Handle and blade heights in rowing, 6 concepts, 3 solutions

​In this video, Ken Davey discusses 6 concepts and 3 ways to ensure you have the perfect handle and blade height.

Handle and blade height is essential for a clean, effective tap down, recovery, and an efficient catch and drive phase. 

Video Transcript

​it's important when you're rowing that you have the blades at the right height the handles at the right height in relation to your body and the water the the best place to check this is once the boat's on the water it's very difficult to check what the blade height should be or the handle it should be if you're just doing it on dry land because different boats float differently they're different designed for different weight athletes and so it'll be a little bit different for each boat so what i suggest you do though is sit with the blades at the finish square and buried and your hands in a sculling boat should come to about heart rate strap height and if they don't then you need to adjust things so they do remember though when you're measuring it here lean back as far on the boat as you normally would and make sure that you're sitting tall because both of those things will give you misleading information so once you've determined that's where the blade height should be if it's too high or too low then you need to adjust it a few think ways you can adjust it the simplest way is simply to drop the gate a little bit so take some washers out from under the gate and drop it down a little bit to make it lower and conversely put some washers underneath and to lift the gate up to make the handle height put the finish higher you want to have your blades just buried and your hands at about your sternum level now if you find that that doesn't provide enough adjustment doing it that way then i suggest you might need to jack your seat up you can do it with a seat pad to start with so just put a seat pad on top of the seat and sit on top of that but unfortunately a seat pad if you have a lot of seat pad on top of the seat then it tends to separate you feeling wise from the boat and so because it's soft and spongy a little bit then you'll find you don't get as good of feel for what the boat's doing if you have a seat pad so i suggest use a seat pad to get it adjusted so you know what height it should be and then if you're going to be using that boat a lot then i suggest chock the seat up way you do that is you take the seat off and unscrew the screws holding the wheels onto the seat and put some packing washers or pieces of other material in between the seat and the wheel chassis and then put the screws back in you may need to put longer screws in in order to compensate if you lift a long distance so they're the two easiest ways to adjust that part of it what happens though when you do adjust the height like that then you'll find that the the distance between your seat and your heels has also changed if you change it in the washers in the gate then that doesn't make any difference to the seat feet height but if you change the seat that's going to change the distance between your seat height and your feet height so if that happens then you need to make sure that you compensate for that for example if your seat to feet height was correct before and you're able to get easily into the catch position with your shins vertical then what you want to do is if you lift your seat up then you're going to have too big a gap between your seat and your feet so then you need to lift your feet up by the same amount to make sure you keep that ratio the same there's no real problem with having your seat high the only thing it does a little is it lifts your center of gravity and the boat which then can make the boat a little bit more unbalanced but it's more important to have your handle height right and therefore your blade depth correct and comfortable rather than to sacrifice that for for balance in a boat you'll find you get used to the balance quite quickly so the critical steps to change change the height remember it's move the gate up and down move your seat up and down they're the two main items that you can change but bear in mind you need to also look at the changing of the the height from your seat to your heels and get that correct as well but important make it so that when you pull it in it's about sternum height and what that should mean in order to get a good catch and get the blade buried at the catch is when you put the blade in you'll find that your hand your arm isn't quite parallel with the water but it's on a slight downward slope that's the normal sort of position you'll feel and so if you're lifting it too high and going too deep in the water then the easy way to remember that is to say okay where's my arm in relation to parallel to the water and am i in the correct position so important to make sure before you row that you get your heights right if the heights are too low then you'll find that you won't be able to tap out very easily if they're too high then you'll have an ineffective final part of the stroke