Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?

Hamish Bond, in the book The Kiwi pair, enthusiastically seconds the motion...

From The Kiwi Pair (c)

Hamish Bond’s thoughts on Drew Ginn’s “Will It Make The Boat Go Faster”

“Everything, and I mean everything, suddenly clicked for me.”

“I felt like it could revolutionise what we did.”

"Sometime just after Christmas, I received an email from a friend containing a link to an audio recording made by the great Australian oarsman Drew Ginn. Drew, the three-time Olympic gold medallist, having won his first in 1996 with the 'Oarsome Foursome' before going back-to-back in the pair in 2004 and 2008, was the archetypal rowing soul man, a deep thinker and a regular contributor to rowing conversations through his blog, Rudderfish.

"I clicked on the link and listened, and was instantly and absolutely transfixed by what he was saying. It was as if the last decade of my life flashed through my mind, a movie reel of memories like some scene from a science-fiction epic. He was describing - in the language of a rower, not a coach – the exact same feeling I had been trying to articulate for my entire career. What he was explaining, simply put, was how to make a boat go fast.

"Drew knew his stuff, and had rowed with some of the very best. He would later say of his motivation for posting the recording, 'I wanted to put out there something that countered the traditional beliefs about the rhythm required to row a boat fast. Fundamentally I was finding, and had found for many years, a resounding conflict in what was being taught and what I had experienced.

"Everything, and I mean everything, suddenly clicked for me. As soon as we were back into training, I played the recording to Eric, who was happy to try some of the things Drew suggested. In many ways it was the perfect catalyst for taking back some ownership of our training from Dick, something we both wanted to do. I wanted Dick to hear the clip as well, and stopped by his office to play it to him, but before I could get the track to play, Dick's patience ran out and he got up and walked out the door. Undeterred, we began to implement some of Drew's theories.

"In essence, everything Drew said could be boiled down to a single, defining thought: don't fight the boat. There is an equilibrium moment when you find the pitch of the shell and tune yourself to it. At race pace, you can feel it - it's what gives you that exhilarating sense that the boat is taking off.

"There are only four parts of every stroke: the catch, the drive, the finish and the recovery. The trick was to get from the finish to the catch while slowing the boat down as little as possible. If you can do that efficiently, get forward and ready to put the oar back in the water without overly checking the boat's momentum, then you could take the next stroke while the boat was still moving.

"If you move against the boat, the next stroke will feel heavy, and heavy strokes, time after time after time, end in fatigue. Suddenly we understood how to make the set-up changes, adjusting seat heights, oar pitch and the height of our shoes on the foot stretcher. We had chanced upon this feeling in the four in 2007. Now we could recreate it any time we wanted to.

"I felt like it could revolutionise what we did, and we implemented the changes without telling Dick. I had wanted to bring him inside our thinking but he had shut it down. I already knew it was his way or the highway, and I still respected that his word was law – but his job was to set the programme while technique became our domain. He would occasionally bark an instruction from the boat, but we persisted with our own ideas. We tried things, it felt good, we squad-raced like beasts, and everything seemed easy."

(c) Penguin Random House New Zealand ISBN: 978-1-74-348731-0

In response to the video, Johannes Rudolph, on his Rowing in Motion blog, posted an excellent technical explanation of why Drew and Hamish are right. What follows is a lightly edited version of the original with emphasis added.

Improve Your Stroke -

Maintain Boat Speed on the Recovery

"Posted on February 21, 2013

This article is partly inspired by an interesting discussion on the decentrowing blog. In the comments, someone brought up a link to a video by Drew Ginn where he advocates accelerating the sliding seat into the catch. This advice seems to be a bit unconventional considering most coaches advocate a constant sliding seat speed into the catch. Now, Drew Ginn is a very successful athlete and it’s definitely worth listening to his advice. In this post, I'll explain why Drew is right and how you can use Rowing in Motion to confirm that. I hope this serves as an inspiration how our Rowing Apps can help athletes improve their stroke and row faster.

"Speed and the stroke cycle

Rowing boats do not move at constant speed. As the athletes apply force to the boat, velocity changes and that change in velocity is called acceleration. So by looking at acceleration over time, we can make a fair guess what happens to the overall boat speed. A crew will typically achieve the highest boat speed right at the finish of the stroke as the boat’s been accelerating throughout the drive phase.

"What does that imply for the recovery phase? We'll look at two different rowing techniques and reason about their effect on boat speed.

"Pulling on the stretcher

This is the style Drew Ginn advocates and I call “pulling on the stretcher”. After extracting the blades, you try to maintain a steady “pull” on the stretcher. This may even go as far as accelerating the driving seat throughout the recovery phase and “pulling” the boat underneath you. When you pull on the stretcher, you apply a force directed in the boat’s movement direction – the boat will accelerate. Another way to think of this is as a momentum exchange with the boat. Momentum is the product of mass and speed and momentum exchange describes what happens if two coupled bodies (the crew and the boat) change speed. I’ll lie to you a bit and proclaim that the sum of the momentum of the boat and the crew is about zero at any point in time if we discard motion relative to the water. Think of it as if you're rowing in the air or on an ergo with slides. Why zero? Momentum is actually a vector so two momentum vectors can add up to zero if they have the same length but opposite direction. For the sake of the argument, we'll call the boats momentum positive and the athletes momentum negative.

"As the crew accelerates towards the stern it builds up negative momentum, the boat has to accelerate in the opposite direction to build positive momentum. By pulling on the stretcher, you will maintain or even increase the boat’s speed towards the catch. If you maintain a higher boat speed, this will also increase your average speed over the stroke cycle. Looking at the picture below, we see a good acceleration throughout the drive phase and then a flat line (= no acceleration) during the recovery phase. This indicates a high boat speed is maintained throughout the recovery phase.

"Pushing on the stretcher

“Pushing on the stretcher” is what I call the second style of handling the recovery phase. This is the style I see many athletes apply, even though they aren’t aware of it and for the worse: it’s slow. We'll start by looking at the finish and ignore the difference in the acceleration structure of the drive phase (which is a topic of another post). As we can see in this [next] acceleration graph, the rower starts pushing on the stretcher long before the actual catch. Picking up the analogy of momentum exchange again, this means the rower exerts force on the stretcher towards the stern. The athlete slows down his body’s movement towards the stern so the boat has to slow down too to keep the sum of the momentum zero. What effect does this have on boat speed? Because we slow down the boat earlier, we have a decreased average boat velocity.

"Comparing “pull” vs. “push” recovery

I have drawn up a quick graph in excel [below] to help you better understand this comparison. It shows the relation between speed and acceleration of both styles of rowing. As you can see, until x=4 all graphs are the same. The “pull” style then continues to maintain a higher boat speed as the “push” style causes negative acceleration and the boat to slow down. The “pull” style comes at the expense of a steeper deceleration at the catch so the start and end speed of both strokes will be similar. What matters though is the average speed over the stroke, which I'll define as the distance per stroke divided by the stroke duration in seconds. As the distance travelled is the integral under the speed graphs (the area under the speed graphs) and the stroke durations are equal, we conclude that the “pull” style achieves a higher average boat speed. It will bring you to the finish line faster!

Paddling Pair 2007

"I rehash this short clip. It was reverse seating with Duncan Free in the bow. The rhythm in the boat was more patient at the release. Watch the hips during the recovery and how we break the knees softly then allow the boat to come to us as we roll and catch the water out over the toes. You can hear the speeds being called out as we go from 1.52 down to 1.49 splits per 500m. Now when we had the boat rigged with Duncan in the stroke seat we would regularly be able to paddle at 1.48 splits in still water. Our best was 2000m at 1.45 splits with a very slight tail wind. Once you're paddling that fast in a pair you have to take time to let the boat run while the body mass does the work and then the recovery required a silent body swing and from there we found the slight acceleration was about getting the feeling of roll and catch to be one movement. The boat speed stayed higher for longer in the recovery and without killing the CM or body mass momentum. We found these speed were also pretty transferable up through the rates. As speed increased, rate went up and so too did the handle speed. This means we worked to honour speed first and rate and the movement visually comes with it.

"Now given all this I appreciate there are different views out there about how to row best and to make a boat go fast. I am not here to debate but have only every shared the experiences. We have good data about higher boat speed with less effort. So I know what I trust.

"Would I tell others to row the same way? NO

"What I tell others to do is experiment with how they produce power, how they connect to the water, how they can move the boat further in the drive phase and how to relax and let a boat work for them during the recovery. I believe in [traditional] sequencing in general terms but also feel each boat, once on a speed, has a rhythm to it and each crew's movement has a rhythm to it. Each day is subtly different, just like each stroke, so it requires awareness and adaptation. I love great rowing. I am passionate about seeing boats go fast. I am also someone who likes to challenge my own assumptions and those of people around me. I have long held that once you work out just how fast you can drive a boat at a given rate then the game becomes how long you can keep it close to the maximal speed for the rate. Efficiency is a cool reward once boat speed is achieved. Doing anything that's so called fancy without first driving the boat leaves the athlete or crew searching for gains without the biggest ingredient. Learning to drive the boat first is essential then, once that's in place, enjoying finding ways to go even faster is where all the magic happens."

In case you missed the link in the Improve Your Stroke article by Johannes Rudolph, above, here's an interesting discussion on the subject in the decentrowing blog.

And here's an older technical article by Magnus Burbanks of Molesey Boat Club that purports to prove the validity of a slow early slide as advocated several years later by Drew Ginn. Scroll down to the article entitled "The Recovery - Quantitative - Optimising the Run". While you're there, take some time to look around on Burbank's SlidingSeat blog. He covers lots of interesting topics.

08/10/17: Here is an interview with Drew, years later, about the video and his theories on rowing technique, training and more. Fascinating! Credit: Joe DeLeo.

08/12/17: There seems to be a renewal of interest in Drew Ginn's "Will It Make The Boat Go Faster". This time commentary by Bill Tait and Rod Siegel on their BRowShow podcast. Very well done with a good analysis of what is happening and why it works. Be sure to follow along with the slides they use during the podcast.

Related to the discussion above, an article by Ken Davey, an AUS elite coach. Emphasis added.

Rating vs Boat Speed

"What I'd like to talk about here is the concept of rating versus boat speed. Often you'll find, particularly with school crews, that they are told that during the race they should start out at a rate of, say, 42. They should then break it down to about 37 and then during the race maybe go to 33, 32, depending on the size of the boat. When they get towards the finish line, they take the rating back up again.

"The problem with a concept like that is that the school kids tend to chase the rate, and in fact not just school athletes, it’s all athletes. If you try to chase the rate without having the boat speed then you’ll find that it’s not possible to get rhythm and boat speed at that rate.

"What you need to do, if you’re going to increase the rate, then the first step is to increase the boat speed and then move with the boat. If you can do that effectively, then you’ll find that the rating will come, but the boat speed must come first. In short, if you need to take the rating up, first take the boat speed up and then let the rating follow."

See the full post here.

The End. Thank you for reading.