Beginner to Elite - Rowing Catch Exercise

In this video, Ken highlights the crucial differences between the catch of a beginner and elite rower. Because the catch is so quick, it isn't easy to interpret with the naked eye. However, the catch can easily be measured and analysed with the Rowing in Motion app.

Joel and Eve demonstrate an exercise which increases the effectiveness of the catch. The Rowing in Motion app allows the rowers to monitor their catch metrics in realtime while recording them for later analysis and comparison.  

Video Transcript

Catch slope what is it and why is it important elite athletes have a steep catch slope and beginner athletes have a flat catch slope here's a useful drill to be able to improve catch slope at any level and therefore get a faster boat catch slope is difficult to see with the naked eye on the acceleration curve you can see the catch slope quite easily by looking at the beginning of the stroke as highlighted here we're going to choose two sessions from our rowing and motion program and the way we do this is we look in the analysis area and then we're going to choose the particular stroke rates of the files we're looking for so we in this case looking for files between 36 and 39 and so we've chosen selected the two files with the tick that we want to have and you can see them now on the screen you can see the catch slope is illustrated here whilst both are quite steep you can see that the yellow line is a little steeper than the purple line let's see if we can put a metric to that so if we put a number on it you can see that the catch slope for the single sculler with the yellow line is 127.9 and for the double scull it's 86.4 we want to have that number as high as we can and you can see if you look again that the slopes are slightly different and this drill that we're about to show is designed at improving the catch slope if you look in this case at a schoolboy rower you can see that the catch slope here is really quite flat a very gradual catch slope again if we want to get an improvement in speed this is one of the easiest places to start you can see here that the catch slope for this particular athlete is about 27 compared to 127 that we saw with the elite athletes in the previous slide so what are we looking at what we're looking for is to have the blade go into the water as cleanly as it can without any movement of the blade towards the bow or the stern once it's in the water however we want it to be locked on and apply the power that's the way that we get a good catch slope i.e quite a steep one how do we do that so we can improve the catch slope so here's a drill being demonstrated which is designed to improve the catch slope the idea is the athlete comes to the catch places the blade pauses and then drives through firstly with a legs only drill and then finishing the stroke off again the concept is make sure the blade is placed in the water connected it's a drill that can be done in any boat so i suggest make sure the athlete comes into the catch places the blade and then once they're placed they then drive through to finish practicing getting well connected before the drive so that's how you can improve the catch slope from this very flat catch slope as often experienced in school rowing or through to a catch slope like this which is what we find at the elite level so a very useful drill for improving catch slope and getting better connection and a faster boat