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> slide forward slowly

It's an efficiency thing, the linked page partially covers this in section 5. Going forwards slowly impacts the same momentum, but as it is done gradually it results in a greater overall boat speed because you avoid sudden speed jolts. And remember that going forwards quickly also means you must decelerate your body quite a bit at the catch! When a coach is telling you to slide forward slowly they are trying you to move forward at a constant speed, not so much a slow speed.

That being said, it is better to do slower and longer strokes. You're trying to move the boat, so all the moving of your body is wasted energy. Moving your body really quickly is very tiring, whereas you can sustain slower and longer strokes a lot longer. At an elite level you simply can't make the stroke any longer, and you can't get more power out of a stroke either because there are limitations to oar length. The only way for an elite rower to put more energy in the boat is to do more strokes, which means they have to speed up.

> pushing with your legs first

Your legs are a lot stronger than your torso and arms. If you do arms first, the power being put into the boat by the legs is limited by your arm strength. When you leave the arms extended, you are simply hanging on them without the muscles engaged, allowing you to go full leg strength. This is 100% still the case at an elite level, but it is harder to see due to the higher stroke rate, and the fact that they engage the arms/torso before the legs are completely flat.

+1 Coach could also ask to accelerate an decelerate smoothly while recovering but telling rowers to recover more slowly or „calmly“ usually does the trick

Yup. In my experience coaching novice rowers, even the smartest people suddenly become really stupid the moment they pick up an oar, and need to have a simple, actionable training goal.

The movement is already hard enough to master without complicating things. All the detailed stuff and the "why" can come after a year or two of training. Before that you'd just be wasting your time.

>> pushing with your legs first, then torso, then arms

I think that makes sense, i’ve got a rowing machine so i don’t know if it translates perfectly to real rowing but that’s the motion i do. Use the big leg muscles to move as much “oar” distance as possible first, then use your hips and core, then arms for whatever space is left between oar and chest.

I never feel my hips or core are tired but if i screw up this sequence my arms will get tired.

Your coach was right, it was good advice, Olimpic rowers master this to perfection and make it look easy.

And I think that the argument would be that during the return to backstops you would increase the speed of the boat's shell -- leading to a drag term proportional to v^2, in addition to the mean speed of the boat, effectively demanding an increased power on your behalf during the drive to compensate for it. If you move to front stops slower, the bow doesn't surge as much, and the required power is therefore more constant.

You have a certain amount of time (read: very little) to reach the catch if you want to maintain a high stroke rate.

Assuming a fixed time “pulling” in a given stroke, and given two options:

- Row 35 spm and reach the catch slower

- Row 40 spm and have to go faster to reach the catch

I’m pretty sure the latter would win a race. Even though you’re “rushing” the slide and robbing the boat of momentum.

The problem is that the coaches were so adamant about crawling up to the catch, that something has to give, and stroke rate suffers. I know this because after being taught by said coaches, I rowed the stroke seat in my first race, keeping everything in mind the coaches had taught me. I ended up rowing an average of 27 spm and we got absolutely trounced.

That's the irony of rowing: when you are doing it properly it looks completely effortless.

I can't say I feel that to be the case having watched various races... it looks fucking exhausting!

> Watching rowing in the Olympics it doesn’t seem like they’re worried about this at all.

Rushing the slide is less of a problem if you have good catch placement. Olympic rowers tend to have near perfect catch placement.

There's an efficient ratio between the drive and recovery. At 20spm a 1 second drive means 2 seconds on the recovery (so a full stroke is 3 seconds). Try rowing that rating at a ratio closer to 1:1 and you'll really notice the inefficiency. You couldn't do that for an hour and maintain a decent split. As power and rating increase, you want to maintain a ratio. I don't know if it's always 1:2, but there's still an efficient ratio. A similar idea might be being in the wrong gear on a bike. On flat ground with no wind, if you're in the wrong gear you might be able to pedal at a very high rpm, but you'll probably notice that you are not moving efficiently. So avoiding rushing the slide isn't as much about free speed or checking the boat, but being in the right gear. Definitely not a physicist - so maybe not the best analogy, and maybe I'm misremembering how my coaches had explained it to me.

The move slowly thing is likely to account for jerkiness as a thing people do is rush up the slide and wait at the catch position. You want to get to the catch without the inertia of being forced forward so you can raise your hands get ours in and then push. From a physics perspective there’s also the possibility that rushing up the slide forces the stern down faster breaking the about however that Varys massively and I don’t know about it being proven.

Regarding the order of operations after the catch that’s because a stroke is similar to power clean sitting down. You are effectively maximising the lever arc.

Coaches don’t necessarily tell you what you have to do, but what makes you do what you have to do.

Yes, Olympic rowers move forwards fast in their slides (how else do you do 40+ strokes a minute?), and no semi-experienced rower fully separates the arms/back/legs motions (they tend to blend into each other a bit), but common beginner errors are:

- to race the slide, then stop at the catch, causing the boat to pitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_motions#Pitch) more strongly, losing speed. Pros move fast, but all their other movements are faster, too, so they don’t race forwards on their slides (at least not in training. Sprints in racing can be different, but even then, they try not to do that, as it costs speed)

- to bend the arms first, then stretch the legs. That won’t work if you’re using your leg muscles to the fullest, as your arms won’t be able to stay bent. They will straighten out again, and the force of the blade on the water will be lower than when they didn’t do that.

So, the “legs/back/arms on the stroke, arms/back/legs on the recover” and “don’t rush the slide” mantras exaggerate what you ideally should do, but for beginners, erring in that direction isn’t that bad compared to those errors.

> Coaches don’t necessarily tell you what you have to do, but what makes you do what you have to do.

Yup, this was exactly the problem for me. I take the advice too literally and I had awful form until I just relaxed and rowed in a way that felt natural.

I mean sure, you should be starting the catch with your legs first and finishing leaned back with your arms coming in only as you reach the end. But the coaches would exaggerate way too much and tell you to not even start moving your back until you were fully halfway into the stroke. I took this far too literally and locked my back in place for way too much of the catch and ended up making the whole thing awkward and inefficient.

Don’t rush the slide, sure, but the coaches made it seem like you had to inch. Up. So. Slowly, and we did low rate technical rows to hammer this home. I rowed stroke seat in my first race and guess what happened? I went up the slide slowly and ended up rowing at 27 strokes per minute and we lost the race handily. Oops, i guess they forgot to teach us how to actually row fast before we got to our first race. I never rowed stroke after that because I was too used to rowing slowly.

The reasoning behind coaching in a way that causes you to do what you’re supposed to do instead of what you’re told to do, makes sense, until you realize that there are people that will actually take the advice literally. And you’ll overshoot and miss the mark.

Basically: “do as I mean, not as I say” is a shitty teaching style, at least for people like me.

>There were other dubious bits of advice too, like pushing with your legs first, then torso, then arms, but if you try to actually do that in reality it feels extremely awkward. And watching the pros do it on TV it doesn’t seem like they’re doing anything like this.

This is the proper way to row. Iirc its about extending the length of your stroke while having consistent pulling

Maybe also using the legs while the oar is perpendicular to the boat.