Boating Part 7

In order to facilitate the entire body in swinging from the hips, and not from one of the vertebrae, the legs should be opened, and the knees induced outward, as the body swings forward. The body can then lower itself to a greater reach forward, and directly from the hips; whereas if the knees are placed together the thighs check the forward motion of the body, and compel it, if it remains rigid, to curtail its forward reach. (If the vertebrae bend when the swing from the hips is checked by the bent knees, the extra reach thus attained is weak, and of comparatively minor effect.)

Next (2) the shoulders have to be rigid. If they give way, and if the sockets stretch when the strain of the oar is felt, the effect of the stroke is evidently weakened. Now if the shoulders are stretched forward at the beginning of the stroke, the muscles which govern and support them have not the same power of rigidity that they possess when the shoulders are well drawn back at the outset. The oarsman gains a little in reach by extending his shoulders, but he loses in rigidity of muscle, and consequently in the force which he applies to the oar.

3. The legs and feet should combine to exercise pressure against the stretcher at the same moment, and contemporaneously with the application of the oar to the water. If they press too soon, the body is forced back while the oar is in air; if too late, the hold of the water is weak, for want of legwork to support the body.

4. The oar should be held in the fingers, not in the fist; the lower joints of the fingers should be nearly straight when the oar is held.

The hold which a gymnast would take of a bar of the same thickness, if he were hanging from it, is, as regards the four fingers of the hand, the same which an oarsman should take of his oar. His thumb should come underneath, not over the handle.

5 and 10. Government of the depression or elevation of the blade, respectively, during stroke and recovery, is a matter of application of joints and of muscles. This much may be borne in mind, that the freer the wrist is, the better is the oar governed; and if an oar is clutched in the fist the flexibility of the wrist is thereby much crippled.

6. The arms should begin to bend when the body has just found the perpendicular. The upper arm should swing close to the ribs, worked by the shoulders, which should be thrown well back.

7. The 'biceps' should not do the work; for, if it does, either the hands are elevated or the level of the blade altered--if the elbows keep close to the side; or else, if the level of the hands is preserved, then the elbows dog's-ear outwards. In either case the action is less free and less powerful than if the stroke is rowed home by the shoulder muscles.

8. The part of the hand which should touch the chest when the oar comes home is the root of the thumb, not the knuckles of the fingers. If the knuckles touch the chest _before_ the oar comes out of water, the blade is 'feathered under water'--a common fault, and a very insidious one.

If, on the other hand, the oar comes out clean, but the first thing which touches the chest is the knuckle, then the last part of the stroke will have been rowed in _air_, and not in _the water_.

9. Dealing now with recovery. The hands should rebound from the chest like a billiard-ball from a cushion. If the hands delay at the chest they hamper the recovery of the body--e.g. let any man try to push a weight away from him with his hands and body combined. He will find that, if he pushes with straight arms, he is better able to apply the weight of his body to the forward push than if he keeps his arms bent.

Having shot his hands away, and having straightened his arms as quickly as he reasonably can, his body should follow; but his body should not meantime have been stationary. It should, like a pendulum, begin to swing for the return so soon as the stroke is over.

If hands 'hang,' the body tends to hang, as above shown; and if the body hangs, valuable time is lost, which can never be regained. As an ill.u.s.tration: suppose a man is rowing forty strokes in a minute, and that his body hangs the tenth of a second when it is back after each stroke, then at the end of a minute's rowing he will have sat still for four whole seconds! An oarsman who has no hang in his recovery can thus row a fast stroke with less exertion to himself than one who hangs. The latter, having wasted time between stroke and recovery, has to swing forward all the faster, when once he begins to recover, in order to perform the same number of strokes in the same time as he who does not hang. Now, although there is a greater effort required to row the blade square through the water than to recover it edgewise through the air, yet the latter has to be performed with muscles so much weaker for the task set to them that relatively they tire sooner under their lighter work than do the muscles which are in use for rowing the blade through the water. When an oarsman becomes 'pumped,' he feels the task of recovery even more severe than that of rowing the stroke. Hence we see the importance of economising as far as possible the labour of those muscles which are employed on the recovery, and of not adding to their toil by waste of time which entails a subsequent extra exertion in order to regain lost ground and lost time.

10. The manipulation of the blade through the water is of great importance, otherwise the blade will not keep square, and regular pressure against the water will not be attained. Now, since the angle of the blade to the water has to be a constant one, and since the plane on which the blade works also is required to be uniform, till the moment for the feather has arrived, it stands to reason that the wrists and arms, which are changing their position relatively with the body while the stroke progresses, must accommodate themselves to the progressive variations of force of body and arms, so as to maintain the uniform angle and plane of the oar. Herein much attention must be paid to maxim 4 (_supra_). If an oar is held in the fist instead of in the fingers, the play of the muscles of the wrist is thereby crippled, and it becomes less easy to govern the blade.

11. On a somewhat similar principle as the foregoing, the arms, on the recovery, are changing their position and angle with the body throughout the recovery; but the blade has to be kept at a normal level above the water all the time. It is a common fault for the oarsman to fail to regulate the height of the feather, and either to 'toss' it at some point of the recovery or else to lower it till the blade almost, if not quite, touches the water. Nothing but practice, coupled with careful observations of the correct manner of holding an oar, can attain that mechanical give-and-take play of muscles which produces an even and clean feather from first to last of recovery.

12. We are still, for the sake of argument, dealing with fixed-seat oarsmanship. Slides will be discussed subsequently.

In using the legs, on a fixed seat, for recovery, the toes should feel the strap, which should cross them on or below the knuckle-joint of the great toe. Each foot should feel and pull up the strap easily and simultaneously, so as to preserve even position of body. The legs should open well, and allow the body to trick between them as it swings forward.

13. If the body swings true, the oar will keep home to the rowlock; there should be just sufficient fraction of weight pressed against the b.u.t.ton to keep it home; if it is suffered to leave the rowlock, the oarsman tends to screw outwards over the gunwale, and also, when he recommences the stroke, he loses power by reason of his oar not meeting with its due support until the abstracted b.u.t.ton has slipped back against the thowl.

14. The pace of recovery should be proportionate to the speed of stroke.

If recovery is too slow, the oarsman becomes late in getting into the water for the next stroke; if he is too quick, he has to wait when forward in order not to hurry the stroke.

15. Too many even high-cla.s.s oars are p.r.o.ne to omit to keep the oar feathered for the full distance of the recovery. They have a tendency to turn it square too soon. By so doing they incur extra resistance of air and extra labour on the recovery, and they are more liable to foul a wave in rough water. The oar should be carried forwards edgewise, and only turned square just as full reach is attained. It should then be turned sharply, and not gradually.

16. The instant the body is full forward, and the oar set square, the hands should be raised sharply to the exact amount required in order to drop the blade into the water to the required depth, so as to cover it for the succeeding stroke.

17. The new stroke should be recommenced without delay, by throwing the body sharply back, with arms stiff and shoulders braced, the legs pressing firmly and evenly against the stretcher, so as to take the weight of the body off the seat, and to transfer its support to the handle of the oar and the stretcher, thus making the very most of weight and of extensor muscles in order to give force to the oar against the water.

N.B. Before closing these remarks, it should be added that, with reference to detail 12, it is a.s.sumed that the oarsman, having progressed to the scientific stage, has so far mastered the use of the loins as to be able to combine their action with that of the toe against the strap in aiding the recovery of the body. If he tries to rely solely on the motor power for recovery from the strap, and the toes against it, he will not swing forward with a stiff back, and will be in a slouched position when he attains his reach forward.

The Rev. E. Warre, D.D., published in 1875 some brief remarks upon the stroke, in a treatise upon physical exercises and recreations. They are here reproduced by leave, the writer feeling that they can hardly be surpa.s.sed for brevity and lucidity of instruction upon the details of the stroke.

NOTES ON THE STROKE.

The moment the oar touches the body, drop the hands smartly straight down, then turn the wrists sharply and at once shoot out the hands in a straight line to the front, inclining the body forward from the thigh-joints, and simultaneously bring up the slider, regulating the time by the swing forward of the body according to the stroke. Let the chest and stomach come well forward, the shoulders be kept back; the inside arm be straightened, the inside wrist a little raised, the oar grasped in the hands, but not pressed upon more than is necessary to maintain the blade in its proper straight line as it goes back; the head kept up, the eyes fixed on the outside shoulder of the man before you. As the body and arms come forward to their full extent, the wrists having been quickly turned, the hands must be raised sharply, and the blade of the oar brought to its full depth at once. At that moment, without the loss of a thousandth part of a second, the whole weight of the body must be thrown on to the oar and the stretcher, by the body springing back, so that the oar may catch hold of the water sharply, and be driven through it by a force unwavering and uniform. As soon as the oar has got hold of the water, and the beginning of the stroke has been effected as described, flatten the knees, and so, using the muscles of the legs, keep up the pressure of the beginning uniform through the backward motion of the body. Let the arms be rigid at the beginning of the stroke. When the body reaches the perpendicular, let the elbows be bent and dropped close past the sides to the rear--the shoulders dropping and disclosing the chest to the front; the back, if anything, curved inwards rather than outwards, but not strained in any way. The body, in fact, should a.s.sume a natural upright sitting posture, with the shoulders well thrown back. In this position the oar should come to it and the feather commence.

N.B.--It is important to remember that the body should never stop still. In its motion backwards and forwards it should imitate the pendulum of a clock. When it has ceased to go forward it has begun to go back.

There are, it will appear, from consideration of the directions, about twenty-seven distinct points, _articuli_ as it were, of the stroke. No one should attempt to coach a crew without striving to obtain a practical insight into their nature and order of succession. Let a c.o.xswain also remember that, in teaching men to row, his object should be to teach them to economise their _strength_ by using properly their _weight_.

Their weight is always in the boat along with them; their strength, if misapplied, very soon evaporates.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARLOW.]

CHAPTER IV.

COACHING.

For reasons which were set forth at the commencement of the chapter on scientific oarsmanship, the very best oar may fail to see his own faults. For this reason, in dealing with the methods for detecting and curing faults, it seems more to the point to write as addressing the tutor rather than the pupil. The latter will improve faster under any adequate verbal instruction than by perusing pages of bookwork upon the science of oarsmanship.

A coach may often know much more than he can himself perform; he may be with his own muscles but a mediocre exponent of his art, and yet be towards the top of the tree as regards knowledge and power of instruction.

A coach, like his pupils, often becomes too 'mechanical'; he sees some salient fault in his crew, he sets himself to eradicate it, and meanwhile it is possible that he may overlook some other great fault which is gradually developing itself among one or more of the men. And yet if he were asked to coach some other crew for the day, in which crew this same fault existed, he would be almost certain to note it, and to set to work to cure it.

For this reason, although it does not do to have too many mentors at work from day to day upon one crew, nevertheless the best of coaches may often gain a hint by taking some one else into his counsels for an hour or two, and by comparing notes.

We have said that it is not absolutely necessary that a good coach should always be in his own person a finished oarsman; but if he is all the better, and for one very important reason. More than half the faults which oarsmen contract are to be traced in the first instance to some irregularity in the machinery with which they are working. That irregularity may be of two sorts, direct or indirect--direct when the boat, oar, rowlock, or stretcher is improperly constructed, so that an oarsman cannot work fairly and squarely; indirect when some other oarsman is perpetrating some fault which puts others out of gear.

If a coach is a good oarsman on his own account (by 'good' we mean scientific rather than merely powerful), he can and should test and try or inspect the seat and oar of each man whom he coaches, especially if he finds a man painstaking and yet unable to cure some special fault.

Boatbuilders are very careless in laying out work. A rowlock may be too high or too low; it may rake one way or other, and so spoil the plane of the oar in the water. An oar may be hog-backed (or sprung), or too long in loom, or too short; the straps of a stretcher may be fixed too high, so as to grip only the tip of a great-toe, and the place for the feet may not be straight to the seat, or a rowlock may be too narrow, and so may jam the oar when forward.

These are samples of mechanical discomfort which may spoil any man's rowing, and against which it may be difficult for the most painstaking pupil to contend successfully. If the coach is good in practice as well as in theory of oarsmanship, he can materially simplify his own labours and those of his pupils by inspecting and trying the 'work' of each man in turn.

He should bear in mind that if a young oar is thrown out of shape in his early career by bad mechanical appliances, the faults of shape often cling to him unconsciously later on, even when he is at last furnished with proper tools. If a child were taught to walk with one boot an inch thicker in the sole than the other, the uneven gait thereby produced might cling to him long after he had been properly shod.

Young oarsmen in a club are too often relegated to practise in cast-off boats with cast-off oars, none of which are really fit for use. Nothing does more to spoil the standard of junior oarsmanship in a club than neglect of this nature.

Having ascertained that all his pupils are properly equipped and are properly seated, fair and square to stretchers suitable for the length of leg of each, the next care of a coach should be to endeavour to trace the _cause_ of each fault which he may detect. This is more difficult than to see that a fault exists. At the same time, if the coach cannot trace the cause, it is hardly reasonable to expect the pupil to do so.

So many varied causes may produce some one generic fault that it may drive a pupil from one error to another to tell him nothing more than that he is doing something wrong without at the same time explaining to him how and why he is at fault.

For instance, suppose a man gets late into the water. This lateness may arise from a variety of causes, for example:

1. He may be hanging with arms or body, or both, when he has finished the stroke, and so he may be late in starting to go forward; or

2. He may be correct until he has attained his forward reach, and then, may be, he hangs before dropping his oar into the water; or

3. He may begin to drop his oar at the right time, but to do so in a 'clipping' manner, not dropping the oar perpendicularly, but bringing it for some distance back in the air before it touches the water.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COACHING UNIVERSITY CREW.]

Now to tell a batch of men--all late, and all late from different causes as above--simply that each one is 'late' does little good. The cure which will set the one right will only vary, or even exaggerate, the mischief with the others.