Strength Coach Thoughts on "The Drive"
Three things I focus on, and why glute activation isn't one of them
I’m back at Craftsbury camp this week and thinking a more about sculling technique. I’m in my “Camp Coordinator” role this week, helping manage equipment and logistics, but I coached one camp late last season. During that camp, I gave the dock talk on what happens when the blades are in the water, aka “the drive.”
If you haven’t been to Craftsbury, dock talks are our ~12-minute introductions to the second row of the day during week-long camps. The coach is in the single on the water to demonstrate concepts for the rowers observing from the dock. We stick to one theme and the best dock talks deliver something that each rower, from junior to master and beginner to experienced, can work on during that session. We do not try to cover everything in the dock talk! The standard prompt is, what would you want a rower to know about this if you only have 10 minutes to teach them about it? It’s a starting point for the session, not the whole story.
One of my first formal mentors in coaching taught me to instruct in chunks of three things for best retention. I try to organize my information delivery in trios of primacy (first thing you hear), recency (last thing you hear), and no more than one thing in-between. More than one thing in-between first and last tends to get lost.
My three things for the drive were:
Different boats get different “force models.” Those who learned in fast-moving team boats or on stationary ergs need to try changing their force model from a “jump on it” front-end power emphasis to more of a “crescendo” that begins softly and builds pressure throughout each propulsive phase.
We propel the boat past the blades, we do not pull the blades through the water. I’ll show this from the single, but you can watch the Concept2 “blade path” animation for a digital illustration. I like the cue of pole-vaulting to get in this idea. I demonstrate the “plant-and-go” drill of putting the blade in the water at the catch, doing a brief pause with blades in the water, and then patiently accelerating from that highly connected position to put concept #1 and #2 together.
We include the release in the drive talk. I like the cue of “elbow your sibling” for what I feel the ideal release looks and feels like. I like to coach outboard pressure into the pin as coming from the elbows, not from the hands. Most people who spend a lot of time riding the I-beam on ergs need extra attention to outboard pressure to work the arcs, rather than the straight-forward-straight-back erg stroke.
You may have noticed that internal or muscular cues and mentions of The Almighty Glutes are not in my three things. I asked the rowers in attendance to forget for the 12 minutes that I am a strength coach, and there was audible disappointment when I said that I would not be discussing the actions of the glutes during the stroke. “Think on land, feel on water,” to paraphrase Steve Fairbairn’s writing. In my opinion (shared posthumously with Steve), the water is not the place for heavy thinking about biomechanics and functional anatomy.
My main reason for this is athlete attention and the limits of conscious thought on dynamic movement. To make the math easy, let’s say we’re rowing at 30spm and a 1-to-1 drive-to-recovery ratio. That’s 1 second per drive and 1 second per recovery. If we divide the drive into entry, mid-drive, and release, that’s 0.33 seconds per phase. Athletes are supposed to consciously activate certain muscles within fractions of a second? By the time you’ve thought, “glutes!” at the entry, that time has already passed! In reality, it’s even faster for those rowing with, for example, a .75-to-1.25 drive-to-recovery ratio, or faster than 30spm.
A second reason is limits of athlete understanding. Anatomy is challenging, and we shouldn’t assume that everyone is conversant in muscle areas and actions. I often tell a story of coaching a strength clinic for high schoolers when I was just out of college. I was going on about glutes this and glutes that for some time until one athlete raised his hand and said, “Coach, I don’t get it, what’s a ‘gloot’?” It’s not just youths, either. A masters rower for many years who had rowed in college as well asked at Craftsbury last year, “coaches are always saying feel the drive in the lats, but I don’t know where the lats are. Can you explain that to me?”
Through zero fault of their own, most athletes do not know enough about functional anatomy or biomechanics to accurately understand internal cues about individual muscle actions or segment movements. I’d contend that most coaches don’t either, at least not enough to explain in clear, accurate, and actionable terms. I would need about 20 minutes in a classroom with athletes and animations like this in order to feel good about using an anatomical cue on the water.
Even if coaches explain it clearly, athletes understand it accurately, and let’s just say we CAN consciously activate muscles so precisely, research on sport performance indicates that external cues are generally better for performance than internal cues. This holds for strength performance and endurance performance like in this 2015 erging study (abstract-readers: note that “increase in VO2” is bad when holding equal pace) and even in on-water rowing technique like this 2009 study on novice skill acquisition.
Directing athlete attention to details of how muscles act or how bodyparts move to produce force is using internal cueing. Directing athlete attention to the results or effects of their movements on the environment or equipment is using external cueing. Internal cueing requires cognitive attention, which can diminish physiological output. External cueing avoids this cognitive burden and also allows the athlete to self-organize bodyparts and muscular actions, improving physiological efficiency.
The take-home is not that internal cues are bad and coaches should never use them. I use internal cues in the gym when we’re focusing on fine-tuning smaller movements in a stable, focused, modifiable environment where, unlike coaching on water, I can easily move around, help the athlete reposition, and adjust the load of the movement as needed. I try to focus on external cues when we’re back in the sport environment, but internal cues can be useful when we’re more focused on cognitive control than physiological output, such as in a slow drill environment. We should consider if our instruction is clear and actionable, if athletes understand the cues or concepts before we use them in the performance environment, and we should try to engage athletes in multiple ways instead of relying on internal cues only or dominantly.
