As rowing slowly begins to return to normal, Hugo Gulliver and Richard Chambers spotlight sweep rowing technique. Back in June, they presented a British Rowing webinar on sweep rowing so we asked them for their technical insights.

Hugo’s tips

1 – Sweep rowing has to be a team sport. The team size may be two people or 50+ people but, regardless of size, all athletes and coaches must make sure they are creating and enhancing an environment which is encouraging everyone to be the best versions of themselves.

2 – If training in eights, then don’t underestimate the usefulness of rowing in sixes for the majority of the outing quite often. With regular pair swaps, heart-rates can be maintained, so there is still physiological benefit to the session, but the secure platform allows the athletes to focus on a technical point without the distraction of balance and the need to set the boat. Sixes will often also allow you to run two or more eights side-by-side with greater ease.

Connecting the blade effectively in a fast-moving eight is a tough skill, and often overlooked

3 – Achieving a strong position at quarter slide on the recovery is really important. Pausing drills to where the athletes feel their ‘weight is over’ I find more useful than pausing at an arbitrary position like ‘bodies over’ or ‘quarter slide’. Both the rowing machine and strength and conditioning also present plenty of opportunities to strengthen this position.

4 – Inside-arm only (outside-arm off) is a drill you’ll see a lot of American crews use but is less commonly used in the UK. Do the drill with a square blade, legs only, starting off the front. It highlights to the athlete how to accelerate the blade in the water using the hips and glutes.

5 – When an eight is at top speed it’s moving fast. Connecting the blade effectively in a fast-moving eight is a tough skill, and often overlooked. Don’t be afraid to throw very high-rate bursts into sessions at points in the season some wouldn’t normally expect you to, like early and mid-winter.

Richard’s tips

Do the basics right and don’t over complicate the rowing stroke.

1 – Start with how you hold the handle. You can have a relaxed grip whilst keeping a good hold of the handle. Keep your knuckles over the handle and your thumb tucked under. This will mean you can get a more effective transfer of power to the end of the spoon earlier in the drive phase.

Roll ups throughout an outing can help improve a crew’s togetherness on the recovery and catch placement

2 – At the beginning of the season keep the movements steady and controlled. Around the finish, as the blade releases from the water, have a steady and controlled movement of the hands away. I prefer to see a slight pause at the finish to emphasise this. This allows scratch crews to find a reference point that they can move together from, allowing crews to come together quicker.

3 – If rowing in eights, then spend at least half of the session rolling around in sixes. Pausing drills and continuous rowing will allow the rowers to figure out rhythm and technical points with a fast-moving shell that is also stable.

4 – Roll ups throughout an outing can help improve a crew’s togetherness on the recovery and catch placement. With the Cambridge reserve crews (Goldie), we used to do a lot of them, so that on race day the first stroke they took from the embankment was all eight full slide – practised and done right this can give so much confidence to any crew and can be quite intimidating to others!!!

5 – Give your athletes the opportunity to learn to steer in pairs in an unpressured environment. No stopwatch, just guidance and help.  Small movements with the steering foot will be more effective than full lock with the rudder. Steer with your foot at the finish of the stroke and look round every five strokes, if on a river. The more time you spend steering the more natural it will become.

The post Technical spotlight: sweep rowing tips appeared first on British Rowing.

Mark Wilkinson, Director of Rowing at The Windsor Boys’ School, hosted a British Rowing webinar on sculling with James Loveday, Performance Development Coach – Paralympic Programme, a few weeks ago.

Working extensively with the GB junior team, Mark heads up the GB junior men’s sculling team – he shares his top tips for sculling below.

1 – Set up the boat properly

The boat is a training tool to develop the individual and the set-up can make or break it. A lot of bad sculling can be fixed with a well set-up boat.

2 – Technical drills

Challenge yourself with technical drills to develop confidence to make the normal stroke easier to deliver.

3 – Use the team model

Ensure that you apply the team technical model, agreed by your coaching team, so when you get back in a crew boat it fits!

4 – Let it run!

Relax and let the boat do something – let it run. The boat running is the ‘sweet spot’ of rowing, so don’t get in the way of it and enjoy it.

Great individuals make great teams so stick with it, get it right and embrace the challenge!

5 – Balance and basics

If struggling with balance, you can make the boat wider by pushing out the blade into the gates with your thumbs. But, remember good sculling will lead to good balance, so stop trying to balance the boat and focus on the basics.

6 – Ask for feedback

Get video feedback regularly and chat with your coach about your technical development.

7 – Train with someone else

Why not row as a peloton? Always challenge yourself against faster athletes!

8 – Enjoy the process

Most single sculling is an opportunity to learn and develop as an individual, so that you will then be ready to fit into the crew.

Finally, great individuals make great teams so stick with it, get it right and embrace the challenge!

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Developing the various components of your individual performance will all count for very little if you cannot coordinate your contributions with the rest of your crew.

While the technical synchronisation of each individual stroke is the obvious, and more discussed, element of teamwork within rowing, there is less agreement around how to work together in order to pace a race from start to finish. Researchers at the University of Worcester have investigated the differences in workload distribution within a crew and discussed the implications of their findings.

Using a standard instrumented gate, forces and angles were measured to calculate power output per stroke. The study then examined the overall distribution of work during single 2km and 5km time trials at a boat and individual level. While boat speed was not reported, assuming the power produced translates to boat speed, the overall output for both trials reflected the pacing strategy commonly seen in rowing races – in basic terms, a fast start, steady middle thousand, sprint finish – but perhaps more exaggerated than at the elite level. The participants in this study rowed at an intermediate standard.

The thought-provoking element of this study is the individual contributions to the overall boat power, and how they differed with the trials.

I will focus primarily on the 2km data here, but the results of the 5km trial followed a similar pattern.

In this crew, the stroke and bow seat rowers delivered their highest average power in the final 500m, while the middle of the boat delivered their highest output during the first 500m. A statistical look at the dispersion of stroke power during the 2km for the four rowers revealed that the average individual power output varied from 12.52% to 18.77% over the 2km course.

Is there merit in different crew members contributing different outputs at different times?

It is worth noting that this study is a snapshot view of a single crew over single trials. It is not suggesting that this is the norm, and further research may be needed. But it does spark a debate about the most effective way of delivering a pacing strategy within a race.

So, should you look to have each crew member deliver an identical work distribution as the race progresses? Or, is there merit in different crew members contributing different outputs at different times, depending on their strengths?

There is a large technical element to this discussion. Individuals varying their contributions within a race could have a significant effect on the crew rhythm, amongst other things – but less so if the strategy is planned and practised in advance.

The best way to measure individual contributions to the boat is by telemetry, though these systems can be expensive.

Without offering an explanation, the paper’s authors intimate that there may be negative consequences if all athletes deliver their finite energy supplies in a uniform way. This relates to the different physiological make-up of individual rowers.

While all rowers need ‘big ticket items’ – a large endurance capacity and strength – there are subtle differences between rowers that lead to them each delivering an optimal 2km performance slightly differently.

Differences in the anaerobic capacity (important for ‘top-end’ power) and oxygen uptake kinetics (the speed at which aerobic metabolism meets demand at the start of a race) mean that there may be an advantage in athletes pacing slightly differently within the confines of the overall crew rate profile. This approach should ensure they add their strengths to the team effort and deliver their highest average power output over the course of the race.

Article written by Dr Mark Homer, Former GBRT Sport Scientist – Physiology / Illustration by Jo Scales

The post All for one and one for all: crew pacing strategies over a 2km race appeared first on British Rowing.

Incorporating cross training into your winter training can make you go faster on the water come the summer. I use cross training during the winter and early spring. Once we enter the racing season, I significantly reduce my cross training in order to maximise my in-boat focus. Here are two cross training activities that I enjoy doing.

1 – Road cycling

In November, the GB women’s squad heads to the popular cycling island of Mallorca and it’s popular for a reason. The roads are well maintained, providing an assortment of terrain and, most importantly, it is home to big climbs, the most infamous being Sa Calobra. A piece of road that will be forever etched in my mind, having pushed me to my mental and physical limits numerous times.

Firstly, cycling is a great cardiovascular exercise that incorporates a lot of the same muscles that are essential to move a boat fast. Because your heart rate varies to a greater degree on the bike, compared to rowing, due to generally unavoidable changes in gradient, this offers up a new challenge and stress to the body.

A big benefit of road cycling is the length of time you can be on the bike. This can far exceed the time on the rowing machine or in the boat. The majority of our long steady-state rowing sessions last 90-100 minutes, so we are never pushing over the two hour mark. However, you can ride the bike for over six hours and this allows you to really push the endurance aspect of training.

2 – Indoor cycling

In the winter, if you find the water frozen or resembling the North Sea, cycling can be a break from the rowing machine. The indoor bike can be challenging mentally. Having done a whole cycling camp on a turbo-trainer, I know this only too well! Remember, time doesn’t stop and the session will come to an end eventually. Keep your mind on the benefits of the session and think about the summer races you might be winning – if you train well.

Read more about Vicky Thornley’s cross training activities in the latest edition of Rowing & Regatta magazine.

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