Re: OK, is this a daft question ... what do you DO to balance a single?

On Feb 2, 3:48 pm, Henry Law <n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm going to confess that this is a question that has been bothering me
since I emerged from the splashy melée of my novice days and I've never
had a satisfactory answer to it. Maybe I'm the only oarsman in the
whole world who doesn't know the answer, and that the rest of r.s.r is
even now hooting with laughter, mirth that can be heard in five
continents; even so, I'm going to ask it.

When a single starts to tip down on one side (in response to one of my
very ropey finishes, perhaps), what does the oarsman actually,
physically, measurably, observably DO to stop it doing so and return to
the flat? I've heard about keeping the hands level, or at the right
height: well that's not dynamic and so won't cure a list. I've heard
about raising and lowering the hands; about pushing out against the
buttons; about adjusting the lean of the knees slightly; about pressing
with the feet; about thinking hard about the boat's list diminishing
(I'm not kidding), but what is the real answer? Stop laughing for long
enough to tell me, please!

I have been concentrating on the single all this winter so far, and
occasionally what I do looks a bit like sculling, but this balance thing
has me beat. Sometimes it just happens, and there's a marvellous moment
of quiet when both blades are off the water, but mostly it's
"prrrrrttttt" on one side or the other right up to the catch.

--

Henry Law Manchester, England

OK, I'm going to do it. I finally remembered my password so I can post
to this group again.

I've been coaching sculling now for ~10 years, sculling a bit longer:

I'm not a natural athlete by any stretch of the imagination, so I have
to think a lot about what I do and I need lots of help ( my friends at
CRC will tell you that only one other person has bene to more of their
camps than I have and I am vying seriously for the title of worlds
slowest learner. Here is one edition of the document that I share
with my scullers (in bits and pieces), for your collective criticism.
It is a cold day in the central US, I have spent most of the day
sanding oars and refurbishing albano course buoys, thinkning about
politics and defending and supporting my favorite candidate.

You folks will pray for our ice to go out by the time I am through.

Here it is:

THE ROWING STROKE- is an endless motion, but for convenience of
description is broken down into two parts, the recovery and the
drive. If you perform the recovery correctly, the drive follows
naturally.

RECOVERY- The recovery portion of the stroke is just that. You are
recovering from the last application of power. You are also preparing
by positioning the oar correctly to start the next stroke. During
normal rowing, if the stroke is properly performed, you are recovering
2/3 to 3/4 of the time.

It is during this time as well that the set (keeping the boat straight
and upright) is determined. There are several reasons for this. You
spend more time on the recovery than on the drive, so there is more
time for things to go wrong. The oars are in the air during the
recovery, so are not buried in the water to provide extra points of
balance. Because you aren't pulling hard against a fixed resistance,
you are more likely to "flop around", that is make extra, unintended
motions during the recovery.

SETTING A PLATFORM: This is a key concept. It is not unique to
rowing. It is critical to every athletic activity. In football, to
block effectively you must position you body appropriately in time and
in space. In tennis, you must prepare ahead of time to meet the ball
square on. Setting a stable platform to work from is the single most
important concept in the activity of rowing. Rowing boats are light,
very long and very narrow. If your body is not stable throughout the
stroke, the boat will not be stable, and any attempt to get the oars
into and out of the water predictably and comfortably will be
compromised.

You must sit up straight and keep your weight set solidly and equally
on both cheeks of your ***. The core of the body, the muscles
surrounding the hips and lower torso, define the core stabilizers that
allow you to maintain this stable posture, and so form the basis of
the rowing stroke. Accomplished oarsmen refer to this as the "muscular
corset". These include the gluteals, attachments of the various muscle
groups supporting the spine and the abdominals, Abs include the
rectus abdominus, the ones that give you, (but not me), a six pack,
the obliques and the transversus abdominus. The transverse muscles
are particularly important because they are the only abdominal muscles
that completely surround the abdomen.

Use all your senses: When you position yourself stably in the boat,
you can use syntactic cues effectively to respond to changes, and so
keep the boat perfectly upright. The more sensors you have, the more
accurately and quickly you can make adjustments. The sensors that you
have include, but may not be limited to:

1) Your vision. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Just like an airplane
pilot, keeping your eyes on the horizon lets you gives you instant
feedback as to whether you are "flying" (hopefully) straight and
level.
2) Your ears, both sounds and your sense of balance.
3) Tactile inputs. Here, the more sources that you maintain and pay
attention to, the better off you are. These can include:

a. the cheeks of your ***. The amount of weight on each should be
the same. You can control this pressure by sitting upright, with your
abdominal musculature and your glutei (your *** muscles), slightly
tensed. When they are taut (rowing
with a bit of a tight ass), any change in pressure will be sensed more
quickly.

b. the soles of your feet. There should always be pressure on the
soles of your feet. If there is not, you have lost connection on the
drive, and you have lost control on the recovery. The location of the
pressure on the soles of your feet (heels vs. the balls and toes of
your feet, gives you important clues about where you are in the
recovery. You can use these pressure changes as cues for timing both
for squaring the blades, and lifting the blades into the water. The
pressure should be equal on the right and left foot. You can make
adjustments in balance sensed in both your *** and your feet by
pushing down on one foot harder than the other. It is easier to make
small changes (i.e. not over react) if there is some pressure there to
begin with.

c. The pressure should also be sustained equally on both hands as you
lever against the pins through the drive (applies to sculling only).
In sweep, you can think of both arms as providing one balance point.


You can improve your appreciation of and reliance on these tactile
inputs by rowing with your eyes closed and your feet out of shoes.

I like to think of this process as a "my dynamic stability system".
There is much written about dynamic stability in the engineering
literature. Newer cars have electronic stability control. Many of
these systems are actually modeled on human or other biological
systems, yet very little is written about this in the sports
literature.

The Finish: At the finish (the point at which you are about to take
your oar(s) out of the water, you should be leaning back against the
oars, perhaps at 15%. The lower back should be held erect and the
abdominal muscles should be tensed slightly. The legs are pushed down
and straight, maintaining pressure through the soles and heals of the
feet to the foot stretchers. You should actively avoid slumping. You
should be working slightly to keep your tailbone up off the bow end of
the seat. While the rest of the body should be relaxed, the lower
abdominal and lower back muscles should always remain slightly
tensed. Again, it is this stability and strength at the core that
allows efficient transfer of pressure through from the feet through
the body to the arms and hands through the handles or the oars to the
pins.

The pins, seat and foot stretchers are the main points of contact
between the rower and the boat to the water.

Maintaining this posture allows much better balance and connection
throughout the stroke. Maintaining appropriate posture, keeping the
head up, eyes out of the boat and fixed at a far point, keeps the body
stable. This will maintain the stability of the entire boat.
Remember, even a female lightweight (<130 lb) weighs more than four
times the weight of a single scull (~31 lb). The boat won't roll
unless you do. If you maintain a stable platform, your rowing will
become immediately easier and more rewarding.

At the finish, your forearms should be parallel to the water (elbows
are out). You should finish in front of the body, before pressure on
the oar(s) is lost and water fills back in on the back of the
oar(s). The forearms push the handle down as the last part of the
drive. This movement should originate in the elbows. The shoulders
stay still and back. Your elbows should be held comfortably away from
the body. The wrists should stay flat. (In sculling, as you tap the
oars down by pushing with your palms, wrists flat, from the elbows.
Your shoulders should not move. As you tap down, maintain outward
pressure with the thumbs (this keeps contact with the pins) and open
your hands slightly. The handles will roll up under your fingers as
the force of the water against the blade during the exit pushes your
blades into the feathered position.

If you institute the feather by overextending, "breaking" or
"cocking", your wrists, several unwanted events result. You have to
push down much further, because as you push down with your forearms,
you are effectively lifting the handle up with your wrists and your
hands stay tightly gripped on the oars. The tenseness of your grip
transfers to your shoulders which tend to come up toward your ears,
rather than staying low and relaxed.


Consequences of faults with the finish:
1) The extraction takes longer and for this reason, the blade has a
greater tendency to be caught in the water. At the least, this
checks the boat's run. At the worst you will catch a crab. This tends
to make you leery of the finish and hurry to get out of the water, you
finish early, wash out and lose the effectiveness of all your hard
work during the drive.
2) You tend to use the shoulders to push down. This throws your
weight downward and into the bow. This makes the boat bounce, also
causing check.
3) It leaves you more unbalanced at the finish.

All of this can be corrected by simply learning to push down with your
wrists flat and opening your fingers at the release, and keeping your
shoulders down and relaxed. If your wrists are flat at the release,
there is no need to adjust hand position and it is easier to keep the
blades at a constant height during the recovery.

In the next movement, nothing changes except that the arms push the
handle away from the body at the same rate of speed that you drew in
at the finish, keeping the handle at a constant level. Be patient at
the finish. Feel the speed of the boat and match the speed of your
own motions so as to interrupt the run of the boat as little as
possible. Let the boat work for you. As the hands go away, the body
angle does not change.

As the hands pass over the knees, you begin to lean forward, from the
hips. You should feel the lower edge (the bottom end of the cheeks of
your ***, push down on the stern end of the seat. The seat may even
rock a bit. The legs remain straight. You are transferring your
seated weight to the sternward half of the seat. This sternward
transfer of mass helps to lift the bow out of the water and to
accelerate the boat forward, even though the oar is no longer in the
water. You should feel your hips acting as a pivot to redistribute
your weight down into the heels of your shoes. This weight transfer
downward and sternward is crucial. Keep your head erect and your
point of gaze up out of the bottom of the boat. This will help to set
the boat. Make sure the motion is at your hips, not in your back.

Correct performance of the recovery maintains the set of the boat
(keeping the boat upright and from rocking back and forth). Set is
improved by keeping your weight as low in the boat as is possible.
This does not mean you should crouch down or slump. It means that you
need to learn to keep as much of your weight distributed to your feet
as is possible. This starts during the recovery. You should feel
pressure on your feet throughout. Pivoting on your hips as you lean
forward starts the process of downward, rearward weight transfer. If
there is weight on your feet, you have four points of balance (both
feet and both cheeks), rather than just the two you sit on. Once you
obtain your body angle, your legs should start to bend. You maintain
the transfer of weight to your heels by letting the boat "come to you"
during the recovery, rather than trying to pull it up underneath you
with your toes. The forward motion of the boat helps in this regard.
The seat tracks are also on little ramps, so that you tend to slide
toward the stretchers naturally. You also keep weight on your feet by
going slower and slower toward the rear of the boat as you approach
the catch. We use the analogy of feeling the legs loading up at the
knee like a coiled spring, with increasing pressure on the feet. You
should feel the pressure building in your heels and then transferring
up to the balls of your feet as you reach the catch. By letting your
legs bend only slowly, you have much more control over where your
weight goes. You are not lurching about, increasing momentum to one
side or the other precipitously. This helps with set. By approaching
the catch in a controlled fashion, you have more time to prepare for
it. This is important because the catch is the most complicated, and
most critical, part of the entire cycle.

In summary, your hands lead your arms away from the body at the same
speed with which you drew in, your body follows more slowly. You bend
at the hips without bending your legs, transferring your weight
rearward and downward. Once you have established your body angle,
your back position stays constant. You allow yourself to move up the
slide by allowing your legs to bend at the knees more and more slowly
as you approach the catch, maintaining pressure on your feet. That
pressure transfers from your heels toward your toes as you approach
the catch. You should be squaring and actively reaching for the water
as your weight is transferring from your heels to the balls of your
feet. Try to reach actively for the water before your come to the end
(frontstops) of the slides. You should be reaching OUT at the catch,
trying to extend your arms out to the side, not rearward. This will
maximize your length, keep outward pressure on the oar(s), maintaining
contact with the pin(s), and by spreading your weight outward, helping
to maintain balance at the catch, the most unstable part of the rowing
stroke. As you are reaching out, you should be reaching down to the
water by squaring your blades. You close your hands and list them
quickly as you feel the pressure on your feet shift from the heals to
the balls of your feet and your toes. The second before you reach the
frontstops, you allow the blade of the oar to drop in the water by
lifting your (outside) hand(s), using the shoulder as a pivot. Your
back does not move. If the catch is performed correctly, you will
hear a satisfying, resonant, "plunk". It sounds like a stone being
dropped into the water. Remember, to square the blade, simply close
your fingers. Think of squaring the blade down to the water.

Things to remember:

The catch really is the last part of the recovery
You can't catch well if you are unbalance or uncomfortable at the
catch.
Do not lunge further forward at the end of the recovery
Keep your head up, back straight, chest out.
Keep your weight underneath you by getting length at the catch with
compression, not by
lurching toward the stern.
Stay as relaxed at the catch as you were during the recovery.

To repeat, performing the recovery in this way helps maintain boat
stability (set) by keeping weight low in the boat. Your feet are the
only suspension point for your body weight that is below the roll
modulus (the imaginary pivot point that the boat rolls from side to
side around). Maximizing the amount of weight below that point is
crucial. I can't stress enough how much difference this makes in
maintaining boat stability. If your weight is already on your feet
and you are coming up the slide slowly and the boat begins to roll to
one side, you can correct it quickly by transferring relatively more
pressure to the opposite foot. You lose this control if you allow
yourself to collapse into the catch or lunge into it. You cannot
establish this weight transfer and control without appropriate core
strength and posture.

The next important consideration is to make sure that your oar doesn't
slide in and out of the oarlock. This also rocks the boat. To prevent
this, keep your pinkie of your outside hand (thumbs when sculling)
over the end(s) of the handle(s). (For sweep rowing, wrap your pinky
over the end of the end of the oar if you have to.) Keep a slight
amount of outward pressure on the oar at all times. Think of having 5
or 6 primary points of balance, your 2 feet, the pin(s) of the
oarlock(s) and the two sheeks of your ***, held firmly in place by
sitting upright with a tensed torso.

I have said little about oar movement. All of the above is referred
to as body work. Blade work is more straightforward (in concept but
not in practice). At the finish, you want to push down on the handle
until the blade just clears the water. You then carry the oar forward
all the way to the catch with the handle at exactly the same height.

When you reach the point of maximum compression, you immediately let
the oar blades drop in the water by lifting your hand up. Nothing
else moves to this point. Placing the oar in the water is the last
motion of the recovery.



Catches- The blade must be completely SQUARED BEFORE ENTRY AND
SUBMERGED (anchored) BEFORE you start applying power. The blade entry
should be quick, to avoid moving the blade through the air (missing
water), but relaxed, so the blade isn't pushed too deep. The perfect
catch is best obtained by lifting the hands so that the blade falls
into the water of its own accord. The movement is at the shoulder,
not the elbow or back. There is no other body motion. The blade should
be with its top just under the surface. Common faults include
"opening up" the body angle at the catch, rowing in (driving before
the blade is engaged with the water), "Skying the blade", pushing down
on the handle before lifting up at the catch. This is analogous to
"winding up" immediately before swinging a bat or golf club. You
should begin your catch while you are still coming up the side. The
blades should already be squared. There should be no hesitation at
the catch, but you should "allow the body to catch up with the mind"
and your entry and drive should be in pace with the boat's speed
through the water. Make a conscious attempt to reach out and grab the
water with your blade. You should be initiating blade entry as you
are still coming up the slide so that by the time you are completely
compressed, your blade is fully buried. Take the time to sense the
speed of the boat as you come up to the catch. The catch and the
finish are the only time that your body speed matches the speed of the
boat. Use those times to gather that information and then use it.

You should think about putting the blade in the water at one spot and
doing your best to keep it at that spot throughout the stroke. An
analogy used often is: Pretend there is a post in the water, sticking
up just below the surface. Put the blade in the water just as close
behind the post as possible and grab it with the blade. Once the
blade is firmly in the water and "locked on to the post" ,push down
firmly with the feet to pry the boat past that position with the oar.
You should feel the load transfer up your back almost entirely to the
area between your shoulders, as you might if you were swinging back
and forth while hanging on a set of monkey bars. Nothing else moves.
The body stays forward. The arms stay straight. The lower back and
shoulders must support the suddenly imposed load or your *** will
scoot out from under you. We call this fault "shooting the slide".
The British call it "bum shoving". As you step down, you should feel
your weight raise up off the seat so that it is suspended between the
oars and your feet. You can think of the pins and the feet as the
points where weight should be held during the drive. When your weight
falls back to the seat, you are no longer accelerating the boat
forward. The best rowers maintain this acceleration, the feeling of
hanging on the oar, all the way to the finish.

Your goal is to make the rowing stroke as efficient as possible. To
do this, you must perform the stroke so that energy you expend is
spent moving the boat forward. You can also spend energy rocking the
boat from side to side, or pushing the oar backward through the water
or using the oar to splash the water. Your maximum energy output is
determined to greatest extent by a higher power (God, genes, what-have-
you). You can waste that energy, or use it wisely. When analyzed,
about 1/5th of the energy wasted during the rowing stroke is that lost
through hull drag and cyclic variation in boat speed. The rest of the
waste occurs in the rowing stroke (where the rubber meets the road).
You increase your boat speed by getting your oar into and out of the
water with as little disturbance as possible, and by using the oar,
once in the water, to pry the boat forward, rather than push the oar
backward. The oar's movement backward through the water is referred
to as "slip". As the oar moves away from and toward the hull during
the stroke it also develops some lift (like the wing of an airplane).
More lift occurs near the catch and near the finish because the oar
moves in and out with respect to the boat, gliding through the water
like a wing through the air. More slip occurs in mid - drive, when
the blade is perpendicular to the hull. Thus, the catch and finish
should be efficient. You can use puddles to tell you something about
the efficiency of your stroke. You can't accelerate your drive more
quickly than the water will let you. If you push down with our legs
with all your might, use all your energy right at the instant of the
catch, you will spend more of that energy moving water backward and
less moving the boat forward. If you take the time to let the water
build up on the blade of the oar, the oar will stay at the same spot
and you can spend all that energy on moving the boat by accelerating
the stroke all the way through the drive.

You should remember also that the boat speed varies significantly
throughout the cycle. The most efficient way to increase average boat
speed is to minimize the difference between the fastest and slowest
portions of the stroke cycle. In addition to allowing the boat to run
during the recovery, you should work to maintain acceleration
throughout the drive, rather than increase energy expenditure at one
point during it. To do this, particularly in sculling, you want your
stroke to be as long as possible, and to increase power application in
a controlled fashion from the catch through to the finish.




Here are some catch positions of some very good rowers. Note that
despite some variations, all have their heads up, their chests out and
their noses pretty much over over their toes(es). In addition, their
blades are buried BEFORE they have pushed down with their legs.




Puddles- Puddles are the imprint that your oar leaves in the water
after you have finished your stroke. Some novices, even intermediates
for that matter, get the notion that the diameter of the puddle
reflects the amount of accelerating force applied to the boat. This
is not true. If your puddle is big and foamy, it generally indicates
that you have used lots of force to splash water around. The energy
used to make that big hole in the water is energy that was not used to
pry the boat forward. It may have been a powerful stroke, but it was
an inefficient one. The best puddle is the one that it the most
compact, but lasts the longest. It is comprised of a deep set of
concentric swirls imparted as the oar locks onto and pushes against
the water, the puddle moves outward from and then inward toward the
boat during the course of the stroke. The blade enters the water at
a distance away from the boat defined by the sine of the catch angle
(the angle between oar at the catch and the oar when perpendicular to
the boat, remember Chief Sohcahtoa) times the oar length. It is an
oar's length from the boat at mid stroke and is again closer to the
boat at the finish.

The best puddle appears as a compact, well defined "C" defining the
blade's course with vortices swirling from the ends of the letter.
Because the oar blade generates some lift (similar to an airplane
wing), the most efficient stroke will reflect an oar path through the
water that terminates at a point further ahead in the water than the
point where the oar entered at the catch (the lift force is greater
than the inherent "slip"). There are pictures available to document
this.

Connection- (Also described as "hang", see above). Connection is a
hard concept to grasp. It refers to getting all the force transferred
between the bottoms of your feet as they push down on the
footstretchers, and your hands as they hang on the oars. Your weight
should be largely suspended between these two points throughout the
drive, using the seat only for balance. Connection becomes harder to
maintain as you go from catch to finish. It is a matter of angles.

To establish connection, you push down firmly with both legs at the
catch, with your shoulders relaxed, arms straight, and your back
tensed just enough to keep a constant body angle as you push down hard
with your legs. You are sitting up straight and maintaining that
posture by keeping your core muscles, lower abs, lower back, and
gluts, slightly tensed. As the legs are about halfway down, you begin
to lean back, or straighten the body angle, so that you are adding the
force of your lower back to the force of your leg drive. This should
occur at just about the point that the oar shaft is perpendicular to
the boat, allowing you to apply the greatest amount of force at the
point in the stroke where the mechanical advantage is greatest. As the
leg drive is largely complete and the back is opened about 1/2 way, you
start to pull back with the arms, but mostly by pulling with the
shoulders by squeezing the shoulder blades toward the center of your
back, with the shoulders still down. In this way you are more and
more muscle groups throughout the drive to accelerate the boat through
the water for the entire time that your oar is in the water. You
accelerate past the oar blade that is fixed as a pivot point at one
spot in the water. You should feel pressure on your feet throughout
the drive, all the way to the finish. At the finish, your erect
posture, raised hips and quiet extraction should allow you to change
direction (initiated with hands and arms away) while continually
maintaining pressure on the foot stretcher. If your feet come loose,
you have check in the boat at the finish. This is critical as an
unchecked boat will continue to increase in speed partway into the
recovery, resulting from the movement of your mass toward the stern.

Now we are back where we started.


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