Rowing and Regatta magazine articles

ARTICLE 1 - Examples from current international rowers who competed at the 2007 World Championships

In the magazine we plotted the blade path shape. However, some people find it easier to think about what the hands are doing so in this case we have also plotted the hand circle shapes (which are just the inverse of the blade path).

                        Blade path shape                                                                Hand circle shape

Seat 4 (stroke)  Click picture to enlarge

Seat 3  Click picture to enlarge

Seat 2  Click picture to enlarge

Seat 1 (bow)  Click picture to enlarge

Example international data. (Note, this is a single stroke repeated that doesn't show all aspects of the software).

As you can see the profiles are all exceptionally good. I would suggest that you have a look at the example file from different angles and try looking in slow motion. The catches, in particular, are worth looking at as an example of what you should do.

• The hand heights are all totally constant in the recovery

• The catch slip and finish slip are small

• Blades are at the correct depth in the drive part of the stroke

• In all cases the hands start to go up on the way forward

However, even at this level there are some points which are worth noting.

On the above 8 pictures, the magenta coloured dot shows the point at which each rower starts to raise the hands. From this we can see that stroke and bow start this movement slightly earlier than 2 and 3. This is reflected in the catch slips shown below. Although, all of these values are good at rate 40, the stroke and bow seats have lower catch slip than the 2 and 3 seats.

What is also interesting is that the rower in the stroke seat drops the hands at around 3/4 slide before raising them again (in good time). In this case, this style has not penalised the rower compared to the bow seat who maintains constant hand heights until the hands are raised. (Both rowers achieve similar catch slip of around 6 degrees).

The video below (of software examples with audio commentary) compares the catches of the bow seat (catch slip of 6.4 degrees) and 2 seat (catch slip of 9.5 degrees) in the above examples. Have a look at the blade path shapes first before looking at the video. (In this video the first graph is a bit small but you can look at it properly yourself by downloading our software and running the example file).