Broken Oars Technique Clinic: An Alien’s Guide To Rowing Well, Part Two

The Northern One, or as we like to call him when he's writing the podcast blurb, the technically flawless one, returns with Part Two of An Alien's Guide to Rowing Well - The Revenge. This Time He's Back, and He's Read the Manual.

 

You know the premise - if aliens capable of travelling interstellar distances in spacecraft capable of warping our perceptions of space and time ever came to Earth and wanted to get in a boat and pull hard on an oar, this primer would take them through the basics, breaking down each element of the rowing stroke to its fundamental pieces, and talking it through with conceptual ideas, spatial triggers and technical drills that would help them beat us in a winner take all 2k race.

 

Yeah. We're rooting for the aliens ...

 

In this episode, we recap the key points of the first, and then get right into it:

 

In this episode, we talk about:

 

1) The stretcher / footplate - and why it's vital to understand what it does, and what you do to it.

 

2) Talking to your boatman, and the tears that may ensue when you do.

 

3) Squaring, and why squaring early and positively is a good muscle memory habit to get into.

 

4) Raising the hands to the catch and why your partner's kidneys are a good thing in this case.

 

And now we've compressed down, everything is in the right position and we're poised, we talk about the catch, how it should feel, how it should look, we talk about why having Great Apes in our ancestry is a good thing, and why half slide rowing rate up twos until it falls apart are one of the best things you can do to sharpen it into a thing of lethal beauty.

 

5) Learned responses vs. stimulus responses and why hard, harder, hardest ideas of loading up lose out to everything all at once when you look at the realities of the blade in the water vs. the moving boat when it comes to the legs ...

 

But then, dear listeners, we go further, and in doing so we totally destroy our self-curated myth that we're a bunch of chancers who know nothing about rowing, because we go on to talk about:

 

6) Why rowing isn't, in fact, all about the legs, but about how the power of the legs sets up the use of the body and the body's weight to drive the oar hard against the pin, creating boatspeed and why the draw to the finish contributes to this when done properly.

 

We reach the finish, but not the finish of Broken Oars Technique Clinic, as next time, we'll get into extraction, recovery, ideas about gearing and rigging, watermanship and some of the fads and fashions that have come and gone. 

 

As we always do, we emphasise that however you choose to move a boat, the best way to do it is by getting everyone on the same page doing the same things - whether you're a GB profile advocate, a Spracklen devotee, or a Fairbairn apologist. So, feel free to get in touch with us and tell us where we're going wrong.

 

Like you always do!

 

Stern Four? I said, 'play the piano! Do it now!'

 

Get Some!