Drill and Tool for Improving Blade Depth

In this video, Ken demonstrates a good drill and tool for helping athletes and coaches achieve a consistent blade depth during the drive. 

Video Transcript

​I consider that a quick catch is a really important part of the stroke i tend to talk about it quite a lot with athletes because if you haven't got the blade in connected really quickly then you're not connected to the water any body movement is going to essentially damage the run of the boat rather than make it go faster so the critical step is to get that blade in and deep and well connected if you focus on getting the catch in really quickly then you'll find that you're going to get a much better connection to the water earlier and it's going to be before there's any particular body movement particularly pushing with the legs sure your body has to move a little bit you seat has to move a little bit as the blade goes into the water because it has to move with the speed of the boat but getting it in quickly is paramount if you put it in and it takes half a second to go in that's quite slow if you put it in super quick in 0.1 of a second or a little bit more then that's going to give you a much better connection at the start and a much better chance of getting a fast boat so i suggest a couple of things put some tape on yours like we demonstrate here here you can see we've got a number of different colors of tape and the purpose of that is because from a coach perspective outside of the rowing boat you can see at a glance how deep the oar is we've got these ones 10 centimeters apart and you can see that because of the the changing colors you don't have to count how many 10 centimeters it is you just need to look at the color and you'll know on both sides of course if you're following behind the boat behind the quad behind the single then you'll be able to see very clearly uh immediately if the blades are different depths on different sides and indeed if they're different variant among the crew so i'd suggest instead of just putting one or two tapes on the oar i put one every 10 centimeters then you've got real data that you can work with you'll be able to see at one glance you'll be able to see where the oars are in relation to their depth and at which part of the stroke again as the blade goes through the stroke you want to have it going in deep at the catch and then you really want to hold it deeper in the water until you're heading towards the finish so my preferred option would be to put the blade in deep and then hold it the same depth under the water until you pass square off and then let it gradually come up and but don't wash it out of course come up keep pressure on the blade right the way through to the finish and then tap it out indeed tapping it out i think it's you can almost liken it to a delayed feather so blade comes through tap it out and feather it now that's a bit extreme i understand that but if you can get athletes or if you're coaching yourself if you can get to the point where there's a definite up out of the water keep the pressure on tap it up then feather rather than rolling it out of the water you'll find you get better performance a good drill for practicing that in a single or in any boat really is to have one side squared one side feathered and then swap to the other side so hold it right the way through the finish on one side and then tap it out and feather it and the other side have it square right the way through the finish and hold it square you'll find that frequently the boat will drop to the side that's been feathered out of the water which means that you're not holding it through deep enough to the finish and not getting a clean enough exit so a bit of blade work things there the catch and the finish really worth focusing on