Paddle Length and You
A quick search online will reveal several published resources making general recommendations for choosing a paddle length. These resources often quote paddler height, level of experience, or bench placement in guiding buyers towards choosing a paddle size. While these rationales are reasonable, there are several factors in choosing a paddle size that, when thoroughly understood, can help determine how to find a paddle that works best for you.
Background
The International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF) has established a general schematic for all dragon boat paddles approved for use in IDBF competitions world wide. This helps minimize any disparities between teams racing in an IDBF event due to equipment considerations. The current standard is known as Specification 202a, which specifies that paddle length (from blade tip to top of handle) is between 105cm and 130cm. Dealer websites may measure this in terms of inches, but the standards are the same.
The Business End
What part of the paddle matters the most? The blade. It’s the part of the paddle that serves as the interface between you and the water. When choosing a paddle length, the ultimate goal is to get the blade into the water where it works best. Generally, this means AT LEAST submerged below the surface of the water.
Shaft, can you dig it?
Since Spec 202a paddles all have specific dimensions for the blade, the one effective variable in paddle itself is the shaft length (spanning between the top of the blade and the handle). This makes choosing a paddle length about facilitating the best leverage for a paddler to apply force to a fully buried blade.
Lower Triangle
Triangles are an efficient shape for transferring force. By this rationale, our bodies will theoretically transfer force efficiently to the paddle and water when our back and outside arm are straight. Different paddling styles aside, after burying the blade, the goal becomes pulling the blade back (or yourself up to an “anchored” blade) while it is at a set depth. This means that as we pull back, our outside hand remains at a somewhat consistent distance to the water’s surface. This creates a triangle between our body and the plane of the water. This triangle is our foundation, the basic requirement to getting the blade buried during our reach. Paddle length has little to nothing to do with this triangle as it depends primarily on the physical size of the paddler.
Fig 1Upper Triangle
Adding the top arm and paddle shaft into the picture, we see an upper triangle formed. The efficiency of this triangle is highly dependent upon paddle length and paddler technique. In Figure 2, increasing trunk rotation on the reach has the functional effect of lengthening our outer arm and shortening our top arm. This affects angle of paddle at entry, influencing the vectors (direction) of force applied by the paddle to the water. It also serves to increase the horizontal displacement of our paddle during the pull, which is a good thing!
In Figure 3 B) and C), we see how increasing paddle length affects our body position and efficiency. Leaving the bottom hand the same in B), a longer shaft forces our top arm higher which can cause more strain to our top shoulder’s joint and potentially lead to increased risk of rotator cuff or labral injuries. Choking up at the bottom hand in C) to preserve top arm angle forces the paddler to bury the blade deeper in the water. Because the blade is farther from the bottom hand, the force of the water against the blade (or vice versa depending on the relative physics) is applied farther away from the bottom hand. This increases the torque that a paddler fights during the pull, making each stroke feel more difficult despite the same amount of power being put into the water. In other words, choking up due to a paddle being too long puts the paddler at a mechanical disadvantage, wasting energy.
Having an excessively long paddle also forces you to compensate during recovery just to clear the blade from the water. Having an excessively short paddle will decrease the horizontal displacement of your blade during the pull, which decreases paddling efficiency. A short paddle may also force you to flex more at the trunk during the reach to get the blade buried, which compromises 1 side of the Lower Triangle and may increase your risk for spine injuries (not pictured).
Fig 2
Fig 3
Choosing the “Right” Length
After all that theory and physics, it requires trial/error and close assessment with your coach to determine the paddle size that gives you the best fit. Depending on how skilled you are with paddling, your fitness level, where you sit, and how your coach would like you to paddle, you should choose a paddle length that allows you to get the blade fully buried while allowing you to pull with an Upper and Lower Triangle that is most efficient for you.
Recommendations
1. Continuously refine your paddling technique.
2. Get regular 1 on 1 feedback from your coach about your paddling technique.
3. Try a variety of paddle sizes from teammates to see how it meshes with your paddling technique.
4. Consider changing your paddle length if your technique is strongly compromised, it forces you to work beyond your level of fitness, or you have noticed it contribute to painful symptoms.
What To Do If the Boat Starts to Sink
I remember taking a mandatory safety class through the CDBA as a requirement to sit for the steering certification test and there was a topic that came up on what to do should your dragon boat start to take on water (eg sink) while you are away from dry land. The official recommendation (and subsequently the correct answer on the exam, ahem) was to have several paddlers bail water, have other paddlers paddling back to shore ASAP, and have another group of paddlers jump overboard and hang on to reduce the amount of weight in the boat. It was clarified that, to be fair, those people who jumped in could rotate in/out of the water with other paddlers if the journey to shore would be too long for comfort.
Yea, that clip pretty much sums up my feelings, so here we go!
Top 3 Reasons Why That Plan Sucks:
1. The boat is sinking but not sunk yet, you have some time before it ceases to become water-worthy and your crew is effectively stranded off shore. Thus, it behooves everyone to get to shore as fast is flippin’ possible. Faster travel requires more paddlers. Why on Earth would you drag people through the water? Ever pulled a tire behind the boat, it’s hard right? Pulling a tire doesn’t allow much speed even with a crew of buff paddlers, right? Losing able bodied paddlers while dragging them through the water will slow your return to shore. I will say having folks stop paddling occasionally to bail could be helpful if water is rushing in quickly.
2. The additional weight of having 2 paddlers in the boat will not affect the rate of sinking very much compared to the time lost from the effects in #1.
3. The water’s probably going to be colder than the human body. Hypothermia is a life threatening condition that you’re actually considering having people volunteer for when they don’t need to? Having paddlers rotate being in/out of the water is even more dumb. Hypothermia can still occur after you get out of the water. Plus, you now have 2 freezing people back in the boat and 2 people about to freeze in the water. Nice going. Did I mention that freezing people don’t paddle very fast?
Just don’t make that question the one that causes you to fail the test, ok? Also, after passing the test, please don’t kill people unnecessarily by actually following the recommended answer you used to pass the test. Thanks.
Rock the Boat
A boat in good working condition, in flat water, floats totally still. A boat filled with people who aren’t paddling and not moving around also should sit still. Once people start paddling, sometimes the boat can start to rock side to side. Why does this happen? How do you limit this to create a smoother running boat?
As discussed earlier, paddlers exert a same-sided, downward force on the boat when they paddle. If you have a keen eye, or better yet some video equipment to do slow motion, take a look at when the rocking occurs as the crew paddles. Boat rocking can indicate that, on average, one side of the crew is stroking just ahead of the other side, reflecting a timing issue. Try having more communication between your strokes to synch things up between them and use any tools you find helpful to encourage the rest of the crew to synch up with their other side as you move back.
If timing looks perfect but the boat continues to rock, it may reflect a difference in power between left and right side paddlers. Stronger paddlers exert more force to the paddle which translates to more force transferred to the boat. More relative force transferred to the boat than the other side can cause the boat to rock towards the stronger side during the pull phase. It’s difficult to tell athletes in a race situation to try less hard, so it may be helpful to train paddlers on the weaker side to be stronger, or perhaps teach people to be more ambidextrous so in a practice situation the coach may tinker with what seating line up gives the best timing and power distribution throughout the boat between left and right.
Why You Can’t Lift the Boat
It’s a common notion that paddlers can, through good paddling technique, actually “lift” the boat so that it sits higher on the water. This feeds into the notion that the boat becomes “lighter” to the water than when it sits at a standstill, decreasing water drag, and increasing the potential for speed.
It’s complicated and there aren’t any studies that I’m aware of looking at this phenomenon with dragon boats specifically, but based on existing science of water craft physics, it doesn’t appear that paddlers can actually lift the boat when paddling as generally thought. I’ve got some reasons for thinking this, but perhaps the Mythbusters can put this to the test.
Reason 1: Paddlers can’t directly exert an upward force on the boat by paddling. When the paddle “anchors” in the water and the paddler pulls, they transfer this force to the hull through their butt and foot to propel the boat forwards. In transferring this force, paddlers actually push the boat downwards into the water on the side they sit. At practice, try having several rows paddle on one side of the boat. The boat will dip to that side during the pull phase and rock to the opposite side during recovery.
Reason 2: Boat lift is generally attributed to either hydrostatic (buoyant) lift or hydrodynamic lift. Hydrostatic lift is the phenomenon that allows boats to float because the hull displaces an equal mass in water volume as the craft and all its cargo weigh, which is why dragon boats and those like it are said to have displacement hulls. At a standstill, boats float by hydrostatic lift. Once the boat starts to move, some lift is gained by hydrodynamic lift where the water is pushing the boat upwards vs being pushed out of the way by the hull. At a certain speed, the boat’s hydrodynamic lift will exceed the hydrostatic lift and the vessel begins to plane across the water. This requires a very high amount of power to achieve. Think of trying to walk on water. Unless you’re especially holy, you’ll likely sink the moment you step foot on the surface. Now, if you get tossed out of a speed boat going 200 mph, you’ll painfully skip and bounce off the surface of the water because hydrodynamic lift is keeping you from sinking. It would take a very strong motor to get a dragon boat even close to planing speed. IMO, paddlers can’t put out enough power to make hydrodynamic lift that effective.
Reason 3: Like I wrote above, paddlers will have a very hard time reaching planing speed because of the physics of displacement hull speed. Displacement hulls are subject to something called wave making resistance which occurs when waves made from pushing water off the front combine with waves made in the wake. This combination of the waves at either end cause a rapid climb in water drag. This point is called hull speed. It is a calculation based on the length of the water line of the hull as it sits in the water. A fully loaded dragon boat has a a certain measurable length of water that contacts the hull which is measured as the water line length. A larger waterline actually makes for a higher hull speed value! Lifting the boat out of the water becomes less desirable in this regard. Certain boats are designed to allow the athlete(s)/motors to exceed calculated hull speed without planing, which THEN causes a strong decrease in drag. Essentially, water drag increases as hull speed is met, a boat with a larger water line length has a higher hull speed, lifting the boat decreases the water line length and decreases hull speed causing earlier rise in water drag as speed increases.
Teamwork and Boat Control
These Chinese teams show some kick ass control over their boat and crew. I’m sure they’d have no problem lining up at the start line on a windy day at TI.
Ways to Improve Efficiency: Being Rigid
Part of any racing sport involves efficiency. Efficiency means you spend as little energy as possible in accomplishing the same goal. Take a Prius vs a dragster, for example. If both cars rolled 1/4 mile at 35 mph, the Prius would probably expend less gasoline getting there than the dragster. The Prius is obviously the more efficient car, right? Now, have both cars complete the 1/4 mile in as little time as possible. The dragster takes 5+ seconds while the Prius finishes in 15+ seconds. Which car was most fuel efficient? The Prius was of course. Who cares? Nobody cares, because the Prius lost the race. Which car was more efficient at winning? The dragster was.
In a competitive sprint sport such as dragon boat, it shouldn’t matter if your team can handle a 2:30 split time for 10,000 meters. 2:30 in a 500 meter race will put you at a recreational team level. In this case, the judicious use of extra energy is warranted to boost performance. That’s not to say that losing all focus and coordination in exchange for high stroke effort is worth it, it just means that racing should never be paced easily to be competitive. The big question is, how do you apply energy to the water efficiently to give you the highest performance possible?
There are many ways to be a more efficient paddler, but today this post is about selectively making your body rigid during the pull phase.
Why be rigid?
Rigid structures transmit force efficiently, ideally to where that force can be applied for the greatest power and work. Flexible structures do not efficiently transmit force because of their tendency to deform in response those forces. Think about the dragon boat paddle itself. Why not make a paddle out of yarn? It’d be pretty light, but it’s so damn flexible you can wrap it around your neck as a scarf! You can try to paddle with it till your workaholic significant other comes home and it still won’t get you far. Now, wood and carbon fiber paddles are very stiff and deform very little when you apply force to it. This allows the paddle to transmit force to the water, which by action/reaction, provides a force back on the paddle. Thus, current IDBF spec 202a paddles are much more efficient than a yarn paddle. Who would have thought?
To bring this back on track, let’s apply that concept of rigidity to your body movements during paddling. Collapsing top arms, bending bottom elbows, and slouching spines all contribute to lost paddling efficiency. Theoretically, because rigid structures transmit force better than less rigid structures, the less rigid structures in a system are more likely to deform in response, which can coincidentally increase the risk of injury to those body parts. Back to the yarn paddle example (last time I swear), your body is hopefully more rigid than the yarn and so the force you put into the yarn paddle is poorly transmitted to the water. The opposite can be the case for a wood/carbon paddle. The paddle may be much more efficient than you are at transmitting force.
Example of how less rigid structures are poor transmitters of force
Notice how that kid’s butt is moving more than the weight he is lifting? His crappy technique and weak back are not enough to lift the weight efficiently. The same thing can happen if you slouch or crunch your torso when paddling. Instead of pushing the boat forward through your feet (your firm connection point to the boat), the water is bending your back into a U, as if it were some kind of…yarn spine. Hardly efficient.
The Mt. Home Canoe Club has published some articles that refer to multiple ”Power Circles.” I prefer to summarize the concepts through the transmission of force from the water, through the paddle, through your body, to the boat. The ultimate goal is to turn 100% of that water force into a force to move the boat.
1. Assuming you have the skill to apply effective force to the paddle without “ripping the water”, we’ll assume the water pushes back on the paddle with equal force (untrue since the paddle itself is not 100% efficient).
2. The water’s force is transmitted through the paddle to your arms, shoulders and torso. Here’s where it’s important to maintain that A-frame in which the relative position of your shoulders and hands don’t change during the pull. A collapsed A-frame decreases efficiency.
3. By keeping your spine as rigid in neutral as possible (the position it would have as if you were standing up tall) the force can be transmitted from your upper body to your lower body. Slouching, crunching during the pull, or doing the “roll up” as you pull, decreases efficiency.
4. Firmly planting your hip, outer leg against the gunnel and wedging your heel against the seat stop ahead of you anchors you firmly to the boat. This allows for efficient transmission of the water’s force to the hull. Have you ever tried paddling with your legs held off the floor of the boat? Try it, see what happens. Did you move the boat at all or did the water end up moving just you instead? Making yourself as much of a solid, attached part of the boat as possible improves efficiency of force transmission.
5. Force applied to the hull is expressed in terms of the wonderful F=ma and the boat is accelerated in accordance to how little force was wasted along the way from the water to the hull.
This detailed schematic basically sums it up
There’s the magic effect of improved paddling efficiency! If you can increase your paddle power by 10% in a few minutes of changing how you transfer force, that’s a much better deal than trying to get 10% physically stronger, which can take 6-8 weeks of working out!
So as you paddle, try to think about how to hold yourself selectively rigid from the tips above to avoid losing paddling power.
And we’re back!
Just got back from a fun and educational day at Dominic Shew’s paddling clinic hosted by BAD. From essentially 9-4 we learned about his perspective on paddling and how he instructs his paddlers to be the roughest, toughest, and fastest bunch on the water. Not to say that our attending group is now ALL that, but it definitely opened my eyes to a whole new style of paddling dragon boat.
You can see the style of paddling that Dominic was instructing us in here in the FCRCC Grand Finale of 2010:
At 0:54 in the video, you can hear how their technique makes women swoon and how bodaciously kick ass their performance is.
Clarification: Dominic is a paddler on FCRCC’s DB team as coached by Kamini Jain. While he is not the coach of FCRCC itself, he does coaching/consulting with other teams
The training that Dominic puts towards his teams is methodical, challenging, and clearly effective. From his 15+ years of racing experience across multiple types of paddle-craft, he has a strong rationale for every aspect of what he teaches. His mindset is to emphasize all that is powerful and effective while reducing as many detrimental factors to performance as possible.
Now, my goal with writing this post isn’t to regurgitate what he teaches or how to race like a top Canadian team but rather reflect on my experience and how I believe it connects with coaching in general.
1. You can learn to paddle like a pro from a pro paddler, but you’re not a pro unless…well, you train at that level. I’d say choose a paddling style that works best for the type of paddlers you have. Set a reasonable performance goal and use that style with good consistency to accomplish that goal.
2. Radically changing technique can have several possible outcomes. Most notably: the team manages to shave seconds off a time, the boat goes slower due to funky paddling, or people get injured. These injuries can range from relatively minor to very severe and harmful. Minor injuries can be like blisters in new places or sore/tight muscles. More serious injuries can consist of torn ligaments/tendons or damaged inter-vertebral discs. The more drastic the change, the higher the risk of injury. As a coach, it’s your responsibility to minimize this risk to your athletes. Set up a plan that slowly modifies technique towards your end-goals. Work on prerequisite technique and fitness as appropriate.
3. In Dominic’s words: “improving paddling technique can take you very far in terms of performance.” I had always wondered why top, world-class teams all looked so different when paddling, yet pull times very close (for the most part) to each other. So far, my best guess is that technique helps, but is not everything about racing. The sum effect of fitness, experience, natural talent (physical build) easily outweigh technique alone IMO. At the world level, top teams are ALL very experienced and fit. All paddlers are driven and motivated and often have atypical physique. Given those things present, each individual team uses a uniform technique to great effect. The nuances of the stroke technique itself become less important so long as all paddlers are working together.
In the end, I thought Dominic’s paddling clinic was very interesting from a coaching perspective and as a paddler, I have to say it’s been a long time since my bottom has been that sore….don’t be gross now.
If you enjoyed reading, please consider making a donation. We SFL bloggers write and paddle for the love of the sport but, like many other things, blogging takes time away from work, family, and paddling (in increasing order of importance, j/k). Every contribution (no matter how small) helps raise money for the team to race and use better equipment. As a team, you have our thanks for anything you can spare in helping us out. You may use this link:
More paddling physics
Another article describing the physics of paddling. Gonna have to digest this one and compare to the Oxford article later.
Read it here.
Stereo-GoPro’s
Trying out a new idea to mount GoPro’s on opposite ends of a pole and holding them up front for views of both sides of the boat…hard to keep steady being handheld and the pole vibes can be heard through the mics, but is a neat concept IMO.
To Power or Not To Power
If you read through the Oxford University Physics of Rowing, you know that it’s more energy efficient to minimize variations in speed over a course and also that you can’t double your speed if you double your power output.
For these reasons, it makes sense that adding Power 10′s into your race piece are risky to your performance.
1. It takes much more power than you think to speed by another moving boat. If you double your power output (an incredible effort when racing) the real change in your overall velocity is minimal due to the need to overcome increased resistance at-speed and change the velocity of the boat (and the mass of 22 people).
2. Fluctuations in velocity are more influential in terms of energy consumption than average velocity. Say you run Power 10′s during a race to spike the boat speed temporarily. Between the Powers, let say your boat speed slows a bit because of fatigue/timing etc. You would have spent more energy and gotten the same finish time as if you just held a steady pace between the velocity of your Powers and your non-Powers.
Just imagine if you had the same car as a buddy of yours and the both you were driving on a very long, straight road. Your friend puts the car on cruise control and holds a steady speed. You, like a spaz, drive alongside by stepping on the gas to get ahead and then letting off the gas to slow down. By the end of the trip, you can bet that by the same physics as rowing, you would have spent more gas on the trip than your friend did.
To bring that example back to dragon boat, you can see our GPS tests here:
Example 1 – paddling 300m with a full race start, no Power 10′s
Example 2 – paddling 300m with a full race start, with Power 10′s
The metrics show that for the run without powers, we moved 0.1 km/hr faster on average than with the powers. Of course, it’s far from proving anything, but for our crew on that day, it showed we had a drop in performance when we added Power 10′s. I can tell you that from being on board that day, people were much more tired when adding the Power 10′s. To spend more energy and go slower makes absolutely no sense especially when running multiple heats at 100% effort through the day. So, we as a team are toying with stopping the Powers.
As a coach, don’t let this article dissuade you from running Power 10′s. Just understand what makes Power 10′s actually beneficial. Your team should be very well-conditioned to handle the physical toll of adding Powers and disciplined enough to maintain technique leading up to and after the Powers.
If you enjoyed reading, please consider making a donation. We SFL bloggers write and paddle for the love of the sport but, like many other things, blogging takes time away from work, family, and paddling (in increasing order of importance, j/k). Every contribution (no matter how small) helps raise money for the team to race and use better equipment. As a team, you have our thanks for anything you can spare in helping us out. You may use this link:
Read, Learn, Apply, Rethink, Revamp
I found this a while ago, but thought it was a very good article on The Physics of Rowing. I plan on writing up some dragon boat corollaries in the Coaching Corner. Stay tuned.
That Mental Switch
As good athletes, you are in touch with the effort required to race, the determination needed to stay strong, and the line where your body says “enough is enough.” During a race, you will struggle to keep those things in balance.
There’s a saying that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” When you hear that little voice inside your head telling you to give up, you press onward. As your body says it’s getting tired, you dig deep and find energy you didn’t feel before. It’s easy to lose that fighting spirit and let the race, the competition, and your bad habits take over. So now’s your chance. Don your imagination caps and put yourself in the race.
—————————————————————————————————————————
You’re feeling fresh and jittery at the start line. The race marshall shouts a bunch of stuff through his megaphone but you only half-hear it. You are focused on the commands of your steersperson only. You are leaned forward and still as a statue, mentally waiting for those magic words “paddlers are you ready.” The moment you hear “paddlers” you jump to life and set up for that first stroke. There’s a split second of total silence and right as you hear that airhorn, you take that first solid stroke.
The rate steadily climbs as you accelerate, the water becomes so light that you almost don’t feel it against your paddle anymore. You run through the count and give the ready and reach your full stroke. Your focus is completely on the paddle in front of you; matching the exit and entry exactly. You have to tell yourself to relax and flow w/ the boat, completely in time. You take a couple deep breaths and then you pump yourself up for the first Power 10. You keep your head up, still locked onto the paddle in front of you and take your best strokes. You reach it out and maintain, ready to repeat as the call comes across the boat.
Your lungs burn, the water is in your face, you taste metal, and your paddle starts feeling heavy. You can see the finish buoys in your peripherals and you can’t help but notice other boats are louder than they should be as they are close by. You feel a panic take the boat, people start yelling about timing. You feel powerless to stop what’s happening. The team is falling apart.
That very moment when everything seems on the brink of collapse, you feel as though somebody pulled your blindfold off. You feel like you just woke up from a crazy dream. In a split second, you feel just as strong as you were at the starting line. You hear the finish call through the chaos and you can feel everybody join you in building the boat back to peak velocity. You barely hear the call to Let It Ride and know that something incredible happened.
You found something inside yourself that you didn’t know about before and it wasn’t luck. You found a mental switch, a special tank of reserve kick-ass that only you could tap when 100% focused and determined. It’s something that will always be there, race after race. It’s the reason you belong on this team of people with the same reserve.
You know you paddle with SFL.
More Technique
Most of us have heard this before…and it’s another thing altogether to make it happen, but coming from one of the top teams on this continent, it’s gotta mean something!
Interesting Thoughts
Found this new video on technique, have yet to really digest it, but seems interesting and the guy makes some good comments.
Keith Code – Words of Wisdom
Keith Code is a former championship motorcycle racer who started and runs his own riding school. I saw this clip where he puts out some great words of wisdom. I thought it adequately sums up my philosophies on paddling as a coach, a paddler, and a science-minded person.
“In asking other riders, even really really good ones, didn’t yield anything but sortof this half-cocked advice, you know, and no, there’s got to be something more to it than this. We have some physics involved here, we have some geometry involved here. You know, if you’re applying that to something specifically, there must be a right way to do it.”
Slug Taper
Yet another uncredited resource from collegiate-level swimming. Here are excerpts from a document on taper training. Again, if this is your verifiable intellectual property and you would like this removed, please contact us.
Slug Taper
Things to remember:
The work is not over. You still have some training to do. Some heart rate work to maintain aerobic capacity, sprints, and some power racks.
Watch your eating habits. Your workloads are decreasing and your intake does not need to be the same.
Sleep as much as possible, but not in the morning. Continue to get up fairly early and take a nap during the day if possible. Go to bed early.
When asked to go fast in practice – go fast. Don’t hold back. Don’t wait to feel great before you go hard. There is no special magic.
Reward the positive and ignore the negative, focus on where you’re going.
Taper works because:
You have your back up against the wall. There is not a second chance.
Mentally you prepare for the big push.
You are part of a team and the team deserves your best. The team is also there to support you.
Keep in mind:
This is a swim meet. Nothing more/nothing less. Take each race one at a time. Don’t let one race affect the other.
Good or Bad, learn from the experience! What will you change for your next race, day, season?
If you enjoyed reading, please consider making a donation. We SFL bloggers write and paddle for the love of the sport but, like many other things, blogging takes time away from work, family, and paddling (in increasing order of importance, j/k). Every contribution (no matter how small) helps raise money for the team to race and use better equipment. As a team, you have our thanks for anything you can spare in helping us out. You may use this link:
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The Secret of Speed
The following is an excerpt from training documents issued to competitive collegiate swimmers. The documents provide no author but these were issued to a swim team under the skilled direction of Mr. Kim Musch. If this excerpt is your verifiable intellectual property and you would like the post removed, please let us know.
The Secret of Speed
Speed results not so much from the swiftness with which you can contract your muscles, but the swiftness with which you can relax them so that they don’t act as brakes on your acceleration.
The concept of relaxation applies to any motion. The more relaxed your antagonistic muscles, the faster – and paradoxically more powerful – that motion.
The source of strength is simply explained. A realxed muscle can be stretched to greater length than a tense muscle. Up to a point, the more stretched it is, the more forceful it’s contraction.
You don’t have to kill yourself to be a winner -
Despite evidence indicating it’s inefficiency, all-out struggle remains a national fixation. Our tradition holds that the battle is won by the man who gives the limit. We treat with supreme regard sacrifice. Death is the ultimate performance. ”He killed himself” is a colloquial form of flattery with antecedents in the legend of the warrior Pheidippides, who ran from the plains of Marathon of Athens to announce, “Rejoice we conquer!” and fell dead. There was a sacrifice consistent with our own concept of achievement - which is that if you have anything left in you at the end of a contest, you haven’t given your all.
“That extra effort can hold you back” – Whether you want to swim fast or think fast, overeffort diminishes your prospects. The way to perform at your best is to learn to ease off all extra tensions by switching off all untimely reactions. Take, for example, thinking and doing. We try to think while we’re doing, which impairs the doing, and we try to do while we’re thinking, which prevents us from thinking clearly.
In our ambition to succeed, we’re driven to do anything and everything at once. This isn’t the way the body/mind functions. You can’t abruptly “stop and think”, as is so often counseled. Stopping is an active process. What you can do is stop, pause and then think. There needs to be n interval between doing and thinking and thinking and doing. While you perform, you mustn’t think about the technique of your performance. While you think through the details involved in performing you mustn’t perform. You can do both at the same time, of course, but you won’t do either well. To think or perform at your best, you keep the functions separate. When you try too hard at anything, you produce extraneous effort: You quiver all over and then become tense; Your motions are inefficient. When you play too hard, you make a business of recreation, which deprives you of its expressive, restorative benefits. Working too hard and playing too hard are roads to self-destruction. Consider the word: recreation (re-creation) that’s its function.
To work hard and play hard should mean working productively and playing ecstatically. Peak experiences result when all elements fit harmoniously together and you become as one with your task. The state arrives spontaneously. It’s almost never achieved through extreme effort – because such striving sets up bodily forces that disorganize and burden the essentials needed for the event.
In neuromuscular terms, a gentle forcefulness is produced by just the right number of muscle fibers coming into play at just the right time in just the right organization to move the levers and joints of the body through the precise motion needed to accomplish the objective. Extra effort upsets this balance. Result: a poor performance.
When you ask athletes who have just performed a record performance, to tell you what happened – they always say something like this. ”I didn’t even really remember starting the race. All of a sudden I was swimming. I don’t remember any particular moment during the event. It all seemed so easy. At the finish, the way the crowd was cheering told me I’d done well, but I had the feeling that if I’d only tried a little harder I could have done much better.” But would he have had the same success if he had tried harder? Probably not!
Exhaustion is no longer the mark of top class performance. It shouldn’t be the mark of yours. So TRAIN for your event – don’t STRAIN yourself.
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GPS speed profiles!
UPDATE: I’m going deposit most of our practice GPS profiles here unless they deserve their own post for some reason.
Technique of Hcc
Don’t really know if Hcc has anything to do w/ the team, but it’s got probably the best slow-motion capture of dragon boating I’ve seen. It’s a great opportunity to pick apart their technique! I’ll only touch on a couple of their paddlers that really stand out.
0:00 – 0:55 = everyone has a good setup on the start. The black-shirted guy breaks his bottom arm which keeps him from digging fully (this seems to be how he paddles throughout the vid). He also doesn’t reach that far compared to others around him (based on his trunk lean). This means he’s pulling less water both in depth and in length of stroke. The guy in back pulls out early which makes him rush a bit.
1:13 – 1:35 = The guy in the blue t-shirt w/ rolled sleeves has probably the most different stroke technique amongst the whole right side. His top elbow bends so much on the reach that it causes his paddle to twist to face out. It seems to me like he paddles to maximize paddle reach. Not only does his technique make him late on both the exit AND entry, but his paddle fully buries at 90 degrees! Compare that to the guy in red who enters w/ positive angle.
1:44 – 1:53 = rows 1 and 2 match up well except for the exit, where row 2 exits early. They have a nice pause up front, but I prefer a faster dig after the bottom arm reaches full extension. Row 3 bends his bottom elbow in the pull which makes him start to rush.
2:47 – 3:15 = the back 2 guys are interesting to compare. Guy in last row has crazy reach and rotation but his pull depends mostly on his low back (he does the “roll-up”). He also doesn’t drive that much w/ his top arm since his paddle drops at the same speed as his head. He’s using his body to drive the paddle, not his top arm. The problem w/ this technique is that as his paddle pulls back, he loses power because he can only sit up so far. The guy in the bucket hat, meanwhile, has nearly equal reach and rotation but uses more top-arm drive and counter-rotation to pull the paddle vs his back extensors via the “roll-up.” He probably pulls before he’s fully buried to cause the kerplunking backsplash you see trailing his paddle. This is undesirable because the air pocket from a “kerplunk” usually pops up into the paddler 1 row back. This makes it harder to see which can throw off timing.
Steering
There’s a saying that only 1 person can single-handedly lose a race and that is the steersperson. The steersperson has the power to keep the race at 500m or make it 520m. They can help the boat surge and glide at full speed or drag the boat down to a crawl. I’m not saying that I’m good at steering (because I’ve never steered a single race update: now I have, ha) but I’ve seen some techniques that seem to help and some that seem to hurt. I’d be interested in hearing actual feedback from people w/ race steering experience.
1. Surface Area and Drag
The basic principle of steering is that the oar is the rudder that pushes water either left or right, causing the boat to turn in that direction. The more water pushed, the sharper the turn. Since surface area and drag determines how much water is pushed, it makes sense that the deeper the oar is in the water at a given angle, the harder the boat can turn. In other words, the more profile the oar has to the flow of water, the more drag and thus steering power it creates. Since our 500m races are meant to be as straight as possible, it makes sense to me that only the minimum oar depth be used to make needed corrections. While it’s possible that an oar held deep but straight in the water should present minimal drag in itself and stabilize the boat along water currents, the water current rarely travels parallel from start to finish (likely never). If the water current is pushing sideways, a straight steering oar will actually push the boat off course making corrections necessary. If a steersperson has the oar deep, they’d need to keep the angle of their corrections minimal because the oar will push relatively more water than if it’s shallow. Any time the flow of water under the boat encounters some amount of drag from the steering oar, it slows the boat down.
This may be a novice-concept (because I thought of it) but steering isn’t just about yanking or shoving the oar towards or away from you. I say a steersperson should use that T-grip to their advantage because it tells you how the oar is ROTATED in the water. I’m inclined to think that small, rotational corrections of the oar along with small push/pull corrections are more efficient than push/pull alone. It’s just a thought.
Update: I was playing around w/ the oar-tilting idea at Mission’s practice and it works to a degree….but not exactly as hoped. Yes, it does help to have the oar pushing a lot of water and yes it catches more water when tilted in the correct angle while turning. The only problem w/ tilting the oar was that too much tilt caused the oar to get pushed OUT of the water and skim along the surface, yielding no steering at all. I guess the best thing to look for is that the oar has water resistance against it and that resistance is transferring force directly to the steering arm, since this is what transmits that force to the direction of boat travel.
2. Oar In/Out
Very experienced steerspeople will periodically dip the steering oar in and out of the water in an effort to minimize the negative effects that steering input has on speed. This works great if you can read the water well enough to set the boat in a straight path without having to make a doubly-big correction as a result. It’s like driving with your hands off the steering wheel. Have you ever tried this? (WARNING: Don’t try this in traffic or ever!) If you haven’t, I’ll tell you that the car will seem to go straight for a little while but after a few seconds it will veer left or right, causing you and your passengers to freak out and make a quick correction. That correction makes your path of travel curvy and thus longer and also cuts down on your velocity. I don’t know, but I suspect that NO race car drivers would take their hands off the steering wheel, even if it’s a drag race down a straight. The benefits of control over the vehicle often outweigh the cons of micro-corrections on velocity/distance traveled.
Finesse:
You’ve got the power, but do you have the touch? This is probably the grayest area of any sporting activity. Sometimes people with finesse use techniques that don’t make much sense or even seem like terrible ideas, but they always make it work for the best. In dragon boat, there are a lot of good steerspeople but only a few that I’ve seen who appear perfectly at home on the back of the boat. (Luckily for us) Jeff Ma is one of those people. It doesn’t matter what venue of race, what water conditions, what roster is on the boat. Jeff is always relaxed and in control. Check out some of these great photos of him in recent years. I mean, he’s so beyond regular steering he has time to think about freakin’ aerodynamics! Come on! I have never seen another steersperson do this and I don’t think anybody but Jeff would or even could, period.
If you enjoyed reading, please consider making a donation. We SFL bloggers write and paddle for the love of the sport but, like many other things, blogging takes time away from work, family, and paddling (in increasing order of importance, j/k). Every contribution (no matter how small) helps raise money for the team to race and use better equipment. As a team, you have our thanks for anything you can spare in helping us out. You may use this link:
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