.  It’s best if your hands aren’t right one atop the other as they come away from the body, or you’ll put yourself down to port already.  Instead, make sure your left hand releases the water by coming down enough to make the right hand come down too, brushing the heel of your left hand against your right knuckles.  That slightly staggered position helps ensure that the handles are the same distance apart as the oarlocks are.  If your left hand is directly over the right, the handles will be farther apart than the oarlocks are, which is what makes you go down to one side. 

But there are also a lot of things about the release itself that are much more specific and dynamic, that vary from stroke to stroke – not from stroke rower to stroke rower, I mean, but literally from one stroke to the next as you scull – that you have to deal with as you row bow in a double.  And, assuming that both of you are rigged high enough to get all of your blades off the water, and there’s no external cause of one or another blade needing to be on the water, it’s really bow seat’s job to make sure that every blade can get off the water. 

If the boat doesn’t feel stable, then stroke seat will want to keep her blades close to the water so the boat doesn’t lurch one way or the other.  Then again, some people like having their oars close to the water.  So you’ll have to do a little observing here.  If stroke seat has her oars on the water, is it because she doesn’t have enough room to get them off?  Or because she’s used to carrying her blades close to the water’s surface?  Or is it because the set is rocky?  --You’ll be able to feel it if it’s the last one.  You can ask your stroke about the first one – set the boat yourself and have her sit blades square, with her handles on her thighs.  Look to see how much room there is between the bottom edge of the blades and the water.  You’ll want a couple of inches at least; generally more, so that wobbles don’t cause knuckle-smashing.  But if there’s sufficient room and the stroke’s blades smack the water right after she feathers, there’s a pretty good chance that she’s washing out and carrying the handles too high (and slapping her own puddles). 

If the set is rocky, you have the unenviable job of compensating for it.  It doesn’t really matter whose fault the bobbles in the set are – if you’re in bow, you get  to fix ‘em.  Unless you agreed before setting out that you would tell stroke what you see, it would be like back-seat driving to say anything.  On the other hand, if your partner is willing, you can try this drill, one by one.  Have one person sit out, holding their blades out of the way of the other person’s, with the handles butted up against each other and blades OFF the water.  As the other person rows, the one sitting out sits straight up and down (not compensating for any listing of the boat). 

This drill is oddly different from rowing a single, because the extra weight of the person sitting out seems to make the boat do its listing more slowly.  On the other hand, the weight of the oars flapping out there will increase the boat’s sensitivity to balance.  I can’t give you any formulas here on how to avoid disturbing the balance of the boat as you row with the other person’s oars out of the water, only tips.  You’ll have to play around with it a little to see what you find.  But here are a few things to keep in mind while you’re rowing:

+  Take the blades out of the water while your feet are still pressed up against the footboards. 

+  Keep absolutely still except for the movement of the handles as you make the release.  Think of your body as being taut but not tight – just a little firm so that you don’t introduce any extra wiggling into the system.  At the same time, avoid being rigid, or you won’t be able to damp down any wind- or water-induced wiggles; you'll transfer them to the hull instead. 

+  Experiment with feather timing.  See how it alters the set of the boat if you feather the blades out versus extract them while they’re still square, or if you use delayed feather. 

+  Vary your pressure , keeping rating the same, so your boat speed will increase a little.  As it does, make sure you extract the blades faster so they don’t get stuck in the water. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can try increasing the rating as well. 

+  Experiment, too, with microscopic changes in the timing of each blade’s exit from the water.  Basically, if you leave one blade in the water after the other is out, you’ll tend to pull the boat down to that side.  Usually, of course, that’s a bad thing – but in bow seat you can exploit it by holding on to the water with, say, your port blade if the boat feels like it’s threatening to roll to starboard. 

+  Play with how much you weight the handles down on the recovery – see how just the most subtle of changes in handle height can make the boat list to one side or the other. 

+  Once the blades are out, you can also press down gently with the back of one blade or the other on the surface of the water to keep the boat from rocking down to that side.  Of course, this is antithetical to the goal of getting all four blades off the water at once, but if you really think the boat’s going to suddenly flop hard to one side, you might still want to take the option. 

A final suggestion:  Don’t let yourself get to the point of frustration, either with yourself or your sculling partner.  Try the drill for a little while, then just row.  Then try for another little while if you feel up to it.  You’re not going to solve all the balance issues in one practice.  And you’re not going to learn anything if you’re mad, so work to a point just shy of getting hot under the collar (or hot under the heart rate monitor, as the case may be).  Then pick something else to work on.  Or get a drink of water.  Do some birdwatching.  Or tell your stroke a funny story.  Catch your own resonances – you’ll probably pick up the skills faster, and you’ll certainly have a lot more fun doing it. 

 

New Directions in Steering

Been a while since I thought about steering, but I’ve been called upon to help some folks with it recently, so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been thinking.

Now, chances are I’ve never rowed on your home course, so I can’t tell you about useful landmarks.  But I can give a sort of précis of what the major ways to steer are, as well as of some important aspects of each.  You’ll probably have need for all of them at some point. 

I guess the methods of steering have three main functions:  to keep your boat going straight when you need it to go straight, to help you adjust course when you need to do that, and to keep you from running into things at all times. 

When scullers are just starting out, they often find that they tend toward one side or the other.  But you’ve got a good way to monitor your course right in front of you:  Your wake.  Watching your wake is probably the easiest way to make sure you’re going more or less straight – as long as the weather’s good enough to see it well, and no one taller than you is sitting in front of you.  It’s better to make little corrections than big ones, so:  Steer early, steer often.  That way, you’ll get used to how not to pull to one side, too (assuming it’s not a problem with the boat).  Related to this, of course, is using a stern point to keep your boat going straight.  For this, you pick some landmark on the horizon off your stern and you keep your stern pointed right at it.  It’ll wiggle around, of course, but as long as you don’t let the distance between the landmark and your stern get too big before you correct it, you’ll be okay. 

Steering by stern point is probably most common on long straight courses where you can be reasonably assured that nothing will be in front of you – in a buoyed 2K course, for example.  In “straight” team boats, which is to say fours without coxswain, quads, and doubles, the control of who’s steering will often switch from warmup to race.  That is, the stroke has the best view of any stern point, but the worst view of what is ahead of the boat.  The reverse is true for the bow seat.  So on the way down to the start of a 2K, bow seat generally steers (as he or she would normally).  But when the boat enters the buoyed lanes, bow seat will often release control to the stroke, who has a better view of  the buoy lines.  Even though bow seat has better leverage for steering the boat, when stroke seat reaches out farther on one side or the other to effect the change in course, bow or three can see this and join in as needed.  If the four or quad is steered by use of a toe rudder, then the foot stretcher with the “toe” on it is put at the seat of the person who will be steering the race.  When the boat is not in the buoyed course, bow seat can still be responsible for steering by making the steering calls – whereupon all rowers join in a little or just the stroke can use the toe.  When bow seat isn’t making a steering call, stroke will generally try to keep the toe straight. 

For those who haven’t  “toed” a boat:  The boat’s rudder is connected by wires to a metal arrangement on the toe of the right shoe of one of the foot stretchers, and that shoe is attached to the foot boards at only one point, allowing it to rotate.  The wires are set up so that you steer by pointing your toe in the direction you want to go.  This is not the same as how they are set up for a coxswain, because rowers and coxswains face in opposite directions.   The wires attached to the metal arrangement on the toe are crossed on their way to the rudder, or you’d have to point your heel in the direction you wanted to go.  Toes also have an indicator that is supposed to tell you when the rudder is straight, but they often come out of alignment, so you can’t always trust them.  Best way to deal with this is to put the boat in slings, have someone hold the rudder straight, and then look to see where the little metal tabs on the toe are so you know what counts as “straight” .

If the setup sounds uncomfortable to you, you’re very perceptive.  Often, you get to row with your foot angled to the right or the left, as if you were pigeon-toed or splay-footed.  It’s even more awesome when you’re trying to toe a boat whose shoes are twice as large as your feet, because then angling your foot just moves your foot around in the shoe without changing the rudder’s position.  That means you get to really crank your foot around in a contorted position and row like that while trying to follow the person in front of you, make steering calls, and look around.  For this reason, some folks make heel inserts.  You just cut a couple of half-moon-shaped pieces of foam and cover them with duct tape.  Then you stuff them into the heels of the shoes.  That allows your toes to be in the toe of the shoe and more effectively move the rudder. (It also allows both feet to be at the same level)

On most regular rowing venues, I venture (with shockingly little evidence to back me up), rowers steer by gauging their distance from shore or by using a hat-mounted mirror to aim at a point ahead of them.  I don’t use a mirror, so I have little to say about them except that YOU STILL NEED TO LOOK AROUND on shared waterways, even if you use one.  That’s because you can only get a good panoramic view of what’s ahead of you and to your sides by scanning as you turn your head.  Looking over your shoulder helps you memorize the general lay of the land, while a more careful look or a glance into the mirror allows you to identify details in that landscape. 

To steer off the shore (i.e., to use the shore as a reference for your course), you need to turn your head to the side that you’re monitoring (the traffic pattern generally imitates that of a road , so in the U.S. this is your starboard side).  You look over your shoulder, peek at what’s there or what the shore is doing, and adjust accordingly.  The best time to do this is during the drive, because your blades are in the water and you’re the most stable, but of course you should look whenever you have to.  If you’re new to steering, it will seem completely counterintuitive to look on the drive.  Why not do it when you have nothing to do, on the recovery?  Well:  you don’t have nothing to do on the recovery; you have the recovery to do.  Also, your blades are out of the water, so your balance will be much easier to disrupt.  The way you look over your shoulder is this:  During the first part of the drive, you simply turn your head to the side, touching your chin to your shoulder, and peek out of the corner of your eye at what the shore ahead is doing. 

How far ahead?  Short answer:  Far enough ahead so that you have time to avoid hitting things.  This will obviously be farther for a heavyweight men's quad than for a lightweight woman’s single. 

Here’s a more detailed version of the same answer. 

It’s useful to think of rowing shells as not turning in curves, but in a series of straight lines.  After all, these boats are really built to go straight, and only straight.  So, even if you row on a curvy river like the Charles, it’s helpful to imagine your journey not as sinuous but as a series of dots that you’re going to connect.  Once you conceive of your path this way, you can better understand how to use the shore as a guide.  In this idealized, simplified world, you imagine the shore as being much smoother than it really is.  Many coves you’ll ignore; outcroppings you have to pay attention to, so that you can skim by them. 

So let’s walk through a couple of scenarios to see how all this might work.  Imagine you start from a dead stop.  Of course, while you were stopped you pulled over to the side so that no other rowers had to go around you, because it’s annoying to steer and you don’t want to make others have to do so unnecessarily.  You also made sure that you were pointed more or less parallel to the direction of travel while you were stopped, so you presented a smaller target and so you could pick up and go on a moment’s notice if needed.  But now you’re ready to go.  You looked around to see which direction you needed to head in, and you sculled your bow around a little to get yourself pointed correctly.  You may have looked first over one shoulder, then the other, and then averaged; or maybe you only needed a look over one shoulder.

Now you’re up and going.  The first thing you have to do is make sure you’re still pointed the way you thought you were, and that nothing materialized in front of you while you weren’t looking.  Peek over shore-side shoulder and verify that you’re still aiming to miss the next outcropping. 

Good.  Now you have a few strokes to think about technique.  But after no more than five strokes you’ll need to peek again.  This time, forget about the previous outcropping and aim for the next dot in your connect-the-dots picture.  If the shore is relatively straight, pick a region on it several boat-lengths ahead and aim your boat so that it will be the same distance off that point as you are off the shore next to you now (assuming it’s a safe distance to begin with).  If the shore’s not straight, you’ll have to avoid the next outcropping – another reason to be looking frequently.  As you get up to speed you’ll get a sense of how far ahead to look.  Make the minimum adjustment you need to, so you won’t oversteer and have to correct your correction. 

I like to stick pretty close to shore on the Charles, about a boat-length away unless the general traffic pattern demands otherwise.  It means frequent checking, but that’s useful in any case.  The shore is my friend.  It stays where it is and generally damages my boat less than other boats will.  (Hitting other boats is worse than hitting the shore – ask my friend John Yasaitis, who ran into an eight one time.)  I also want to stay in the “right lane”, as it were (I mean the slow lane), unless have to pass someone.  Rare these days, but still a theoretical possibility.  By sticking in the slow lane, I leave more room for faster folks to pass me without having to cross the invisible yellow line separating upstream from  downstream traffic. 

As I row, I peek around every 5 strokes or so, always identifying the next object (shore or boat; rarely a swimmer, but it’s happened) that I need to skim by.  There’s always more looking and more steering when there’s stuff in front of me, of course.  Not pleasant but a LOT better than hitting stuff.  My goal is to look at the shore at the point where I think I’ll be in five strokes’ time, adjusting my course so as to maintain my current distance off the shore. 

When I get to a bridge, I generally give myself two looks, especially if the bridge involves a turn as well (true of about half the bridges on the Charles).  That way I can see how far I am from not only the shore or abutment on my shore side, but also from the abutment on the other side, and then split the distance.  I’ve identified a lot of stern points that I use to make sure I’m tracking on the course I need through the bridge so I can end up in a good position on the other side.  I have landmarks that help me decide when to start or end turns, as well. You’ll develop these, too, as you practice on your home course. 

When I have to share an arch with or pass someone, I stop caring about the far-away points and just pay attention to the other boat’s oars so I can avoid them.  It may sound obvious to say this, but I have coached scullers who do not stop paying attention to far-away marks – and then I've had to disentangle them from the boat they clashed oars with.  When you’re in a pack of other boats, the best thing you can do is to ROW STRAIGHT so that everyone can anticipate where you’re going and not run into you.  If you need to turn and the other boats aren’t showing signs of adjusting, communicate with them.  In Boston a simple “Double!  To port!” or the like will do.  (or “Coxswain!” or “Pair!” or “Jim!”)  The worst thing you can do is steer dramatically and unpredictably, then stop rowing.  That’s certain to cause a  giant fustercluck. 

[Fustercluck, n.  Polite word for a clusterfuck, which is a mass of entangled annoyed boats and rowers all swearing at one another out of sheer pique, exacerbated by hypoxia and the sound of cash registers ringing up the cost of fixing whatever damage has just been done to oars, riggers, and hulls.  For it to be a true clusterfuck, each boat must be simultaneously steering in a different direction while shouting contradictory directions to each other boat.]

What’s the takeaway today?

• Look over your shoulder a lot.  Even if you are in the correct traffic pattern, if someone strays over the center line into your path and you haven’t looked around and seen them, you’re just as much at fault as they are if you collide.  After all, if you’re driving a car and looking down while someone enters your lane and you crash into them, you’re not faultless.  You’re supposed to be looking where you’re going.  (Besides, even if it’s not your fault, you’re still going to suffer if you hit someone.  It’s annoying, but less painful and MUCH less expensive to take the responsibility for checking). 
• Think ahead:  who cares about the shore next to you?  You’ve already avoided it, and your boat isn’t moving in that direction.  Aim to avoid the next obstacle, and once you’ve set a course to do that you can focus on the obstacle after that, and so on.  Find some way to monitor your course in between looks so you have a predictable course that needs little adjustment.
• And communicate clearly but politely with other boats.  If something happens, politeness often gets you a “discount” in the responsibility you get charged with, if you know what I mean.  If you’re an ass about the whole thing, you make the other person want to charge you more.  So think of politeness as an investment, if you can’t bring yourself to just be nice out of habit. 

Oh yeah – I forgot the most important one:  enjoy your rowing! 

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. 

Oh, My Aching...

Hands.  Most of us have them, and we use them to hold the handles of the oars.  And I am reminded of my hands much more in the weather we’re currently having in New England than I am in other types of weather. 

 

It’s summer, you see; and that means it’s humid here.  I really, really hate humidity.  It makes me feel like the stick of butter on my kitchen counter looks:  sagging and oily.  Granted, my hair turns nice and curly, but there are products that do that year-round, so it’s not worth enduring the sweaty, sticky, heavy weather we have now just for a good hair day. 

 

It could be worse, I know.  I could live in the Washington, D.C. metro area like I did as a teenager.  Somehow, I managed not to die from it, but now I can’t imagine how not.  I recall leaving a movie theater once on a mid-August afternoon near DuPont Circle, hitting the moist, superheated air, and thinking, “Why did that invisible person just microwave that wet facecloth and then throw it at my face?  Why?” 

 

One of the commenters to this blog, Eugene, lives in the American South – Mississippi.  My witty metaphors fail me here.  I just can’t imagine how people manage in that weather. 

 

Normally, I’m not such a complainer.  It just happens that I had two funny lines about the humidity, and also it made me think of how much worse my hands blister when it’s humid.  Then, during my third shower of the day, I saw the pumice stone I keep in the tub, and it occurred to me I could make all this pointless suffering into a post.  A post on hand hygiene.  [And a disclaimer.  If you usually read this while eating, be warned:  it’s a little gross]. 

Now, even though they don’t much bother him, I would say that my husband's hands crying out for hygiene.  They are covered with old blisters, rough with snagging dead skin, and pocked with blisters in progress.  Your typical rowers' hands.  Nothing’s infected; I don’t mean that.  I just mean that I have a whole regimen for keeping my hands more socially acceptable than his.  Granted, he does work for a living, while I spend my time blogging performing sophisticated, computerized, acoustic analyses on the speech of individuals with neurological disorders. 

 

Let’s start with my theory of blisters.  [I know:  I have a theory for everything.  Talk to my shrink.]  My theory is that blisters form not just because of rubbing.  Instead, it seems like they form on my hands during rowing when the topmost layers of skin stick to the handles, but when there is a shear zone under those layers.  That is, the top layers seem to stick while also pulling back and forth.  The pulling tears the skin a few millimeters under the surface, and voila!  Pillows.  Painful pillows. 

 

Once you’ve got blisters, there’s not too much to be done except wait them out and take care of them.  I know that some people have regimens of caustic chemicals that they swear dry the blisters up and help them go away faster.  If you’re one of these people, please weigh in.  I’m the kind of person who incessantly plays with my blisters, and then they pop (usually in a small seminar, an important business meeting, or a crowded elevator for maximum humiliation).  Then, I’m stuck with the problem of how to deal with a potentially infectable wound on my hand.  The important message here is:  DON’T POP THEM.  Yes, it’s fun, and yes, they hurt when they are puffy, and yes, they will probably pop during tomorrow’s practice anyway.  But really, there’s no sense exchanging a sterile hand injury for a breeding ground for all of the stuff you flush down the bathroom pipes, which is now floating in your home river, before you’re forced to. 

 

If you do have an open wound, keep it clean.  Soap and water, with lots of rubbing, is the best thing to start with.  Purell or other hand cleaners will disinfect but they’ll also hurt like hell because of the alcohol.  If this is your thing, more power to you!  But I like hydrogen peroxide because it is less painful and I like to see the bubbles.  However, this compound does actually destroy skin, so some people don’t like it.  If you can keep the wound covered until it heals over, even better. 

 

There are some methods of wrapping one’s hands with athletic tape that I’ve found, through painful experience, will help reduce blister formation or help preserve the integrity of the ones I have.  I tend to get blisters between the joints of my fingers, usually the index, middle, and ring fingers; and on my palms just below the lowest finger joint.  The finger ones I wrap with a nice wide piece of tape, wide enough so that the tape wads up a little when I bend my fingers.  This isn’t pleasant, and it does leave a sticky residue on the handles, but it generally doesn’t result in the formation of more blisters at the edges of the tape.  And since the tape strips are pretty wide, they still cover the sore parts even when they wad up. 

 

The ones at the roots of my fingers, though, are another matter.  You can’t wrap the tape horizontally around your palm without it really wadding up and creating a whole crop of new, puffy sore spots.  Instead, you have to use a strip of athletic tape that’s at least an inch (~2.5 cm) wide and long enough to go from your wrist up between your fingers and back down to your wrist on the other side.  Then you tear it in half the long way, about halfway down, so it looks like a very skinny Y.  Put your finger between the two halves of the torn tape, near the crotch of the Y, so that the unsplit part of the tape covers the blister on the palm of your hand.  Then, stick the two arms of the Y to the back of your hand.  Do that for all of your blisters.  If you’re worried about the tape peeling back off your sweaty wrist, secure the ends with a bracelet of tape.  

 

Of course, most blisters pop eventually.  And when they do, I think it’s best to remove the dead skin.  Lovely!  You can use nail clippers, though I find that the curved blades of this tool tend to create more little ends that then need trimming, or else they go too deep and hurt.  I use the scissors on my Swiss Army knife, but you could easily use nail scissors or any small cuticle scissors that are flat.  Lay the blades of the scissors flat against your skin, press down slightly so that you can cut to the very bottom of the dead flaps of skin, and trim the excess away.  Don’t just pull the skin away, because your skin has a grain like wood, and you’ll do what I’ve done more times than I care to admit:  pull the dead skin away, then start pulling live skin away, and end up bleeding all over your notebook.  Or your business suit, or the elevator buttons.  Really unsavory. 

 

Of course, once you’ve trimmed most of the dead parts away you’re still left with the little bitty ends, and as they dry out they like to snag on fuzzy clothes, leading to the problem I just described.  My solution here is to use a pumice stone, like the ones they sell at The Body Shop  (This one isn’t actually pumice; it’s polyurethane, so if you’ve got some clean scraps of that you’re in luck).  You can also get actual pumice stones in most health and beauty aid sections in grocery stores or drug stores, like this one they sell at CVS in the US.  Be certain, though, that the implement you use will actually smooth your skin.  As with sanding any other substance, you’ve got to use the right grit, or you’ll end up making the problem worse.  I like a pretty smooth stone for that reason.  Oh – and remember to rinse the dead skin off your smoother each time, or it’ll get really disgusting really quickly. 

 

I use my pumice (or polyurethane) smoother when I shower.  The water helps soften the callouses and dead skin, and giving my hands a minute or two of sanding really helps keep those little snags from happening.  It’s also good callous maintenance to keep them medium-sized, too.  If you don’t, they get too thick, and you’ll develop a shear zone underneath them as you row.  A blister will then form under them, and the whole thing you’ve worked so hard to acquire will peel off.  And then you’ll be rowing on, like, baby hands.  Gotta love the double blisters you get that way. 

 

A final use for those pumice stones:  sanding the scars from boat bite.  I get boat bite like crazy, and I’m way too vain to wear knee socks.  So, the ends of the tracks just rub through that one layer of skin and make a barely visible sore on my calves.  I usually don’t even notice until I’m in the shower, and then YOWEEEEE!  Then, the next day, I have a wicked gross scab forming.  Through diligent experimentation – I am a scientist, after all – I’ve settled on the habit of putting Bag Balm or antibiotic ointment on the sore, then band-aiding it up.  Change the bandage every day or twice a day, and there’s much less scabbing and scarring, and they heal faster too.  Also, your doctor doesn’t look earnestly into your eyes and ask, “Are you safe at home?” 

 

But once the scab is gone you’re left with a very visible purple scar that takes about two years to really disappear.  I’ve found I can reduce this time to, oh, a mere year and a half by gently sanding the scar tissue off.  You can’t do it too much, or you’ll make a new sore and then have to start all over again.  But doing a little home dermabrasion really does help minimize the appearance of these unsightly scars.  [Like that phrasing?  I got it from a cosmetic commercial!]

 

One last comment:  If I have to row on painful blisters, I’ve noticed that they hurt the worst when I first grip the handles.  If I can just manage not to ever take my hands off the handles during a practice, then I won’t have to suffer through pressing all the fluid back into my hands and squeezing the swelling down again.  And then I’m sort of okay. 

 

…Until I need a drink….

The Essential Randomness of Life.

If you want a certain thing,
You must first become a certain person.
When you are that person
You will no longer want that thing.
        Zen koan (adapted)

Clearly, we’re going to talk about how to row in rough water.  I know you knew that – just from the title alone you guessed it, and the koan was just for flourish. 

I clearly remember the day I learned to row in chop.  It was actually during my second-to-last year of serious competition in my single, and it came after years of training in the basin of the Charles River with my friend Rudy, because Rudy has a Filippi and he hated having to steer upstream during pieces (I’m not bitter.  I’m not bitter).  I have a van Dusen from 1984, which is no trouble at all to steer, but is, I believe, physically impossible to set.  But I needed somebody to do the pieces with, and Rudy was on the same workout plan, so into the basin we trooped.  Despite all those pieces in the basin, I didn’t actually learn how to row well in chop until Canadian Henley one year. 

I was actually watching the 1000m masters races, and the racecourse was in the throes of a fearsome tailwind.  We were all lucky it was a tail instead of a head, but it was still almost unrowable.  I was absently watching heat after heat of masters struggle in the waves, trying not to be nervous for when my 2000m races would come around.  I noticed something very interesting.  Some of the people looked like I felt:  They would hit a wave with one oar, rocket over to list on the other side of their boats, struggle to take a few clean strokes, and repeat the same process – over and over and over again.  The people who were making progress looked like they were just getting their blades up and over the tips of the waves….

Right!  Getting their blades up over the waves!  By getting their handles down lower! 

My college coach’s words came back to me like one of those echoing flashbacks in Seinfeld:  Mayrene’s voice saying, “Get your handles down a little lower!  lower!  lower…” 

I felt liberated and stupid, all at the same time.  But I did better in my race than I had in any other piece in chop I ever had before. 

So that’s one important technique you can use (yes! you too!) to row in chop.  The wrinkle is, or course, that you have to have the trust in your own balance to keep your blades farther off the water than usual.  In chop, actually, this is a win, even if you don’t think you have good balance.  That’s because if your oars are close to the water you suffer mightily, as you probably know from bitter experience.  But if your oars are above most of the waves, you suffer less. 

Another useful trick for rowing in chop is to keep your arms and shoulders very relaxed.  This is a process, not an outcome; you’ll discover yourself getting tight after a couple of strokes, and have to take a deep breath to relax.  That’ll last until the next wave goes over your gunwales and hits you in the kidneys, and then you’ll have to start all over again.  That’s okay.  You’ll get used to re-relaxing yourself stroke by stroke, and then it will look from the outside like you’re just staying relaxed. 

The reason you need to keep your upper body relaxed is so that you don’t transfer the force of whacking into a wave to your hull.  Remember when we were talking about your core, and how it wants to be nice and firm so that it transfers all the force you generate with your legs to the blades?  Same thing, only in reverse, for the arms and the hull of the boat.  You’ll feel more tippy if your hull rocks than if your oars just wave around in the air.  And if you’re stiff with your upper body, any impact between the blade and the water will be more efficiently transferred to the hull.  But if your upper body is more relaxed, then it will absorb more of the shock, and that’s to your advantage. 

If the water is scary-choppy, just row three-quarter slide or even half-slide.  My husband once did that during one of his “three hour tours” (sing that to the tune of the theme of "Gilligan’s Island").  It was in Clemson, South Carolina, U.S.A., and he rowed out on the lake they have there for an afternoon jaunt.  He’s been rowing since he was in high school, and loves exploring.  But it got windy during the row, and his trip really did turn into a three-hour tour.  I think he had to row back arms-and-body only.  (Of course, he’s still faster at arms-and-body than I am at full slide, but that’s because he really has freakishly long limbs).

Basically, if you’re too nervous about the water you find yourself in to row normally, then just stay in the middle of the stroke – you can avoid getting all the way up to the catch by rowing three-quarter slide, and you can take your blades out before your hands get to your shirt so you don’t get stuck.  Remember that you’ll have to have some larger-amplitude movements in chop.  That is, you won’t be able to cheat like you do in flat water and feather the blades out, because you stand a good chance of slicing your blades through a wave and getting stuck.  You’ll have to extract more of the blade before feathering.  And if you’re listing to one side or the other, you’ll have to hinge from the shoulders farther to get both blades in the water. 

In my recent poring through American Rowing articles from yesteryear, I found one by Shirwin Smith, who used to be the director of the Open Water Rowing Center in Sausalito, CA.  Her advice is sage, and not just for rowing in choppy water. 

She advocates the opposite of feeling like your handles are on a tabletop.  The tabletop idea is fine when the water is as flat as a tabletop, but when the surface of the water is dynamic, so must your handle height be.  “Instead of thinking your way through rough water,” she says, “feel your way through it.”  You can’t assume that the motion you make at the catch will be just this big every single stroke, because in rough water it won’t be.  Sometimes you’ll be squaring up right at the water, sometimes you’ll be what feels like a foot off the water as you square. And sometimes you’ll be both – one with each oar.  Especially at the catch you may feel like the handles are far apart in height.  But put your mind into your blades and sense them like you were taking handholds of water, and then pry yourself past those handholds. 

Even during the drive you’ll fare better if your hands and shoulders are relaxed (but not limp).  If you rock into a trough and your shoulders are stiff, you’ll be more likely to wash out and take an air stroke on one side.  But if you’re more relaxed and like a stiff bungee, then your blades will stay buried.  You’ll have to be sensitive to where the water is and adjust to it. 

The basic idea to take away is that the water determines where the blades are, the blades determine where the handles are, and the handles determine where your hands and shoulders will be.  Realize the essential randomness of life, and just go with it.   

On the recovery you can still use level hands (though also low hands) to return the hull to its balance point.  Make sure to brush the knuckles of your right hand to the heel of your left hand so that you won’t meet up with your fingernails and so that you find that level point.  If that doesn’t do the trick, think about pressing slightly with the heel in the higher side to return your hull to level. 

With all of these tricks, perhaps the most important one is just to stop caring about the chop.  You’ll hit waves.  You’ll get wet.  Your oars will get taken by the wind and your hull will rock around.  But it’s just not that big a deal.

If you want to row in chop as well as you do in flat water, you first have to become the sort of person who doesn’t care about rowing in chop.  And when you have become that person, you may stop wanting to row in flat water and discover the joys of open-water rowing. 

Catch Drills.

Before I begin explaining the drills I like to use for practicing blade placement, a disclaimer.

Many of these drills are going to involve rowing (at first) with very little boat speed, placing the blades in the water, and then pulling through only when you have determined that the blades are fully in the water.  Because you’ll be rowing slowly and pausing blades buried at the catch, you are going to feel unstable. So don’t do them on your first day out of the week – we all know that when they aren’t being rowed, singles get skinnier and more tippy.  Pick the flattest, most mirrorlike day you can, and bring all your patience with you.  And if you hate me for assigning you these drills, that’s okay.  I can take it. 

Arm circles for blade placement:  Start by working on a good blade trajectory.  Sit with one handle braced against your middriff, blade feathered, and leaning slightly on that blade.  With the other hand, row arm-only or arm-and-back only, square blade.  As you approach the catch on these short strokes, raise your handles so that your blade curves down toward the water and plunks in just at the furthest point in its trajectory.  The bottom edge of the blade should trace out a path like this:

Crucially, the bottom edge shouldn’t travel like this toward the water:

If it does, then you’ve missed water and shortened the arc of your stroke. 

Even if the blades do start to enter the water on the top trajectory, though, you have to be careful not to start the drive until they are completely buried.  If you don’t, you’ll start the stroke with a half-blade of water, which is the rowing equivalent of skidding.  Think about when you ride a bicycle.  If you’re on a sandy patch and you start pedaling, you have to pedal very gently at first, so that your tires stay in contact with the ground and push against it, instead of just spinning in place.  It’s the same thing at the catch.  You have to wait till the blades are enough so that they aren’t going to tear through the water half-buried.  You also have to push just enough right at first to keep a good grip on the water, not so hard that you rip through the water.  –But we can talk more about initiating the drive in a later post. 

The feeling I have when I place the blades is sometimes like I almost just stick them in the water when I’m ready to take the catch, even if it’s a catch at arms-and-back only.  But because my hands, arms, and shoulders aren’t rigid, it’s okay.  I’m all ready to make the turnaround from recovery to drive, I insert the blades into their imaginary slots, and am immediately ready to press spoon side of the blades up against the water. 

When you get good at placing one blade into the water, try doing the same thing with two at the same time, just at arms-and-body.  At first, try it with isolated strokes:  Place the blades in the water, pull through with no effort, and let the boat run until it’s out of speed or check the boat down before trying the next stroke.  When you feel that you’re able to consistently reproduce the top trajectory instead of the bottom one, you can try it with a little boat speed. 

When you add boat speed in the equation things become more complicated because you won’t be able to pause as long as you want with the blades buried unless you want to check the boat down.  And if you were to do this, your hands, arms, and shoulders would have to be rigid – and that’s exactly what we are trying to avoid at the catch. 

So when you practice blade placement at arms-and-body, be ready to sense the back-pressure of the water pushing the handles back at you.  Plunk the blades in the water nice and quick, feel how the shafts of the oars “loosen up” in the oarlocks (or even wiggle them back and forth once or twice), then pull through.  Plunk, wiggle, pull. 

It’s important to be pretty decisive when placing the blades in the water, or you’ll end up dipping the bottom edge of the blade in the water, sensing when it is buried, and then starting your drive with a quarter blade of water.  While that’s better than starting the drive with the blade completely out of the water, it’s not all that much better.  So be sure you’re getting the whole blade in the water before you go.  You don’t have to raise the hands fast or jam the blades in the water, just let the blades plunk in on their own like dropping a rock.  Practicing this at arms-and-body is good because you can more easily look at the blades as you put them in, monitoring their depth and correlating that with the feeling of the handles in your hands, before you initiate your drive.  While it’s possible to do this at a full-slide catch, it’s really hard at first and could result in flipping.  And then you’d really hate me. 

As you get better at sensing when the blades are buried, you can pull through with more and more pressure.  But if you’re new to this drill sequence, try it with zero pressure at first -- just go through the motions, don't really move the boat.  Once you’ve assured yourself that you can do it with little or no boat speed, you can easily move up to a paddle pressure.  But take the time to check first that you really can plunk and wiggle first before you pull. 

You can stay at arms-and-back while practicing the plunk-and-wiggle or plunk-then-pull until you get to full pressure if you want.  I like to do this because it’s so much easier to watch the blades and correlate the splash pattern, trajectory, and the feel with each other.  But some people prefer to move right to the slide portion of the recovery, and I think this has a merit as well.  Recalling my friend Kate’s “catch with your butt” dictum, it will be important to be able to create the correct placement timing and drive-initiation timing with the slide, not just the arms and hands. 

But once you introduce the slide into the equation, it does make things more difficult.  First of all, you’ll be in a tippier position, and that makes it SO much more tempting to jam the drive right away in an effort to relieve that tippiness.  If you have the opportunity to practice blade placement on the slide in a double with someone sitting out and balancing the boat for you, or to practice it in a learn-to-row single, take it.  You won’t regret it.  The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll discover you did really know how to do this after all, and then you can feel superior.  And if people tease you for rowing a tubby single, you can smile calmly as you row easily past th, watching them hack at the water. 

Regardless of in which boat you begin to practice blade placement on the slide, though, check the boat down almost to a stop between strokes at first.  Practice putting the blades in, waiting for the back-pressure of the water to signal “blades buried”, and then pushing.  That feeling, that patience, is the crux of what you’re working to develop here.  It’s a hard skill – I think perhaps the hardest one of the stroke – but it results in a big payoff.  When I get my catches right, I see an immediate 3- to 5-second improvement in my 500m splits.  That’s nothing to sneeze at. 

To recap a little:  start by practicing blade placement one arm at a time.  Then move to arms-and-body, checking it down between each stroke at first, then moving to zero pressure continuous arms-and-back rowing.  Keep hands, arms, and shoulders relaxed as you place the blades so that you can feel the water gently pushing the handles to you.  You can even use your lats to lock the blade in the water and press the shaft up against the pin.  This will have the effect of lowering your shoulders and rotating your elbows slightly down and to the sides.  It’s okay to take the catch like this, even though you might think your arms are bent and that’s a no-no.  It’s okay because your arms will stay like that through the first part of the drive; they won’t straighten out and make you lose connection. 

When blade has the right trajectory and you know what it feels like to place then pull, move to arms and body.  Plunk blade, wait for back-pressure, pull.  Check down.  Repeat.  As you become more practiced, don’t check down, but do use very little pressure.  Increase pressure as you become more used to the correct timing and waiting for the blades to tell you they are buried before you initiate the drive. 

Then move to quarter-slide or half-slide, using very little pressure at first and checking the boat down between strokes.  Leave out checking down the boat after you achieve the right drive timing, but still use zero pressure.  Take the pressure up gradually, but keep a very low rating to keep the boat speed low.  Always make sure the blades are fully buried before you press, by waiting for that back-pressure signal in your relaxed hands and shoulders. 

When your timing is stable, you can work up to doing this drill at full slide.  All the same caveats apply, but the one about increasing pressure exceptionally slowly is even more important here.  That’s because as you start imitating normal rowing, you’re going to more easily fall into your old motor habits.  So make sure that you are conscious of performing the motion correctly, even if it’s so deliberate that it’s awkward at first.  It will get better, but you don’t want to compress the amount of time you have to test that the blades are buried too much at first.  You can play with the rating later on; for now just increase boat speed with pressure and keep the rating below a 15. 

If you’re sitting waiting for someone to show up for pieces, you can try the drill my friend Aleks does.  He sits at three-quarter slide, squares his blades as he comes into the catch, and places his blades in the water right as his seat stops -- or stops his seat by putting the blades in the water.  Then he takes them right out again and goes back to three-quarter slide.  He does that over and over again, just practicing the placement and seat timing.  It’s an advanced drill, so maybe you want to wait until a hot day when you might not mind tipping over anyway. 

But if you row on a body of water you don’t want to fall into, you can try what I think are called “rustys”.  (I usually just call them "finish-to-catch drills").  You start at the finish, blades squared and buried.  Release the blades, feather, come up to the slide using your perfect recovery technique, and place the blades in the water just as your seat stops.  Wait a split second, then press your feet to the footboards and row through, letting the boat run afterward.  Check it down and repeat.  Again, the issue is going to be to practice the timing of placing the blades into their slots on the water just as the seat stops in the stern, and letting the blades slot completely into the water before starting the drive. 

Happy catching!

Catch as Catch Can.

You’ve been waiting patiently for the catch, and we’re finally there.  (Remember, on the recovery, at steady state, it should feel like it takes a long time to get to the catch).  Let’s start with a metaphor:  To help themselves imagine how to drop the blades in, some scullers like to think of there being a slot for each blade behind them, into which they will slip their blades as they row, without scraping the sides of the slots.  I’ve heard more than one coach use this image, and I think it’s a good one. 

But here’s the thing about the catch:  Ideally, your blades want to go into the water perfectly vertically.  This means that you can’t be pulling on the handles.  That would create a lot of frontsplash, and would signify that you wasted some of your slide on a half air stroke.  Dropping your blades in vertically means that you can’t push the blades into the water with stiff arms, either.  That would create a lot of backsplash, checking your boat down violently and probably making you tip.

So far, this probably makes sense to you, which is good.  But then you think about it a little more, and you realize, “Wait.  It’s fine to think of these blade slots being there to receive your blades, but the damned things are moving past you.  How in the name of all that is holy do you put your blades into them without using a little of your slide?” 

That is the secret of the catch, and it all starts with grip.  A relaxed grip will help your arms and shoulders be relaxed.  It is with these relaxed muscles of the shoulders and the hands that you will absorb the movement of the handles toward you as the blades bury themselves. 

Think of your biceps and triceps being taut, not tight; and in balance with each other.  You can feel what this is like, if you can’t imagine it, by pointing to something outside your window.  Most people don’t lock out their elbows when they point (unless they are gesticulating wildly, which isn’t what I am talking about).  When you point, you’re using just the minimum of energy with your arm muscles to extend your forearm.  That’s what you’ll do before the catch, too.  Some people even take the catch with their elbows slightly bent – this is all right, as long as they stay bent.  It can even help you lock in with your lats better.  But if your arms were to straighten out when you tried to apply pressure to the blade, it would mean you were missing the connection and just using your legs to push your arms straight. 

Your shoulder muscles should be taut but not tight at the catch as well.  They should act to stabilize the joint but not to “grab” right as you apply pressure.  I used to do this grabbing, possibly because I have very flexible shoulders, and my college coach (Mayrene Earle) used to hound me to have relaxed shoulders.  I think I took this too literally, because I would let my shoulders relax so much that I almost felt like my shoulders were coming out of joint.  Soon after, I started to have rotator cuff pain.  Luckily, I finally figured out that there is a happy medium when it comes to shoulder relaxation. 

So:  fully square blades enter the water as your seat stops.  If you’re rolling your wheels “uphill” and making sure your blades are squared before that last rotation of the wheels, you’ll be in the perfect position to place the blades in the water as your seat alights in the stern.  My friend Kate calls this “catching with your butt” – the idea that you don’t wait until your seat has stopped to place the blades, but begin to place them slightly before the wheels have stopped.  In fact, you might want to think of your wheels stopping because your blades have entered the water. 

Now comes the magic, which requires a small digression. 

If you sit relaxed in the boat on a flat day and place a squared blade in the water, the oar will be neutrally buoyant in the oarlock.  That is, the blade will float in the water and the loom of the oar won’t touch the sides of the oarlock, because you won’t be pulling or pushing on the handles, and the water will be supporting the blade.  You will be able to feel this buoyancy by wiggling the oars in the oarlocks – they will rattle back and forth because they won’t be pressed up against one of the sides of the oarlock.  Try it sometime when you’re stopped, after your drink of water.  And as long as your boat is stopped, try something else.  Drop one blade into the water, letting completely go of the handle.  The blade will fall into the water and then fall over onto its side, feathering itself. 

You can make clever use of these phenomena at the catch.  BUT:  They both require a very relaxed grip and upper body.  Coming up to the catch slowly will also greatly aid your ability to use these cues. 

Here’s how it goes:  Your blades are square, your upper body is motionless, and you’re just starting the last rotation of the wheels into the stern.  You slightly raise the handles to place the blades in their imaginary slots.  Since your boat is moving, it’s a good thing that you’re rolling up so slowly, because this means you can stop your seat the second you feel the blades touch the water. 

Your arms are hinging from the shoulders so that the blades go in without your trunk moving.  You drop the blades in the water relatively quickly, just by letting them fall, and allowing your grip to loosen up just a little in the process.  As the water catches the bottom edges of the blades, it enhances the blades’ natural tendency to feather themselves, and you will feel the blades wobble a little as they go in.  Your fingers are just firm enough on the handles to stabilize them so that the blades won’t feather, but will stay square. 

A split second later, you’ll feel the water pressing against the back of the blades and pushing the handles gently into your hands.  Let this happen. You can lower your shoulders and pull them in toward yourself slightly with your lats to absorb the movement.  Once you feel the oars “bump” just a little as you lock on, you can start your drive. 

The key here, and the hardest part, is having the patience to wait for that signal.  It’s also frankly difficult to time that micropause with your seat for just the amount of time it takes your blades to get covered.  At first, you’ll feel like you have to pause so long that you check the boat down.  This is okay, because the the drill sequence I will lay out in the next post will help you practice this skill, gradually moving toward normal timing. 

I’ll finish with an anecdote involving John Riley, famous among American Eastern Seaboard rowers and scullers for his, uh, curmudgeonly personality.  He was my coach in the late 90s.  We went out for a 1:1 session one morning in early April, when he taught me to do just what I’ve outlined above.  It took me a while to get what he was talking about, and I’m sure I only got about 30% of the idea.  After working with me for most of the hour, the last 30 minutes of which was just him riding alongside my boat calling out “Yes!” or “No!” as I did or did not take the catch correctly, he told me to pull over.  When I’d come to a stop, he drove his launch over to me and said, “I feel good about you as an athlete because you’re coachable.  I mean, you’re not Michael Jordan coachable, but you’re coachable.” 

Wow!  What praise!  I think I rowed back home above the water that morning. 

John was going to be away for the better part of a month, so I used the time to work on the catch.  I was going to be perfect when he got back.  I would succeed because I was hardworking, perceptive, and intelligent.  So I knew I would be able to master this new skill. 

I saw John on the water a few weeks later while I was going upstream and he downstream.  He liked to give all of his scullers mini lessons as they went by him, no matter who he was officially working with, so even though he was leading a session for the scullers of the boat club he was working at, he shouted over to me. 

“Hey!” he yelled. 

“You think you’re doing it?" 

"‘Cause you’re not!” 

It took me the entire season to master the catch.  I hope that you will be able to do it faster, but don’t beat up on yourself if you can’t.  Just keep at it. 

Almost There.

We’re almost to the catch.  Just one or two issues remain.  I’d like to recap what we discussed in the previous posts about the recovery and move on to blade placement.  We’ll undoubtedly spend a few posts talking about the catch, as it’s perhaps the most challenging part of the stroke to get right. 

We talked about recovery timing, and using a guideline of 1-2-3-4 (1=hands away, 2=body angle, 3=half slide, 4=blades in the water) to help lengthen the amount of time it takes you to roll up into the catch.  This past week, I was working on this with my friend Annette, and we came up with a nice variation on the counting theme that worked even better for her.  You might want to try it, too. 

Instead of thinking about the whole recovery, think instead about just the slide portion of the recovery.  Once you’re in your body angle position, give yourself a count of 1, 2, 3 to get to blades in the water.  Repeat as needed:  Body angle, 1, 2, 3.  Blades go into the water on “3”.  This variation can make you feel less robotic, and it still gets the idea of ratio across. 

It’s important to think about ratio in two ways:  First, and most obviously, is the idea that the ratio between time you spend on the drive and time you spend on the recovery should be around 1:2 (at steady state).  But it’s equally important to think of a ratio on the recovery between the time it takes you to get to the body angle position and the time it takes you to get from body angle to the catch.  This you can think of (again, at steady state) as being more like 2:3.  When you are getting it right, you’ll feel like you spend most of your time during the stroke in the body angle position – you just flick open on the drive and then flick right back into body angle for the recovery. 

I’ve also seen that, for many of the scullers I work with, the idea of relaxing their legs almost completely on the recovery and allowing just the pressure of the heels in the heel cups to draw the seat toward the foot stretchers creates an excellent ratio between the body-angle and the slide portion of the recovery.  It almost seems backward:  how can using your hamstrings to actively draw you into stern make the recovery more relaxed?  It happens because actively using your hamstrings regulates the speed at which you approach the catch.  Using them prevents your hamstrings from being uninvolved, and if they are uninvolved then you will tend to fall into the catch with no resistance whatsoever. 

Another friend, Marisa, had a breakthrough as she practiced this.  We had been talking about how coaches have told her for a long time that on the recovery you need to move into stern at the same speed as the boat moves through the water.  This was hard for her to gauge and it didn’t make sense to her.  But as we played around with drive/recovery ratio and body-angle/slide ratio, things began to fall into place.  It might have helped that we were rowing together on a nice quiet afternoon when we could hear the bubbles underneath the boat.  But all of a sudden she turned to me and said, “I get why you have to slow down as you approach the catch!  It’s because the boat is slowing down.”  This was an excellent insight, and one I hadn’t thought of before.  But it seems to work.  If you aren’t moving sternward faster than the hull is moving bow-ward, then you won’t have to counteract the movement of the hull scooting forward underneath you when you start the drive.  In other words, you won’t check the boat when you change directions. 

Well, we’ve spoken about what you do with your body as you approach the catch and practiced some drills to polish up this aspect of the recovery.  But we haven’t spoken yet about what you do with your blades.  And this is important, of course, because blade placement is half of an effective catch. 

So let’s talk about blade preparation. 

You know that you have to have your blades off the water so you have room to square up before placing the blades in the water.  But how high off the water?  Optimally, a blade-width off the water.  So that, when you square up, the bottom edge of your blade is right there, ready to drop into the water.  Of course, a lot of scullers don’t do this.  A lot of scullers have their blades on the water, and they have to lower the handles in order to have room to square up, and only then place the blades in the water. 

But that’s sooo much work. 

If you have trouble keeping your blades off the water, try one of the drills I recommended a long time ago:  Lazy Square.  This time, you’ll be thinking about the height of your handles as you keep those blades skimming across the water ALL THE WAY until the catch.  If they lift off the water just before you place them in the water, you’ll have something to work on.  If you alternate 10 Lazy Square with 10 regular rowing, then you'll more effectively integrate the optimal handle-height into your normal sculling. 

I occasionally see scullers who carry their blades very high off the water, 6 inches or more.  I think this is okay, as long as their blades go into the water in a way I’ll describe in a bit.  That is, as long as the blades are right at the surface of the water when you’re getting ready to put them in, I personally don’t care how high they are off the water before then.  In fact, I think that every sculler should develop the ability to intentionally vary the height of their blades off the water.  I used to have a coach who coached a group of women’s eights in the afternoons.  Every evening during my second row, we’d cross paths and he’d wake me.  Not intentionally, of course; he was driving a boat with a v-shaped hull that put up a large wake and no matter how careful he was every other boat on the water would bob up and down for a few strokes as he went by.  Since I couldn’t avoid these wakes, I turned them into a “pop quiz” for myself.  When I heard the sound of his engine, I’d know I had a few strokes where I would have to press my handles down especially far to get my blades up and over the waves.  At first I wobbled around and sometimes got stuck in a wave if I wobbled too far.  But eventually I got used to it and could row through the wake like a knife through butter.  And except for the occasional shot of water onto my kidneys, I was good with those pop quizzes. (Now that I'm a coach, I do sometimes intentionally wake my scullers -- precisely for the purpose of having them practice rowing in chop). 

So, now that you’ve practiced the Lazy Square and you’re used to carrying your handles at a height that keeps the blades about a blade-width off the water, we can talk about squaring up.  Again, we’re going to recall some of what we said about grip.  If you’re carrying the handles with your wrists bent, you’re going to have to flatten your wrists before the drive, and generally this means that you’re going to flatten them as you square up.  But think about what happens if you hold the handle in your hand, bend your wrist up, keep your forearm at a constant height, and then bend your wrist down.  The other end of the oar, the blade, flips up as your hand flips down. 

This is unfortunate, because flipping the blades up as you square is moving them in exactly the wrong direction.  You want the blades to go down toward the water, not up in the air. 

Luckily, you’ve been practicing the grip drills I listed earlier, so you now have the handles under the big knuckles on your hands, stabilizing them with your finger pads.  And your wrists are nice and flat.  So what you’ll do to square the blades up is roll your fingers down into your hands.  My friend Jenny compared this action to how you roll up the neck of a paper lunch bag.  You sort of curl your fingers down and into your hand when you do that, and the motion you use to square the blades up is similar. 

The most important part is that both your wrists and the handles stay at the same level when you’re doing this, all other things being equal.  If you want to, you can think of the isolated squaring motion as keeping the handles at a constant height, and your wrists rotating up and over them, as if you were trying to show someone off your stern the face of your wristwatch. 

Of course, all other things are not equal when you’re squaring up, because not only are you squaring the blades, you’re also getting ready to put them in the water.  You want to square up early enough so that they’re fully square before they enter the water, but not so early that you’re rowing square blades.  (Unless you want to row square blades, of course.)  So what you’ll do is square by curling the handle into your hand, and at the same time place the blades by lifting the handles.  When you place the blades, it’s by hinging your arms at the shoulder, not by opening from the hips or waist.  This can be difficult for some scullers, and will be its own topic in a post or two.

But for now, we’ll just concentrate on the square-and-lift feeling.  My old rowing friend Ted liked to compare this motion to how you open a door with a doorknob.  You turn the knob and push the door around in an arc at the same time, and the motion is a little like square-and-lift. 

This motion has to be timed perfectly with another event in the stroke.  You have to make sure that the squared blade goes into the water just as your seat stops in the stern.  That’s part of the magic of the catch, and we’ll discuss it next time. 

Recovery drills.

Drills to practice the various parts of the recovery abound.  I’ll start with some that help you practice the sequence of movements on the recovery; they will be familiar to many scullers, and you may feel that they are beyond you.  Try them anyway.  I’ll then move on to some home-grown drills, and these will be more challenging.  Try them, too. 

Drills for separating the different movements on the recovery take the form of pausing at different points on the recovery.  For example, you could pause at hands-away, making sure that your shoulders do not come forward.  How do you do that?  You start by sitting at the finish, blades flat on the water.  Then, move the handles away from your body.  Make a note of where the handles are on your legs or lap.  For example, if the handles are above the hem of your shorts when you sit at hands-away, then aim to achieve that point on every pause stroke.  You can also pause at arms-and-body, and at any point on the slide. 

One aspect of pausing on the slide that is particularly challenging is to avoid speeding out of the pause position and into the catch.  To help you with this, pick a nice flat day to do your pause drills, and just let your blades stay (feathered) on the water instead of trying to balance.  Then, you won’t be tempted by a wobbly boat to get to the catch as quickly as you can.  Instead, you can focus on the wheels of your seat, and rolling them at a nice even pace, or “uphill” so that they slow down as you approach the catch.

Another technique I have used successfully with scullers who are working on the recovery is “1-2-3-4”.  I let the sculler row steady state normally, and count “1, 2” on the drive in the cadence they’re rowing at.  On the drive, 1 is legs and 2 is swing.  In that same beat, I then count 1, 2, 3, 4 on the recovery.  On the recovery, 1 is arms-away, 2 is body angle (that’s the same thing as arms-and-body), 3 is half slide, and 4 is blades in the water at the catch.  If scullers are rushing, they might put their blades in the water when I count “3”.  I ride alongside scullers, calling “1, 2, 3, 4” on the recovery to help them calibrate their movements to the correct cadence.   

You can try this on your own, too.  When you do, you don’t have to be robotic about achieving the different positions on each number, though if it helps at first then please go ahead.  Instead, work to achieve a flowing, smooth kind of movement on the recovery.  Just make sure the recovery is long enough to allow the boat to move well, and make sure your movement into the stern is slow enough at the end that you aren’t going to push the boat sternward when you begin to drive. 

Another drill I like for getting to know every millimeter of the recovery is one I call “Super Slow.”  To do this, you row below 15 strokes per minute.  If you can achieve a rating of 12, good!.  The goal is NOT to pause, but to keep moving continuously, just in slow motion on the recovery.  (The drive will be almost as fast as it is at an 18 or 20, but it’s the recovery that really stretches out in time).  Again, don’t worry about set – just let your blades act as training wheels if you like.  The focus isn’t balance for this drill, it’s getting to know each and every point on the recovery.  What you’re trying to do is to make a detailed mental model of exactly how your body feels at each point on the recovery, especially that last half or quarter of the slide.  You want to feel as though you will never get to the catch, the slide is that long.  You can vary the drill by sending the hands away quickly, then slowing the handles down more and more as you approach the catch.  Either way, feel your heels pulling the foot stretcher to your seat as you gradually roll up. 

The final drill I use to help scullers avoid rushing is one I call “Lazy Square,” and it’s the most challenging.  Try it! and if you want to curse me, feel free.  During this drill, you will row square blades, but you will keep the bottom edge of the blades on the water at all times.  You will need to relax your grip, making your hands feel “rubbery” instead of stiff.  Their job will be only to stabilize the handles from turning in your hands as the blades drag across the water.  Your arms and shoulders will also have to be very relaxed, because you can’t stiff-arm the water, or you’ll find yourself slamming to a quick halt.  Instead, skim the blades lightly over the water.  You won’t be able to push the handles; your speed on the recovery will be determined by how slow you need to move the blades in order to avoid that horrible juddering feeling when your blades jam into the water.  But once you get the trick of it, you’ll also get the feeling of how your body needs to glide into the stern and alight at the catch end.  Again – a drill best saved for a perfectly flat day. 

Let me know how your like these drills.  Or if you have your own, I’d love to hear them too. 

How to practice.

The idea for this post came from an article I came across recently while looking for information on treatment of speech disorders caused by Parkinson’s Disease.  The article is “New Conceptualizations of Practice:  Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Concepts for Training,” by Richard Schmidt and Robert Bjork.   It appears in the book Disorders of Motor Speech: Assessment, Treatment, and Clinical Characterization, edited by Donald Robin, Kathryn Yorkston, and Davbid Beukelman.  (Brookes Publishing, 1996).  Naturally, the article is concerned with speech and language skills, but much of it is relevant to learning sculling.  In this post I will show how I think the results discussed in this article relate to coaching and to practicing technique.  As the authors say,

“ {The findings we discuss} are obtained from diverse research paradigms that employ several different verbal and motor paradigms…  Taken together, however, these finding suggest that certain conceptualizations about how and when to practice are at best incomplete, and at worst incorrect.  These findings also have some theoretical implications with respect to the processes involved in practice, particularly as they relate to the acquisition of real-world skills.”  (p. 4)

The general issue that the authors discuss is one which all you scullers will like, if you feel the sound of the coach’s launch makes your technique go to pot.  That is the issue of whether the conditions that result in the best performance during practice are the same that result in the best performance later on.  They are not, the authors say.  In fact, acquisition performance is an imperfect indicator of learning. 

There are certain criteria that a teacher of any sort uses to decide how effective the lesson was.  Among these are long-term retention, generalizability, and resistance to altered contexts.  And what research shows is that there are at least three kinds of situations where something about the learning stage actually decreases performance toward the end of practice, but results in better post-training performance (as measured by long-term retention, generalizability, and resistance to altered contexts).

This is especially interesting to me, because I very much want my scullers to perform well during their sessions with me.  I don’t want to praise them for poor performance, but I also don’t want them to feel as though they don’t get what I’m trying to teach them or that they are failing to acquire the skill.  In fact, I consider it the mark of a good coach to be able to adjust her teaching style to match the learning style of the sculler.  With the information from Schmidt and Bjork, I now want to be careful that, in doing so, I am not inadvertently reducing how well my scullers eventually learn the skills they want to acquire.  The information will also be interesting to those who self-coach.  It will tell all of us how we might best practice.   

First, how should you order the tasks in your practice session to maximize skill retention?  Two possibilities are “blocked practice” and “random practice”.  In blocked practice, you complete all trials for a given task before going on to the next one.  For example, if you were learning to type, blocked practice might involve working through all of the exercises that involve the left index finger’s movements on the top rowof letters before going on to the exercises that involve the left index finger’s movements on the second row of letters.  But in random practice, you do the same number of trials overall, just in an order such that the same task is never practiced on two trials in a row.  So you might work on top-row, left index finge;, then middle row, right index finger; the bottom row, left index finger, then top row, right – and so on.  Research that Schmidt and Bjork cite shows that random practice always resulted in better retention, even though it was also detrimental to performance during skill practice sessions. 

What seems to be the active effect is that random practice provides “forgetting time” for the learner during acquisition (thus the poorer performance during practice).  The need to continually work at retrieving the information on how to perform the action correctly seems to be the factor that actually enhances long-term retention.  In the words of the authors, “Information-processing activities that cause forgetting of the to-be-remembered information, and thus require practice at retrieving it again on a subsequent trial, are beneficial for retention.”  (p. 13).

Clearly, there are types of interruptions that cause forgetting and do not aid in long-term retention (like that annoying noise your rigger makes every time you feather).  But if the practice schedule creates the need for kinds of information processing that are also needed for retention (like remembering the skill), then it will be a good schedule.  I think this practice in remembering the skill is what I have found so useful for myself and the scullers I work with.  If you look back at the drill sequences I list, though they all concern a certain general topic, the motor tasks each one demands differ.  That is, taking your blades out of the water at arms-and-back only differs in some important respects from taking them out at full-slide.  So introducing the perturbation of adding in more of the stroke, while directing the scullers to focus back on the release (or the catch, or what-have-you) after each change, may be very helpful. I wonder, however, whether mixing up the drills a little more may be more effective.  That is, instead of practicing the release at arms-and-body, then half-slide, then full slide, might it be better over the long term to practice it at half-slide, then arms-and-body, then full slide?  Or in some other order? 

A second issue is the nature and frequency of feedback during acquisition.  I had thought that the more immediate feedback was, the more frequent it was, and the more useful it was in changing the sculler’s behavior in the moment, the better.  But Schmidt and Bjork cite research involving a complex task, where feedback was given after each trial, after each 5 trials, or after each 15.  You may already have guessed that during practice, the longer the time the learners had to wait for feedback, the more errors they made.  But when delayed retention was measured, it was the “after-every-15” learners who made the fewest errors.  Similarly, learners who got feedback that was faded over the course of the practice session made more errors during those sessions than learners who got feedback on every trial.  But they performed better on post-training retention test, even though they only got half as much feedback. 

Again, what seems to matter here is that the expanded spacing of feedback allows time for forgetting – and it is really the need to retrieve the skill after forgetting that builds the long-term representation of the skill in the mind. 

What this result tells me is that immediate corrective feedback, which I had felt was vital to getting a sculler to perform a certain movement accurately, may only be useful in the beginning of a session.  Typically, I structure one-on-one sessions with explanation and drills for the first half, followed by “alone time” – time for the sculler to work out on his or her own how to perform the movement without me saying much.  I will sometimes provide reminders for the sculler, either when I see their technique reverting, or after some kind of distracting event like having to steer around an obstacle.  In fact, I often recommend to scullers to tie their concentrating on a certain skill to something like bridges.  The lower Charles, where I most often coach, is blessed with many bridges and turns.  When I was training, I used the bridges as reminders to bring my mind back to the technical issue I was working on that day.  I had to start looking over my shoulder more frequently and steering more as I approached a bridge, but as soon as I was done steering for the time being and was in a bit of a straightaway, I returned to the issue at hand.  Now, I recommend the same to the scullers I work with. 

The final issue that Schmidt and Bjork discuss is “induced variability” – the idea that practicing (say) just throwing a beanbag at a target 3 feet away isn’t necessarily the best way to get good at throwing beanbags at targets 3 feet away.  Instead, throwing them at targets 2 feet away and 4 feet away give better results.  This was true in the experiments Schmidt and Bjork discuss even though the 2-feet/4-feet group never practiced on targets 3 feet away. 

As the authors say, “These experiments suggest that variable practice alters the practice context, forcing a change in behavior from trial to trial and encouraging additional information-processing activities about the lawful relationships among the task variants.”  (p. 18)  In other words, if you must perform essentially the same task in a variety of contexts, you will be better at learning what the important aspects of the task are.  But you probably won’t do as well at the task while you're still figuring that out. 

I don’t know whether the drills I like to use in teaching are enough of a variation in context to induce this kind of learning.  But perhaps it's relevant that I do feel that it is important to be able to do drills well.  A sculler once asked me, “Who cares whether I can do square blades?  You don’t race square blades.”  My feeling was that it’s true that you don’t race square blades.  But if rowing square blades helps you learn more about what releasing the blade from the water involves, then it helps you.  It makes your mental model of the release that much more detailed, and it gives you that much more ability to adjust your stroke to the immediate demands of the conditions you are rowing in. 

Here’s another metaphor:  we’ve all been in boats that just aren’t rigged right for us. While I wouldn’t advocate rowing in poorly-rigged boats as a way of improving your sculling in general, it is also true that the best scullers can make even non-optimally rigged boats move well.  Switching boats means that you have to take some time to figure out how that boat wants to be rowed, and until you do it can feel very annoying.  But maybe having to figure it out isn’t a bad thing, in moderation. 

I’ll close with a quote from Schmidt and Bjork: 

“If certain acquisition conditions force the learner to engage in processes that are also critical for test performance, then those conditions will be judged as effective for learning (because they facilitate test performance), even though they may exhibit different superficial conditions.  Also, those conditions that maximize learning may not be very effective for performance during the acquisition phase, as they provide various “difficulties” for the learners…  In other words, these conditions can be considered as effective for learning because they prepare the learner for the processing that will be required at testing.”  (p. 20) 

So here’s what I’m going to be doing on Sunday morning.  I’m going to try a variety of different drills centering on the same basic issue.  I’m going to give relatively frequent feedback at first, and then I’m going to taper it off.  And I’m going to make my scullers practice their new skills in lots of different situations, like at different ratings that I call out randomly.  I’m going to keep perturbing my scullers. 

Finessing the finish

Forgive the delay in the arrival of new material.  I plead "doctoral" -- just had a meeting this morning with my advisor, and that always means I get a day or two off. 

...We’re not done talking about the finish yet, not by a fair length.  This time, I’d like to move from the focus on what the hands and blades do to what other parts of your body do just before and after the release.  It will be a fairly personal and eclectic post, in the sense that I can really only give information to you about what my body does – but there are lots of little pieces of information to talk about.  The details I’ll be discussing are so tiny and subtle that they are not easy to see in others, but so clear to feel in onself.  Perhaps other scullers do things differently, and in that case I will be anxious to hear from those people about what they do. 

I am also still in the process of investigating the issue of blade trajectory before the release.  Reader Mark pointed out some very useful online video, and Reader Bob told me about some interesting DVDs that I may purchase.  In addition to these sources, I plan to grill the elite coaches and athletes I know to see what their opinions are.  A summary will be forthcoming once I feel it is complete. 

Now, when I think of the end of the drive and the turnaround at the finish [see previous post "Feathering and the finish" for my informal definition of “finish”] the image that comes to mind is that of a talented gymnast performing an advanced move.  Imagine a vaulter, for example. When he has finished his vault, he lands gracefully and precisely on the mat, sticking his landing most professionally.  The last movement he makes is to finish the move, and this he does with a flourish of his hands. 

Think particularly of his body as he does this.  He holds himself almost suspended, muscles taut but not tight, stabilizing himself as his hands make their precise flourish.  His hand movements are highly stylized for aesthetic appeal, but the way that the rest of his body supports those movements is eminently functional.  He holds himself erect and still so that the flourish is highlighted. 

That's the type of posture that I aim for around the release: holding my body supported to allow the small, delicate movement of extracting the blades from the water to operate with precision.  My core is taut so that I feel suspended by my abdominal muscles.  After I have finished the swing back into bow during the drive, I hold myself steady in that position to allow my abdomen to function as a reflecting board of sorts when my handles reach my body.  I sometimes see scullers whose bodies continue to move back toward the bow as their hands come toward their bodies, allowing the finish to become soft and to dissipate the energy of the handles instead of sending it back out through the blades.  A different, but equally ineffective, move at the finish is to allow the waist to curve so that the handles are absorbed into the midsection.

After I set my back to its layback position, I lever my arms in off of my tautened core.  Shoulders are low, elbows are out to the sides and slightly higher than the shafts of the oars.  This allows the hands to follow the arcs of the handles “for free” – in other words, because the elbows are out to your sides, simply extending the elbow joints naturally moves the hands in an arc anyway.  Your hands will naturally rotate slightly on the handles so that the wrists can stay in a flat, relaxed position; the knuckles can be diagonal to your body instead of facing the stern. 

The sensation of drawing the handles toward yourself before the finish is not like it is on an erg.  The erg handle only goes straight back and forth, while the oar handles move in arcs.  Other coaches have likened the arms-only movement to that of pulling open a bag of potato chips:  Your elbows go out to the sides as you pull the two layers of plastic apart.  I like this metaphor, though it usually makes me hungry. Sometimes coaches describe the feeling of your abdomen tautening as your handles approach it as feeling like you are pulling yourself to your handles rather than pulling the handles to you.  Frank Cunningham says this is one of the two examples of “countermotion” during the stroke.  He is referring to the fact that the body should not continue to move into bow as the handles come to the body, but should feel almost like it is beginning to move toward stern slightly before the hands have finished.   In his words:

"The first {example of countermotion} appears just as the handles approach the body.  The stroke is completed and the body returned without any consequent interruption in the speed of the boat.  To accomplish this, draw your handles home with the shoulders, squeezing your shoulder blades together to arrest your back at the end of the swing.  Your back then travels through the shoulders on the way out of bow."  (p. 84, The Sculler at Ease) 

While I lever my arms in against my body, I like to stabilize my entire self with my legs and feet.  What the feet do isn’t commonly discussed in sculling, perhaps because different people use their feet differently.  In mid-drive, I spring off the balls of my feet in order to give myself the longest stroke possible.  I have heard others say that they feel this is not efficient – they ask, “Would you stand on your toes while you do a squat?”  I disagree, however, that this is a relevant counterexample.  First of all, when I squat, the amount of force I need to generate is much larger than what I need to generate in sculling, even during a race.  (If it were not, I would only be able to row five or ten strokes per race – then I’d have to rest a few minutes before taking up the next five or ten strokes.)  Second of all, Olympic weightlifting athletes do indeed come up on their toes when they clean or snatch the heaviest weights they can manage.  I feel this maneuver in sculling allows me a long stroke, and keeping my legs taut until I’m on the hands-away and my blades are feathered is the equivalent of the gymnast’s finish on his move. 

To pick up a thread from previous posts on the finish, let’s think about how to keep the blades buried as the arms finish off the stroke.  Just as the release is made, in part, by the forearms rotating down from the elbows, so the blades can be kept buried by ever so slightly rotating the forearms up from the elbows.  The sensation isn’t one of using very many muscles.  Instead, you may feel just a little pressure on the pads of your fingers as you draw the handles around the arc and into your body.  If you haven’t done this before, and are used to washing out, you may feel as though you have to lift up and then out slightly before the finish.  One of my scullers thought it felt like the handles had to go up and over a lip before she could pop them down to initiate the release. 

My mention of how I like to use my abdomen as a reflecting board may suggest to you that I to have the handles fairly close to me at the release.  I do like them about 6 inches apart, with my thumb knuckles on the curve of my ribs.  I think that the stabilization my thumbs receive by resting slightly against my ribs as I extract and feather the blades helps the release feel more stable.  However, I see many scullers who prefer to release the blades when the handles are more to their sides, or even slightly in front of their bodies.  I confess that I am slightly envious of their ability to maintain the set of the boat when the handles are unstabilized like this.  But perhaps this is because of my very square-feeling release, whose tradeoff very well may be that it decreases boat stability. 

As mentioned, a taut abdomen reflects the handles’ speed instead of absorbing it.  A former coach of mine, Jordan (Datsi) Balchev, used to say this in his Bulgarian accent:  “Shove da wator!”  I love the feeling of shoving the water away from me as I come into the finish, feeling my oars almost shiver with the energy traveling through the handles to the blades to give them that one last flick. 

Finessing the finish also means that I use how and when I release the blades from the water to adjust the set of the boat.  If the boat is listing slightly to port, say, as I come into the finish, I allow the starboard blade to maintain its gentle grip on the water just a shade longer than usual, hoping to pull the boat slightly back down to startboard to right itself.  Done with discretion and without tight muscles, this kind of fine adjustment can damp out a lot of wobbliness in a boat, especially if you are rowing bow seat in a team boat.  In fact, since bow seat in a team boat is farthest from the fin, this person has the most leverage in turning and setting the boat.  Thus, bow seat in a double or quad has the most effect on and the most responsibility for the set of the boat.

This, in fact, is part of why I decided to start my blog at the back end, as it were, instead of some other place.  The finish is the source of so much of how the boat sets that I often spend more time working on it with scullers (scullers with whom I have long-term relationships) than other parts.  If you can get your finish polished and efficient, so many other parts of the stroke will feel much easier. I hope these posts help.    

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.

Feathering and the finish

We’ve talked about grip, and we’ve done drills to improve the grip.  Now, let’s talk in more detail about what’s traditionally called “The Finish.” 

The finish is the part of the stroke where you take your oars out of the water.  For this reason and because the stroke really is a continuous cycle, some coaches call it “the release.”  It’s also called “the back end,” to remind you of your body position.  I use all of these terms when coaching, but I use “the release” to mean the interval of time when the blades come out of the water and “the finish” to mean generally the back-end turnaround. 

The release is a very important time during the stroke.  If not accomplished quickly and carefully, you can really slow yourself down and make boat feel tippier than it already is.  Extracting the blades from the water is accomplished both by relaxing and by active motion.  It is the source of many “errors” – motions, which, though inefficient in terms of boat speed, do attempt to solve certain difficulties inherent in taking the blades out of the water.  The release proper is also intimately connected with the action of feathering the blades, though the two are best thought of as  separate actions with slightly different timecourses. 

First, let’s review the actions in the square-blades release.  We know that the blades must stay fully buried until the handles run out of room; that is, until your thumb knuckles reach your body. We also know that the wrists should be perfectly flat while the blades are coming out of the water, and that extraction is begun by weighting the hands on the handles more heavily.  When the blades are out of the water, the hands may begin moving away from the body to begin the recovery. 

Now, let’s examine what happens when you feather the oars.  The feathering process begins when “most” of the blade is out of the water.  It ends when the oar has rotated 90º and is resting on one of the flat sides of its collar.  The action of feathering the blades does make it easier to get them out of the water, but it is not intended solely to aid in the release of the blade from the water.  Feathering also makes it easier to carry the oar above the water on the recovery.

Optimally, feathering requires very little effort.  Once the oar has been tipped onto the corner of its collar, it will fall over on its own.  Some people accomplish this tipping by rolling the end of the handle with their thumbs; these digitally gifted individuals are blessed with long fingers and have more leverage with which to accomplish this maneuver than I do.  I, on the other hand, need to get the oar to its tipping point by using my wrists – but then I stop using my wrists by flexing my hands and return them to their flat position just before the hands-away. 

Notice that I haven’t mentioned the fingers.  That’s because they really aren’t all that important at the finish.  In fact, it is possible to accomplish the finish (and most of the recovery) with the fingers off the handles entirely.  Taking the blades out of the water requires only deflection of the handles downward, and fingers don’t make this happen.  And feathering requires only tipping the oar.  Though fingers are useful in this action, they aren’t where the main action is here either.  The upshot of all of this is that if you are feathering by gripping the handles and turning them as if you were revving a motorcycle, you’re working too hard.  You’re also predisposing yourself to repetitive motion injuries on the nerves in your wrists. 

Taking the blades out of the water and feathering them happen in very close proximity to each other, but not quite at the same time.  In fact, feathering happens after the blades begin coming out of the water.  The release has to begin with blades squared up, or you will be finishing off your stroke with angled blades – and they are much less efficient propulsion devices than squared blades. Finally, if simply feathering the oar is your sole way of getting it out of the water, this means you had to finish your stroke with a blade that was at least halfway out of the water to begin with. 

To say the same thing a different way:

Part of what makes it easier to extract a feathered blade is that you don’t have to move as quickly.  (The other part is your tummy – if it is like mine, it sticks out and the handles can get stuck in it at the finish).  When you extract a fully square blade, you have to do it fast enough to get the whole blade out of the water before your boat moves too far past where the blade was anchored.  If you don’t, your oar will get stuck in the water and you will feel like you’ve just stopped the boat.  (You have).  Angling the blade before extracting it doesn’t create that juddering feeling of checking the boat down, but still allows the blade to drag through the water.  You’re still checking the boat down, just not as dramatically. 

And if, when you feather those angled oars, your blades end up completely out of the water, that means that you must have been finishing off your stroke with a blade that was only half buried to begin with.  Think about it:  If you feather a completely buried oar, you get a completely buried, feathered oar.  If you feather an oar that ends up completely out of the water, a little more than half of the blade must have been above the surface.  And this means that you were rowing with only a half-blade. 

Finishing off your stroke with angled blades, then, results in a few difficulties.  First, in order to get your blades into a position where they’ll be out of the water just by being feathered, you had to wash out.  Also, as you were leisurely finishing off your stroke with an angled blade, it was dragging through the water and eating up your hard-won boat speed. 

Solving these problems leads us to a difficult situation.  In order to get the most propulsion out of the blades, they must be fully perpendicular to the water while they are in the water.  But they also have to come out of the water very, very quickly or they will slow the boat down.  This means that the motion downward of the handles that pops the blades out of the water has to be an incredibly rapid one. 

In fact, it is easier to extract a half-feathered blade than it is to extract a square blade.  In response to an earlier post, reader Caustic asks:  “Why, exactly, is the square blade good at allowing a strong finish? By having to clear a full blade from the water, the rower is forced to lower their handles a corresponding amount - typically 3-4 inches for the 8-ish inches of blade that needs to exit the water. This means that there must be that clearance in front of their body to allow this range of motion. However, if they are pulling all the way to their body (hence the brushing of the thumbs), this clearance does not exist.  However, if they feather & push away at the same time, this problem is eliminated.” 

I think the answer is actually contained in the last sentence:  If you feather and push away (not down) at the same time, you don’t have to worry about taking the whole blade out of the water at once. The secret is in the timing and in the realization that, in fact, the entire blade need not come out of the water before the feathering motion starts.  To describe the whole process in slow motion:

Your blades are square as you finish off your stroke with arms only. 
When the thumbs reach the shirt you pop the handles down and the blades out.
When about ½ of each blade is extracted, you tip the handles to start feathering.
At about the same time, you flex your hands so that your wrists go flat. 
This further pushes the handles down just a bit without lowering the hands any more. 
And maybe just a fraction of a second later, you push the handles away. 

To do all this efficiently, it helps immensely to achieve the right grip – with your elbows out to the sides, your wrists should be completely flat as you deflect the handles down.  This gives you much more room to make that downward motion than if your wrists were cocked.  Second, it helps to have your oarlocks rigged high enough so that you have enough room to completely extract the blades at square-blades without your handles touching your lap (or tummy).

In sum, though the feathering motion helps you extract the blades from the water, it does not help to finish off the drive.  If you are rowing correctly, you will almost run out of room to row just before you pop the handles down.  At this point, you can angle the blades out of the water without worrying that you will be rowing with angled blades.  The hand-flex completes the “push-down” motion of the handles without changing the height of the hands proper, and it also allows the blade to finish falling over into the feathered position. 

The next post will be a direct response to some of the comments so far.  In the post after that, I’ll describe some drills that will help you accomplish a clean, quick release.  In the meantime, I look forward to reading more of your challenging questions.

Grip Drills

In the last post, I described the proper way to hold the handles.  In this one, I’ll talk about some ways you can coach yourself to a better grip. 

As usual, beginning to discuss one issue in rowing brings up others which deserve comment.  This time, it’s the value of self-coaching.  The vast majority of the strokes you take will be without a coach, so to make sure that you are using proper technique you must develop the ability to tell whether you are rowing correctly.  Teaching self-monitoring to my scullers is one of my main aims as a coach.  I do this by giving them what I call “sensory cues” to help in the self-monitoring process.  As I describe the drills to come, I will also tell you what to look for so that you will be able to tell whether you are rowing correctly.  Your job will be to make those details happen. 

For grip, one of the best drills is simply to start from a dead stop, sitting at arms-away with your blades squared and buried.  As mentioned last time, in this position the back of your hand should be parallel to the water and the wedding-ring part of your hand should be perpendicular to it, facing straight ahead. 

[Aside:  In this position, your hands shouldn’t be one right over the top of the other.  Instead, the knuckles of your right hand should brush the heel of your left hand.  Staggering the hands like this has two important advantages.  First, it keeps your right knuckles away from your left fingernails so you are less likely to gouge yourself.  The second reason has to do with how most boats are rigged in North America. 

Oar handles overlap with each other, so riggers were faced with the choice of which handle should go over the other.  In North America, the left oarlock is generally rigged about a centimeter higher higher than the right one.  However, if your hands are exactly one on top of the other, the difference in height between the two handles will then be greater than the difference in height of the oarlocks, and your boat will tend to list to port on the recovery.  To avoid listing, stagger the hands slightly so that your right knuckles brush the heel of your left hand.  This allows the handles to be more nearly a centimeter apart in height and improves your set considerably.]

Continue with your drill:  Very, very lightly, so that you don’t build up any boat speed, bring the handles to your body.  Your elbows should be out to the sides as if they were akimbo.  Just as there was a nice gradual diagonal line down from shoulders to elbows to wrists to knuckles at the hands-away position, so at the finish position should there also be a diagonal line from elbows to knuckles.  As I sit at the finish, squared and buried, I often notice how my forearms “reflect” the oar shafts.  I mean that my forearms are roughly at the same height as the shafts of the oar (not lower) and that they form a nice “v” with the shafts of the oar. 

In this position (at the finish, squared and buried), the knuckles of your thumbs should be against your shirt (optimally about 4”-6” apart, but this is the subject of a future post).  Your wrists should still be flat.  Crucially, the oars should be fully buried.  This means that they should be all the way under water, with about an inch of water over the top edge of the blade.  Many rowers wash out at the finish, meaning that they allow the blades to climb out of the water during the arms-only portion of the drive, so that in effect they are finishing off the stroke using only half a blade.  Right now the important piece to remember is to keep the blades buried until your handles run out of room and your hands brush your shirt.  You can tell whether you are doing this simply by looking at your blades as you finish off the stroke.  If you see the top edge of the blade peek out of the water, use a little pressure on the pads of your fingers against the bottom edge of the handles to keep the blades buried. 

Here is where the new grip really begins to show off.  In order to take the blades out of the water, all you need to do is to relax your arms from the elbow down.  Think about making your hands weigh more, while your elbows maintain their akimbo position.  When you do this, your handles will pop down and your blades will come out.  Here’s the second drill to try:  with your excellent grip, wrists perfectly flat, just bob the oars in and out of the water.  Feel how the release can now be accomplished by relaxing the forearms, not by pulling or pushing the handles down.  Feel how low and relaxed the shoulders are.  And feel how your elbows stay where they are, as if they were resting on the edges of two conveniently located tables. 

Take a minute to appreciate the beauty of this maneuver.  You release the blades from the water by relaxing.  Imagine:  You’ve now learned how to accomplish one of the most important parts of the stroke by doing less.  You’ve taken advantage of your own body’s biomechanics to make the release a natural, easy, almost effortless movement.

A third, related drill:  Now sit at arms-away, this time with your blades flat on the water.  With the pressure point on the palm side of your hand in contact with the handles, press down to raise the blades from the water.  Lift your fingers up so that they aren't even touching the handle.  Remember:  flat hands, flat wrists. 

The fourth drill is to row arms and body only, square blades, with the new grip you are developing.  But make sure that the blades are fully square all the time – that you’re not sneaking the blades out halfway feathered.  If you are doing this, it means that you are bending your wrists at the release.  The oars should rest continuously on one of the flat sides of their collars. 

As you row arms-and-back, square blades, you will have to make the relaxation maneuver of getting your blades out of the water a quicker motion.  This will be even more true as the boat speed increases, as you will have less time to extract the blades.  Watch your blades to make sure that they are buried all the way until your thumbs touch your body.  Then quickly pop the blades out, deflecting the handles downward by relaxing the forearms.  Sometimes this is actually easier if you pull a little harder – it will create a pocket of low pressure behind the blade, which makes the blade easier to extract. 

When you feel ready, increase the pressure.  You are still at row arms-and-back only, square blades.  Feel how your arms make the release more quickly as the boat speed increases.  Row ¾ pressure, arms and back only, square blades, for 10 or 20 strokes, making the release as clean and quick as possible.  Then return to paddle pressure or steady state. 

Now, add in some legs:  Row half-slide.  After each change in pressure or length of stroke, look at your blades to make sure they are staying buried until the last possible moment.  Check your wrists to make sure that they are flat the whole time.  Make sure that the oars are resting fully on one of the flat sides of the collars as you row.  Because you no longer need to squeeze with your fingers to hold the oars, if the oars brush the water on the recovery, they will angle slightly and skim over the surface of the water.  They won’t jam into the water and stop the boat with a juddering motion. 

This is another advantage of the new grip you are developing:  relaxed fingers.  Because it is the weight of your hands and arms that controls the handle height, your fingers are free to cup the handle without squeezing it.  And that means – again – less effort for you.  It also means that square blades is becoming a less painful drill.  Because your hands are more relaxed, the oar will skim over the surface, not jam into it. 

As you feel comfortable, add in full slide.  Check to see that your blades are still fully buried until your handles get to your shirt.  The release motion may feel very deliberate and “square” in comparison to your previous release, if you were letting the handles sneak down into your lap to get the blades out.  It’s okay for the release to feel “bigger” until you get used to it.  The crucial things are that when your blades are in the water, they are fully in the water; and that your wrists are flat the whole time you are rowing square blades. 

A drill to make sure you're not squeezing too much with your fingers:  Playing the Piano.  Row on the feather, nice and light, and lift your fingers up off the handles on the recovery.  Maintain contact with the handles using your thumbs (press the oars into the oarlocks) and the pressure point of your hands. 

Finally, a very challenging drill I call "Lazy Square". Pick a nice flat day for this one.  Row square blades, but drag the lower edge of the blade on the water at all times during the recovery.  If you're gripping too much, this will be almost impossible.  To make it possible, use your fingers on the handles very, very gently -- just enough to prevent the oars from tipping over and feathering, but not so much that they resist the force of the water's surface to slightly angle them.   

Before signing off, I’ll summarize the drills and their progression.

1. Sit at arms-away, blades squared and buried.  Wedding ring forward, back of hand facing up. 
2. Move handles to finish position, blades squared and buried.  Elbows akimbo, wrists flat, thumb knuckles against shirt. 
3. Bob square blades in and out of the water by relaxing arms. 
4. Lift feathered blades off the water by pressing down on the pressure point.  Lift fingers off handles. 
5. Row arms-only or, better, arms-and-back only, square blades.  Wrists perfectly flat at all times.  Blades under water until thumbs brush shirt.  Deflect handles down quickly to get blades out cleanly.
6. Add a little pressure at arms-and-back only to feel how the release must speed up to accommodate.  Check wrists, elbows, blades. 
7. Return to paddle pressure, arms-and-back. 
8. Add half-slide.  Monitor wrists, elbows, blades.
9. Add full slide.  Monitor the three details as before.
10. Play the piano:  row on the feather, but lift your fingers off the handles on the recovery. 
11. The Lazy Square, for calm days only.  Row square blades, dragging the bottom edge of the blades on the water through the whole recovery.  Relax grip to allow handles to twist and blades to angle slightly.   

Next time:  Feathering and the finish. 

Get a Grip

In the inaugural issue of my periodic contribution to writing about sculling, I’d like to talk about grip.  As important an issue as it is, I used to be very reluctant to change a person’s way of holding the oar, because even for very skilled scullers a change like this can feel very disorienting for a time.  However, I believe the end results are worth the effort it will take to make the adjustment. 

First of all, let’s talk about why a proper grip is important.  Because the muscles in the forearms and hands are smaller than, say, your quads, these muscles fatigue much more quickly than larger ones.  They are thus the weakest link in the chain from you to the water.  But they are also how your body connects with your work.  Careful attention to how and how much these muscles are working is crucial for attaining relaxed, graceful rowing and for ensuring that as much as possible of your force transfers to the blades. 

When I run my indoor “Grip Clinic” using an erg, two oar stands, and a pair of sculling oars, the first thing I do is to put a piece of packing tape on the handle of one oar and color it with a water-soluble marker.  Then I take hold of the handle.  As you’d expect, the wet ink stains my hand slightly.  I use this to illustrate where the pressure points of the handle are on my hand.  If you look at your palm, you will see that there is a region of soft flesh between the roots of your fingers and the two roughly horizontal lines going across your palm.  This part of your palm is directly across from where your big knuckles are on the back of your hand.  It is this region that is most closely in contact with the top of the handle.

When you hold your handles correctly, the main weight of your arm rests on the part of your hand I just described.  The index finger should be close enough to the end of the handle that none of the grip is visible between your hand and thumb.  This way, you ensure that you are using the maximum leverage of your oar.  The thumb touches the end of the handle, pressing slightly outward to keep the oar’s collar butted up against the oarlock.  The fingers curl under the handle, but do not grip it tightly. 

On the drive, the part of your fingers where a wedding ring would be should face directly forward.  Your big knuckles should face forward, not up.  If they do face up, you will need to grip with your forearm to control the handle.  On the other hand, if your wedding ring faces forward, it is the weight of your arm that controls the handle.  This concept is the key to an efficient grip.  We’ll talk about this more in a bit. 
Here is a good way to attain this grip.  Sit at arms-away with blades squared and buried.  Adjust your hands so that your wedding ring is facing forward and the back of your hand, not your knuckles, is facing up.  There should be a slight diagonal line down from your shoulder to your wrist to your knuckles.  The wrist should be flat, as flat as if you had taped a tongue depressor to the back of your wrist. 

On the recovery, the fingers should not have to grip the oar handle, though they will generally be touching it.  Their job on the recovery is only to stabilize the oar so that it doesn’t twist or rotate in your hand.  Your fingers should be relaxed enough (at least when it is flat out) so that you could lift them off the handle entirely on the hands-away.  This is because you are connected with the handle by the roots of your fingers (exerting downward pressure) and by your thumbs (exerting outward pressure). Wrists should be flat, so that the heel of your hand does not touch the handle. 

On the drive, the fingers are curled under the handle and hanging on but not squeezing.  It is as if the fingers are cupping, rather than clenching, the handle.  As you bring the handles toward the body, elbows go out to the sides as they do when you stand with your hands on your hips.  Shoulders are low and relaxed.  Because the handles go around in an arc, so will your hands – and they should naturally rotate slightly on the handles to accommodate. 

Now we come to one of the magic parts of the stroke:  the release.  We will talk in more detail about the release in a future post, but for right know what you need to know is that you do not need to adjust your grip to release the blades from the water and feather them for the recovery.  There are three events that happen, in very quick succession, to accomplish the change from drive to recovery.  First, the hands reach the body.  Optimally, they are about 4”-6” apart, with your thumb knuckles grazing your shirt approximately at the level of a heart rate monitor strap.  The blades are fully underwater at this point.  Second, when the hands sense that they are out of room to continue the stroke, the arms relax from the elbow down so that the weight of the hands quickly pops the blades out of the water. Finally, the wrists or thumbs begin the feathering motion. 

The second of these events is most important to understand.  Because the wrists are flat and the elbows are out from, not behind, the body; and because the main point of contact between you and the oar is the pad near the roots of your fingers, you do not need to do anything active to take the blades from the water.  Instead, you just need to relax.  Think of it not as pushing the handles down, but as letting your hands weigh more heavily on the handles.  You are simply allowing the weight of your hands and forearms to deflect the path of the handles from horizontal to vertical. 

Once your blades are about three quarters of the way extracted, you can start the feathering process.  We'll discuss this more soon, but for right realize that after feathering, the wrists immediately flatten out – while your hands are still very close to your body – so that you gain control of the handles again using the weight of your arms and not the muscles of your forearms.  The hand flexes, the heel of the hand pops up from the handle, and the wrists flatten.  Then the hands begin their trajectory away from the body, and we’re on the recovery again, with perfectly flat wrists. 

Next time, we’ll learn about some cues for you to look at to make sure you’re doing all this correctly, and for some drills to help you learn the right motions.