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#1 The Stroke: More Complicated than it Seems

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#1 The Stroke: More Complicated than it Seems

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My freshman year at UW-Madison I decided that I wanted to walk on to the Women's Lightweight rowing team. I had never rowed before but I had been involved in athletics all of my life and wanted to continue that in college. The first day of tryouts consisted of teaching everyone the steps of the stroke. Every stroke starts at the catch, then then you take a stroke by driving the legs back, and finally you recover back to the the catch position. Throughout all of these steps it is important to remember the placement of your arms and legs. This is because it is bad if your knees hit the oar as you disturb the rhythm of the stroke. As we were learning this sequence on the ergometer, we repeated catch, drive, recover, over and over again to remember the placement of our bodies as we went through the stroke again and again. At this point in the very beginning of my learning, I was in the cognitive stage of Fitts and Posner's Model. I had to think through everything and repeat it to myself while I was performing the task. As I practiced, I tried out different strategies of timing. I was thinking about what ways I could be most efficient in my stroke by having a powerful drive but a sufficient amount of time to recover so I would not fatigue quickly. Finding a balance between these two was important so I had to find what worked for me, while also staying in tune with others when we got in a boat. After a few weeks I was in the associative stage, where I found the strategies that worked best for me, and the movements of my stroke were much more consistent. I was able to follow the stroke of the person ahead of me effectively, and the person behind me could follow my stroke. I noticed that over time the boat became more and more in sync. After about two months, I think that is when I was in the autonomous phase. I did not have to think about the stroke or the ratio of the different parts. I could think about things other than rowing during the long pieces such as what I was going to eat afterwards, or how much homework I had to do. It was no longer the position of my arms or body. Although that is something to be conscious of, it did not take up all of my thoughts.

Below is an accurate image of the different parts of a stroke. It would have been helpful to see this when I first was learning!

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When it was time to finally get in a boat after learning the basics of the stroke on the ergometer, we were each assigned to one side of the boat. It was actually two boats attached together so that we wouldn't tip over, but we all were assigned to port or starboard. I was assigned to starboard. When rowing in the water there is an aspect of the stroke called feathering that you don't need to do on an ergometer on land. Feathering consists of the hand closest to the water gripping the oar tightly and cocking the wrist to lift the blade of the oar out of the water. This step involves a lot of coordination between the catch, drive, and recovery of the stroke, because you feather at the recovery and put the oar back in the water at the catch. When I made the team I ended up rowing starboard, but occasionally I had to row port if someone was sick or injured. The first time I had to row port I was so nervous because I thought I would have to learn how to coordinate my movements all over again and I would row poorly as a result. Surprisingly, I was able to get in the boat and row effectively, although I had no idea how I was able to catch on so quick. This experience demonstrates the bilateral transfer that occurred from the left to right side of my body so that I was able to row port although I had learned on starboard. I now know that the reason this was possible is because of bilateral transfer. I was able to use what I learned on the left side of my body on my right side. The identical elements theory supports this because the movement is identical on either side of the body, rowers use the same muscles on either side to perform the stroke. There is also the same degree of force required on both sides of the boat, so the amount of force that the muscles have to use is the same on both sides.

This picture shows that at one point in the stroke, we are at the same position just on opposite sides.

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During the first two weeks of tryouts there were multiple different tests that we had to do to show our athleticism. One of them was a four mile run, which unfortunately I was unable to do because I had shin splints at the time. Instead of this, the coaches allowed me to row a 2000m piece on the ergometer, which is the typical distance of spring racing. It would give them an idea of how well I could potentially perform. When I did this, I had never rowed continuously on an erg for more than two minutes. When we learned the stroke it was in short time periods in order to teach us the technique, so I had not yet developed the stamina for that long of a piece, especially with the new technique that I had just learned. I completed the test with a time of 9:30, which was an acceptable time for someone who just started, but not great. I made the team, and a few weeks later we had our first official 2000m test. During this time period we had practiced different distances and spent much more time with our technique. I was amazed when my time went down by a full minute! Later in the year it got down to 8:00, and after that to 7:55. My improvements got much smaller after the initial learning had improved because my technique was not improving as much as it had in the beginning. If these pieces of data were on a learning curve, it would show a negatively accelerated learning curve. This is because at first there were very large improvements as I became more proficient in my stroke strategy. Later in the year, the increases in improvement were smaller because I was more consistent in my movements.

I was really proud of how much I was able to push myself to continue to improve over the year, I went from someone who was consistently slow at the beginning of the year and didn't think I would race, to racing with varsity in our most important race! Here is a picture from when we came in first. It was amazing to see how all of the improvements add up over the course of a year.

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As a novice in a new sport, there was a lot that I did not know. It was hard for me knowing that I was going to be competing against people at the collegiate level who had been doing this nearly their whole lives. Luckily, I had some great coaches and coxswains who were able to point out what I was doing wrong. Something that really stuck with me was one day when our coxswain took video footage of me rowing on the water. She texted me the videos after and told me that I should keep my inside shoulder down and get my body over faster on the recovery. She explained why these were important in the stroke and said I was looking better than a few days ago. Personally, I am someone who needs to see what I am doing wrong. As a beginner, I was not aware of what exactly I had to be doing, so it was helpful to be told. This type of augmented feedback is helpful to beginners. Having her tell me to focus on these things, narrowed my focus while rowing on these fundamental aspects of the stroke. These were things I was not aware of so I needed to be told. The video feedback with cues that I got of what to look for were effective in teaching me the correct technique. In this video you can also hear my coach giving augmented feedback at the time of practice. This is concurrent feedback, which was helpful at the time, but not always as beneficial as the terminal feedback my coxswain gave.

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Throughout my years running track in high school, I always preferred sprints, I was not a fan of long distance. I felt the same way for rowing. 2000m was the limit of how far I liked to go. I loved doing short sprints because I felt like I could do anything for a minute or two and then it would be over. When we had to start practicing 6000m pieces, I was not a fan. I wondered why it was necessary to practice such a long piece if we would never actually race it. By practicing at longer lengths, we are able to gain endurance and transfer that to the shorter length races, which helps our performance even if the practice times are not good. Another type of practice variability was the type of conditions we practiced in. We practiced in big lakes, small lakes, oceans, calm water, wavy water (quite often), big boats, small boats, hot weather, cold weather, basically every condition that was somewhat safe to row in we did. These are all examples of practice variability. I know realize that having practice variability gives athletes an increased capability to perform well. On the days when we rowed in especially wavy water or poor weather conditions our performance in pieces was not where the coaches wanted us to be. In practice we always had high standards that were not often met. During our last race of the season, I was rowing in a four person boat, and the conditions were absolutely perfect. We had a tail wind which helped to move the boat forward, and the water was very calm. During this race we won by seven boat lengths, which is about 20 seconds. We were all so excited! By practicing in tough and varied conditions all the time, we were able to perform well in good conditions. This is because we transferred the techniques and strength we needed in poor conditions to the good conditions. In the wavy water we always struggled to keep the boat balanced because other forces were knocking us to one side. Since we had to learn to balance in way conditions, it was easy for us to do so in calm conditions and on this race day we didn't even have to think about it.

At the 10:30 minute mark, this shows how far ahead we were in the flat conditions when we won the race!