Force graph -- help with technique?

[maestroak]

Jackrabbit,

I went to a rowing camp with Charlotte Hollings and John Dunn in Virginia, they are very critical of the legs, then torso then arms stroke and the idea of a straight back. They showed tons of video of top Olympic rowers and very few did anything close to that process. They also think it contributes to lower back injury. They mentioned a similar thing you did, which is if you were going to lift a heavy weight, how would you do it? Would you first extend your legs, with your back straight, then cantilever your back around your waist, and then finish lifting it with your arms? Or would you do it all in one smooth motion where all of the components work together, with your back rounded.

Anyway, food for thought. It was interesting to me because I started on the erg by myself, and naturally had a stroke similar to what they taught, then I learned to row with masters who had all been taught and were teaching the legs, torso, arms w/ straight back consecutive stroke, which I had to adapt to in order to keep in synch with the others, and then went to the sculling camp and they were teaching what felt natural to me.

-Steve

[jackarabit]

Steve, I could not for the life of me think of the word consecutive and employed consequent and coincident in lieu of consecutive and simultaneous as in the four, modern, named rowing strokes. Another senior moment!

I am unable to perform James' test for comparative wattage generated as I am in the habit of opening my back early and can't easily curb the habit. I guess I'm in deep doodoo here unless I decide to take sculling lessons at Calm Waters Rowing. I agree that enlistment of legs and back in a squat movement is pretty much concurrent. I fear that the scholastic imperative to reduce everything to component parts tends to identify more than actually exist. Jack

[Bob S.]

All four style graphs show some overlap of the 3 movements. The major problem that a lot of beginners have is using the arms right from the start. None of the 4 style graphs show much arm movement until well along in the stroke. There is a wide variation for any significant start of the back swing. They all show it as beginning very early, but in the DDR and Adam, it is quite significant earlier on and peaks broadly less than half way through. In the other two, it takes a while, then rises sharply, with sharper peaks about half way through.

Screen Shot 2015-05-30 at 4.45.00 PM.png (83.4 KiB) Viewed 6446 times

I am firmly convinced that the initial teaching of the separate movements is an attempt to break a beginner away from the habit of using the arms at the start - not that they are really separate movements. I believe that in the attempt to do this, the point has been exaggerated. Obviously, there is overlap, but the initiation of the movements should be sequenced. And for anyone into OTW rowing, there should be a minimum of leg and arm overlap. That applies to erging as well, but it is not as big a deal. (And the same with recovery).

Bob S.

[jackarabit]

Hollings' thoughts here: http://www.usrowing.org/news/12-10-31/N ... ature.aspx

[KenS]

I think this is saying that I way under-use my legs when I row. But when I tried to get my curve into shape, I found that I was pulling *way* too hard to sustain for anything more than about 500 meters. Does this mean I need to re-shape the curve by consciously pulling less with my torso/arms -- in essence fix it by bringing down the right side of the curve rather than by raising the left side of the curve? Or??

Not sure what to do here, but from what I've learned recently that curve is holding me back, right?

My force curve never looked quite like the one you posted in that photo, but the curve did indicate I was under-using my legs at the beginning of the drive. Perhaps not coincidentally, my back was bothering me some, too.

I watched that same damper=1 video and immediately tried it. Like you, at first I could not maintain the effort for long. Then I tried slowing down my rate to ~20 so that the flywheel had slowed. That allowed me to maintain the effort for longer while concentrating on getting more legs into the start of the drive. I still do that drill from time to time - working at low drag, low rate, so that my force curve climbs sharply at the beginning of the drive.

Of course, at such a low drag, the curve drops sharply, too. But when I move the damper back to my accustomed 3 or 4, my force curve has the Grinko shape.

Oh, and my back feels better than it has in decades.

And maybe not just by-the-way, trying the damper=1 made me feel I understood the point of the Pete Plan low rate work.

Now, I'm an old lightweight, and I've found myself wondering - do LWs and HWs tend to have different force curves?

Thanks to everyone who had contributed to this discussion and to other technique discussions I've lurked on - I find this stuff fascinating, and reading everyone's comments over the past year has made my rowing far more comfortable and productive.

[jackarabit]

Ken S writes:

. . . I've found myself wondering - do LWs and HWs tend to have different force curves?

HWT includes a lot of folks with widely varying BM indices. Probably LWT category also. So, altho fat can be taught to row efficiently, true sprinters with upper body muscle and upper body power matched to their leg power tend to use it to advantage on the erg in defiance of a lot of conventional training wisdom. Early arms and traps and lats makes a wall on the left side of the power curve (and prolly some of that golf elbow we hear about). Jack

[maestroak]

Hollings' thoughts here: http://www.usrowing.org/news/12-10-31/N ... ature.aspx

Yes, sounds familiar. They emphasized your core, so instead of getting up straight and high with a straight back and having the force go up through your arms, they emphasized keeping a rounded back, and keeping the force lower through your core. It makes sense to me from a physics perspective too. We had a brief discussion on here recently where we also discussed breaking the arms and I linked to the single scull finals video. The one guy almost never had straight arms, but I think the effect of that, if you have strong enough arms, is you're keeping the force as horizontal as possible. There are a couple ways to do it, one is to round your back so your shoulders are lower and keep your arms relatively straight, another is to have your arms slightly bent so your forearms are more or less horizontal. Obviously any approach is going to stress something, either arms, shoulders, or lower back. I think Charlotte emphasizes smooth and fluid over some rigid formula and trying to keep the stroke as horizontal as possible. This may be where there is a significant difference OTW and on an erg, though, as I think in the water pulling vertically is going to be met with resistance that is not there on the erg so you're wasting more energy by not being horizontal.

[jackarabit]

Link to OTW vid of 2008 under 23 world champion: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W8a9nKkp1OM

Take look at 2' 28" in. Unequivocal endorsement of "simultaneous" leg push and back opening by narrator. Jack

[KenS]

Jack, I cannot tell you how much better that video makes me feel about my technique. No matter how much I've tried to think about not opening up my back simultaneously with the legs, I've not been able to do delay my back extension. Now I can stop worrying about that.

Thanks for posting the link to the Hollings article, too. That was illuminating.

Now the video has me thinking about what I've read called compression at the catch. The young men in the video really get their shins vertical and it appears they get the seat closer to their feet than I do.

OK, I'm getting a little obsessive. I followed Jack's video link to a short video of Eric Johannesen on the erg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xExxrbxFpTw

The handle almost hits the PM support. Of course, he's 6'4". But, dang, he makes 1:47/500 @ 20SPM look like he's cooling down. Sick.

Sorry, this is probably old news for most of you guys.

I did try getting more compression at the catch during my row this morning and it seemed to smooth out the power curve some. I usually have a bit of a valley and then a second, lesser peak after the main peak, but letting the seat slide a bit closer to my feet and getting my shins more vertical eliminated that.

If that's really what I'm seeing, why might that be?

[Bob S.]

Link to OTW vid of 2008 under 23 world champion: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W8a9nKkp1OM

Take look at 2' 38" in. Unequivocal endorsement of "simultaneous" leg push and back opening by narrator. Jack

Did you read some of the comments? Quite a few are negative.

Bob S.

[KenS]

Link to OTW vid of 2008 under 23 world champion: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W8a9nKkp1OM

Take look at 2' 38" in. Unequivocal endorsement of "simultaneous" leg push and back opening by narrator. Jack

Did you read some of the comments? Quite a few are negative.

Bob S.

HA! I had not read the comments, and you are right! Lots of negatives. Everybody's a critic.

[jackarabit]

I read the first five pages of comments. Many are negative. "Not what I was taught!" Is typical.

Looks like Johannsen's shins go beyond plumb in the erg video, Ken. It is fun to watch him do The Stroll @ 1:47/rate 20 no fuss no bother. At higher rates, maybe that turnaround at the catch would challenge the tendons to his knees and he'd shorten up the slide? Jack

[Bob S.]

Blast it! I was hoping on posting a couple of technique demos showing Xeno OTW and OTE. They were frame by frame, so the sequencing stands out clearly. But somehow they have disappeared from the net.

Bob S.

[Bob S.]

Ah! Found it available on a different website. It is the one for OTE, but has a link to the OTW demo. It is interesting to compare the two. Note: OTW, his hands follow the table top rule, staying in a horizontal plane for the drive and a slightly lower plane for the recovery. OTE his hands drop considerably during the recovery and rise again just before the catch. I have observed this on a number of other videos of erg demos by elite OTW rowers.

https://invernessrowingclub.org.uk/strokecycles/19

Bob S.

Note that, even at 39spm, he has a 1.24/1.00 recovery/drive ratio. In the OTW demo, at 22spm, it is 1.96/1.00

Note also the the drive times are identical, each at 0.69s.

[DanielJ]

I am firmly convinced that the initial teaching of the separate movements is an attempt to break a beginner away from the habit of using the arms at the start - not that they are really separate movements. I believe that in the attempt to do this, the point has been exaggerated. Obviously, there is overlap, but the initiation of the movements should be sequenced. And for anyone into OTW rowing, there should be a minimum of leg and arm overlap. That applies to erging as well, but it is not as big a deal. (And the same with recovery).

That's my impression too.

And I've found a couple of times in my short time erging that when I just roll the machine to the window to check out what I'm doing, fine-tuning the stroke, I've gained a second or so of pace. My stroke is pretty solid, I think, and my curve is about halfway between DDR style and Rosenberg style, as per Bob's post. But for faster, harder pieces, it tends more towards the Adam style.

I think it's natural for the back to open up at least a little bit at the beginning of the stroke, especially if the drag factor is low. But I definitely feel better and more efficient if the trunk "phase" starts in earnest later in the stroke. At the beginning of the drive, I like to be concentrating hard on pushing hard with the quads, and keeping my body solid otherwise. The back goes backwards a little tiny bit, and there might even be a twitch in the hands or the forearms, but the vast bulk of the work is done with the legs at first.

And it'll produce respectable times one day...

Ah! Found it available on a different website. It is the one for OTE, but has a link to the OTW demo. It is interesting to compare the two. Note: OTW, his hands follow the table top rule, staying in a horizontal plane for the drive and a slightly lower plane for the recovery. OTE his hands drop considerably during the recovery and rise again just before the catch. I have observed this on a number of other videos of erg demos by elite OTW rowers.

https://invernessrowingclub.org.uk/strokecycles/19

Bob S.

Note that, even at 39spm, he has a 1.24/1.00 recovery/drive ratio. In the OTW demo, at 22spm, it is 1.96/1.00

Note also the the drive times are identical, each at 0.69s.

In the Atlanta final, Xeno seems to engage his back earlier in the stroke. Nobody's perfect, of course; everybody's stroke will vary at least a tiny bit from stroke to stroke and from race to race.

Angel Rodriguez opens up quite early too. The Kiwi Pair do not.