This is an important video! When you have a few minutes, 15 to be exact, and an open mind, give a listen. [Mobile? Open in the YouTube App.]
Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? - Drew Ginn
Published on Oct 19, 2012
Hamish Bond, in the book The Kiwi pair, enthusiastically seconds the motion...
From The Kiwi Pair (c)
“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!
"So how can I improve my recovery phase?
A word of caution: how “pull” can turn into “push”
Many rowers trying to apply what I call the “pull” style make the mistake of pulling on the stretcher too hard. They accelerate the sliding seat but then still have to change the movement direction at the catch. This can cause a heavy push on the stretcher at the catch. This is not what it means to apply the pull style. Rather than the intensity of the force applied to the stretcher, these styles differentiate by timing. Correctly applying the pull style means maintaining the pull on the stretcher as long as possible and then having a fast catch.
"Measure, feedback, adapt…
You should start trying to apply the “pull” style today. Rowing in Motion can help you measure and verify your progress as you adapt your rowing technique by giving you feedback as you’re in the boat. Helping rowers improve the recovery phase is actually a great use case for sonification as it will allow you to hear when the boat starts slowing down too early. You can use the Coach App to capture a Rowing in Motion video that shows your boat’s acceleration and the crews motion synced together so you can correlate changes in the motion sequence to changes in acceleration and speed. If you want to see some examples of this in action (including the examples above) you should check out Rowing in Motion on YouTube."
And, if you're still with me, Drew posted a followup on his blog to the 'Will It Make the Boat Go Faster' video that further discusses the subject. Below is an edited version with emphasis added that hopefully makes it a little easier to read than the blog post.
Rowing Fast: Rhythm & Flow
Monday, February 25, 2013
[Mobile? Open in the YouTube App.]
"Here's footage of training on Varese in the Four. The rhythm looks a bit extreme but it's what was creating the best max speed given our power.
"I have been asked a lot lately about how we rowed the four or how I describe rowing fast. There is an audio of my rant [see the "Will It Make the Boat Go Faster video, above] about how much of what we are taught when developing might be good as a starting point but, to make a boat go really fast... Now I appreciate the various methods which get debated but should simply explain why I have come to certain realisations in thinking about boat speed.
"This was some footage during paddling in Varese. It's at rate 19.5 and from memory we were doing about 1:40 splits per 500m which was about 85% of WBT [World's Best Time: 5:38 M4-] but 84% of 5:36 min for 2000m. To do this ideally our effort would be still keeping us in our aerobic training zones. For me below 160 heart rate was achievable.
"So to explain the rhythm you see, you need to consider how fast the boat is moving and then how you take time to keep under rate 20 [what you do during the recovery]. The boat is moving pretty quickly for the rate and so the best way to keep this speed up without having to overwork the drive phase it becomes critical to look after the boat speed as much as possible [don't piss off the boat during the recovery].
"The main thing to look at is the body momentum I think. With the bodies staying still and patient at the release and then letting the boat flow back under us as we have the boat slide towards us all the way to the catch. Catch timing is key because,, if missed timing occurs, then boat speed can be negatively affected. This [is] interesting though as higher check on the boat is ok if it happens in a shorter time. I like the feeling for centre of mass (CM) rowing. Dr. Valery Kleshnev mentions this on his site and we worked with him from 1996 - 2004. How it works is about CM momentum which impacts boat speed of the whole stroke cycle. The idea then of boat acceleration after the release by pushing the hands away and getting the body over onto the feet quickly provides an increase early in the recovery but I wonder at what cost. It's true time needs to be taken somewhere during the recovery and the faster the boat speed the more time there is on the recovery.
"Here's an example of why I think this thing works. When I jump off the ground or a trampoline I notice that after leaving the surface, ground or tramp, that my body extends up towards where the force has been directed. The thing is to get higher off the ground, farther from the contact point, requires more power from the ground then patience to let the body mass reach a max point.
"When I tested this, if at the time of leaving the surface or contact point I collapse my body too soon to get back towards my feet, then momentum is killed. The CM momentum is absorbed by the body movement but the hips do get higher and can look like they accelerate or do accelerate.
"This may be confusing but if you bring it back in the boat then, after all the good work driving the boat past the blade placement is done, you need to be careful with the CM momentum. If the hands and body jump forward, its true you get an acceleration of the boat but I suspect it comes at a cost when the body mass or CM momentum is stopped. The way I think of it is CM momentum is key and how the boat accelerates and decelerates around that is influenced by the nature of the movements including sequencing, rhythm, ratio etc.
[Mobile: Open in the YouTube App.]
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.