Analysis: Considerations in Choosing a Stroke for Cal
Outline:
With three options in mind, we arrived at the question of what stroke is best for Cal.
It came down to identifying the team’s strengths, weaknesses and constraints in training.
Things to Consider
Weaknesses
1. Lower technical ability, which impeded force transfer with the current stroke.
2. Insufficient fitness to sustain an explosive stroke.
3. Low muscular endurance in general.
Strengths
1. 2010’s Cal was a physically large and strong team.
2. Mentally able to stay in control of difficult races and practices.
3. The team was very eager to put in sustained effort in order to improve.
Training Constraints
1. Maximum 2-3 days per week on the water.
2. Many paddlers could only attend less than this.
There was muscle on the boat. But many paddlers couldn’t use the current stroke to move the boat efficiently. Would a new stroke be able to take advantage of the team’s strengths, and compensate for its weaknesses? I thought so.
Criteria for a New Stroke
Limited water time: There is no point in using a difficult stroke without time to learn it. Limited water time also ensures low endurance, so they would remain a ‘strength-based’ team.
We needed a stroke which wasn’t challenging, which didn’t depend on muscular endurance, but which took used physical power. Ideally, this stroke would be ‘novice-proof: maybe less efficient, but hard to get wrong.
The Stroke
Restructuring the Hip Rotation
The paddlers were not experienced enough to have intuition for how body motions move the boat.
Rotation is an important part of the stroke. However, many paddlers rotate without it doing anything useful.
How this can happen:
-Paddlers rotate with the shoulders only—not much muscle behind it.
-Rotation follows the motion of the blade instead of leading it.
To prevent these: emphasize the use of the hips, engaging larger muscles in the rotation.
Keep hips as free to rotate as possible. So I opted for bringing the inside leg, or both legs forward (cf. high-kneel canoe, kayak, resp.). This releases body weight off the inside hip, making rotation easier.
It also makes forward rotation a position of “tension.” With the inside leg back, outside leg forward, as the team used to do, the most neutral position for the hips is to stay rotated forward.
This can trap an inexperienced padder in an “always-forward” position. The other way around, the hips are set-up at the catch to encourage a strong rotation to return them to neutral.
Cleaning up the Exit
Slow exits are bad.
Having the blade (partially) submerged without pulling on it will slow the boat. Spending too much time and effort on the exit leaves little for the recovery.
Cal struggled with exits already. And a very long stroke (see below) would increase risks of slow exits.
An exit initiated by breaking the bottom arm will become, in the hands of a novice,a strange movement in which the tension in the bottom arm is released well before extraction: the opposite of what a long stroke aims to achieve.
Therefore, we adopted a top arm-initiated exit. The top thumb pulls up as the stroke is ending, cleanly extracting the blade without involving the bottom arm.
Demerit: this is actually a very difficult movement for people with poor shoulder endurance. Advantage: it allows the rest of the body to relax a lot more.
Pulling to the Hip
The most major change I made caused a lot of controversy. I decided to opt for the Ontario-style pull to the hip.
Why? Because it was very well suited to a team with big physical strength, and relatively low endurance, and because it provided a large window in which to generate power.
- Once the blade goes negative and passes mid-thigh, the pull stops being efficient so you should exit the water.
Or, a more extreme misstatement: pulling past mid thigh decelerates the boat. - Or, a negative blade pulls the boat down and stops it from planing.
The Facts:
True, pulling beyond mid-thigh exits the normal stroke’s strongest powerband. But for a team with more muscle than endurance and quickness, this doesn’t actually matter.
I’ll support this position with a weightlifting analogy.
Suppose that you’re an olympic lifter trying to hit a new PR on your clean. Are you going to do a hang clean, or are you going to do a full clean off the floor?
To say that you should exit at mid-thigh else you’ll slow the boat is as silly as saying that you’ll clean more from a hang or off blocks than off the floor.
In a clean, the second pull is much more powerful than the first. (As much as double.) But the first pull imparts momentum in the bar which allows a heavier weight to be lifted.
Similarly, you do generate more power pulling the blade from full extension to mid-thigh than from mid-thigh to the hip. But you generate the most power putting them together.
If you’re going for an explosive, high rate style of paddling, then yes, you do want to pull out earlier since a long pull will limit your stroke rate.
Likewise, if you’re a crossfit-er cleaning sub-maximal weight for 21 reps as fast as possible, you’ll probably want to hang clean it. But as Cal has been a physically strong, slow rate team, and not a high-rate team ‘slapping at the water,’ going for the longest possible stroke and moving through as large a volume of water as possible makes sense.
The second point is a load of bullshit, which is well-addressed by Geoff Fong.
If you’re a rower (at least with UK-style technique, or with an “erg technique” high pull) you’ll also know that the finish isn’t the strongest part of the stroke, but you know that it’s damn well essential.
Discussion
For Cal, this stroke made sense didactically and technically.
It’s pretty hard not to generate good power when the idea of the stroke is “put the blade in the water, and use as much of your body as possible to pull the blade as far back as possible.”
If the power comes on at different times, not a problem. If the blade angle slips, not a problem: the pull’s long enough that you’ll still get a good pull in somewhere in the stroke at an effective angle. If the catch is sloppy, again, not a problem, you’ve only missed 20% of the stroke. No matter what the paddler does, this approach will pull a lot of water.
Is it the best stroke? Maybe not. Is it the best approach for a physically strong but inexperienced team? I think so.
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