Rowing with a Relaxed Shoulder and Grip
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Unnecessary tension in the hands, arms, and shoulders makes it difficult to row efficiently and effectively.
In this video, Ken explains why rowers should avoid a tense grip and shoulder. Then he demonstrates a couple of exercises to help rowers cultivate relaxation while rowing on the erg or the water. |
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Video Transcript
We want to have relaxed shoulders with the catch because they're we don't want to use our shoulder all these small muscles up here we don't want to use them to hold the blade because they're not very good at that they don't hold enough glycogen stores that not enough energy in them to actually do a lot of work and whereas if you do a chin up for example when you're hanging from a bar you can hang that for a long time if you just relax and just hang there because these muscles aren't doing anything what you're doing is you're using your bones and your tendons to hold so in a boat you want to use those because that doesn't use any energy so you want to use your bones and tendons to hold if you're holding your shoulder back here that's not going to work if you've got tense grip everything's going to be tense so we're going to have tense shoulders so it's really important to have a really relaxed grip now i would like to do just to demonstrate how little how strong your fingers are i want you to hang onto the ergo with just two fingers now row it's almost no different is it no do the same thing and put your fingers back on again and hang onto the ergo tight alright now
take go back to two fingers again now hang on to it tight that's so hard to do and so what you want to do is you want to be really relaxed so if you get out in the boat and you think am i relaxed or not i'll just take some fingers off and you'll soon get a feeling of what the tight grip is uh it's one of the most important things you can teach I asked Lyall McCarthy who is the coach of Kim Crow that won gold medal at Rio Olympics i said what's the most important thing you can teach an athlete and he surprised me he said grip I thought come on Lyall grip that's the most important thing you can teach an athlete and i'm sure he's right the reason why is that a boat goes well if you're relaxed if you're tense the boat goes bad and so if you've got a tight grip you're tense when you've got a relaxed grip it's pretty hard to be tense if you've got a relaxed grip
take go back to two fingers again now hang on to it tight that's so hard to do and so what you want to do is you want to be really relaxed so if you get out in the boat and you think am i relaxed or not i'll just take some fingers off and you'll soon get a feeling of what the tight grip is uh it's one of the most important things you can teach I asked Lyall McCarthy who is the coach of Kim Crow that won gold medal at Rio Olympics i said what's the most important thing you can teach an athlete and he surprised me he said grip I thought come on Lyall grip that's the most important thing you can teach an athlete and i'm sure he's right the reason why is that a boat goes well if you're relaxed if you're tense the boat goes bad and so if you've got a tight grip you're tense when you've got a relaxed grip it's pretty hard to be tense if you've got a relaxed grip