What exactly is proprioception? You could call it body sense or kinesthetic awareness, it is the brain’s ability to sense the relative positions and movements of the different body parts. Because of proprioception, you know exactly where your hand is in space as you move it around, even though your eyes are closed.

The scientific term for feel is proprioception. The special sense of proprioception is located in your middle ear. It gives us information on acceleration and deceleration, and balance. The general component of proprioception derives from pressure and tension receptors in your joints, muscles and tendons.

All coordinated movement depends on proprioception. It should be obvious that elite level movement in rowing requires an elite level of body sense. For example, there is no way you can row properly without knowing exactly what your body is doing at all times. Accurate body sense is also essential for feeling good in your body.

Improving your proprioception is an excellent goal for anyone who wants to improve sports performance. In fact, I would claim that any therapy or training method that can achieve either goal efficiently works primarly by improving proprioception. Following is a discussion of how proprioception works, why it matters, and how it can be changed for better or worse.

The brain maps the body

The key to understanding proprioception is the body maps. The body maps are parts of the brain that are organized in such a way as to represent the different body parts, just as lines on a map represent roads. Each part of the body has a separate area of the brain dedicated to moving and sensing that body part. So, we have hands, and we have virtual hands in the brain – parts of the brain that represent the size, shape and position of the hands.

Body parts communicate with their virtual counterparts in the following way. There are millions of microscopic organs called mechanoreceptors located throughout the body. When they are stimulated by a mechanical force, they send a signal through the nervous system to the part of the brain devoted to sensing that part of the body. The brain assembles all these signals from the innumerable different sources and determines exactly where everything is and what it is doing. In essence, the brain creates numerous maps of the body that it uses to decide what is going on and how to move.

Good movement requires good body maps

Because the brain uses the map to make decisions about how to move, it is obvious that the better and more detailed the map, the better and more precise the movement. By contrast, if the map is unclear or fuzzy, navigation of the different movement possibilities will be shaky.

These points are illustrated by the fact that body parts that have greater movements demands have bigger maps. For example, the hand is capable of extremely intricate and differentiated movements and sensations, and the brain devotes a large area to sensing and controlling it. By contrast, the brain devotes very little space to mapping areas of the body that do not have much movement or sensation capability, such as the middle of the back or the elbow.

Another indication that the maps are essential for coordination is that they actually grow bigger when placed under demand. For example, the part of a musician’s brain that senses and controls the fingers is actually observably larger than the counterpart of a person who does not use his or her hands as much.

Maps are built by movement

The maps are constantly being updated to reflect current demands. You can sense changes in your maps instantly by doing a simple experiment. Try to imagine or sense the exact shape and position of your ears. Now rub just the left ear for a few seconds and then compare your ability to sense the left ear and the right. You will note that it is much easier to sense the left. The simple reason is that touching the ear activated its mechanoreceptors, which sent a signal to the brain, which activated the map for that area. Of course, the additional clarity is only temporary.

In order to make long term or permanent changes in the maps, you need to place demands on that map consistently over a long period of time. Recall that musicians actually have larger finger maps than other people. When a certain body part or movement is used repeatedly in a coordinated and mindful fashion, there are actual physical and observable changes in the part of the brain that controls that body part or movement. This is part of the reason why you get better at what you practice.

Of course, not all movements are created equal in their ability to stimulate the body maps. Movements that are most likely to lead to changes in the quality of the maps are movements that are curious, exploratory, novel, interesting, rich in sensory input, slow, gentle, mindful, non-painful.

Lack of movement will reverse this process. If you fail to move in a certain way for a period of time, you lose the ability to accurately sense and control that movement. This is called sensory motor amnesia. The brain’s body maps get fuzzier, less clear. If you tape three fingers together in a way that causes them to move as one unit for several days, the brain will start to represent the fingers as one unit, not as three separate parts that are capable of individual movements.

As you row on the water or on the Rowperfect3, whose dynamics virtually replicate those of a floating boat; your sense of proprioception is receiving almost exactly the same signals as would be the case in a boat without the extraneous information of wind, weather, and waves and so on. This allows you to truly concentrate on producing a perfect rhythm and technique, which is after all the perfect coordination of your muscles by your nerves. Doing it this way you are not confusing your body.

Thanks to todd Hargrove and Rowperfect3

The most powerful way of learning at anything is Instant feedback. What is instant feedback in rowing? Instant feedback in rowing for me is that after a rowing stroke you get a direct feedback of the quality of the stroke. With this feedback you make corrections and learn from the new feedback if these corrections have been efficient or not. Instant feedback builds learning confidence in self-directed practice.

How can you get INSTANT FEEDBACK IN ROWING?

I can see 7 ways you can get INSTANT FEEDBACK in ROWING:

1) Telemetric system on your boat oarlocks :
Measure oarlock force curves and angle. The principal component of these systems is a highly innovative way to measure the force and angle applied by the oar onto the pin.
The curves from the data enable a precise analysis of timing, force application and oar movement for each rower.

2) Another very good rower:
By rowing with a very good rower we can get feedback of what he is feeling and we can also feel directly how he applies power and moves the boat. This is a very powerful way of learning and very used from many National Teams all over the world. The veteran rowers with more experience teach and develop the younger rowers in the boat by letting them feel and giving them feedback of what they feel.

3) A good coach:
A good coach will give you instant feedback of what you are doing and will help you change on the right direction and with good instruction. A good coah is also a very powerful part of instant feedback. The coach can row with the rowers, cox or seat on a motorboat. From the motorboat he can see and feel what is going on in the boat. He can also get direct feedback of data coming from the boat to help him reinforce what he is observing.

4) Video Googles:
Those are googles that the rower gets and can see himself rowing live. The coach has a camera and videos him from the motorboat and the rower can see himself live with instant feedback.

5) Rowperfect3:
This is a dynamic rowing machine that gives direct feedback of the power application with power curves and plenty of data from the drive. This instant feedback helps you to learn to move your body the most efficiently and helps you to learn the feel of the good strokes.

6) Speed coach or GPS:
The speed coach or GPS gives you direct feedback of the speed of the boat. If you are working at a given rate and heart rate, you can get instant feedback of changes of speed of technical changes.

7) Another boat if it has a consistent speed:
If we are rowing next to another boat that as a consistent speed we can get instant feedback of changes of speed in relationship to the other boat.

Instant feedback builds learning confidence in self-directed practice. It is the most powerful way of learning.

We all now that sleeping is a key factor of sport performance. Not sleeping enough will deteriorate the quality of the training and the recovery process. Many rowing coaches don’t understand why their athletes don’t improve or don’t get the same scores or improvements as other years having the same training program and talented rowers. There are many reasons that can cause that like motivation or recovery/sleep process. Rowers in college that practice early on the morning have big problems with that. It is hard to go to bed early. There is too much school work. There is no time to do it all and get enough sleep. We all know that student athletes are always tired and falling asleep everywhere. But what are the REAL CONSEQUENCES of not getting enough sleep?
Is sleep as important as they say?
How much is my TEAM really getting affected by the lack of hours of sleep?

Sleep can impact performance in three main ways:

1. Lost sleep reduces the performance of the cerebral cortex in the frontal lobe of the brain which is responsible for the most important mental functions in sport- focus, concentration, flexibility, decision making and information processing.

2. The very deep or Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep helps consolidate activities, tasks and skills undertaken that day. It is indispensable for helping motor learning and skill acquisition.

3. Sleep is a significant stimulator of growth hormone release – the body’s natural agent for cell growth and reproduction. In addition to acting to increase muscle mass, growth hormone also stimulates the immune system. Sleep deprivation raises levels of the stress hormone Cortisol which may interfere with tissue repair and growth.

Now after reading those 3 MAIN WAYS that lack of sleep can affect your rowers, understand how important it is to monitor that and motivate your rowers to go to bed earlier. Maybe you as a coach need to reduce early morning practices on busy times to let them rest more. If you don’t sleep enough for few days all that can get way worst.

As a coach you can control participation and volume and intensity but have a hard time to control recovery, diet and sleep. It is a question of explaining really well to all the rowers of the TEAM how important is rest and how much their quality of training and recovery can get affected.
Details like sleeping hours, the way they eat and motivation are key for top performance. As a coach or rower don’t underestimate them and be sure your athletes take responsibility.

Carlos, do you have a specific video or video’s of good releases? I am getting away from doing too much square blade release and trying more 1/4 & 1/2 feather at the release. My guys seem to set the boat up quite well when we row square blade release or recovery, but as soon as we go to full feather, they can’t hold the set as well. Quite a few of the guys in V & 2V will flick water at the release, which I think throws the set off and slows the run of the shell. I was trying to get them to accelerate around the release & gradually feather as they release as well. I was trying to get them to make the handle move at the same speed as the shell, so that if they are doing the 1/4 or 1/2 feather AT the release, the blade comes out smoothly & easily, with very little effort on the rowers part.
I want to make sure that I am not giving the guys bad info, and just trying to make the release look good. I think that if they do this well, the boat should run better and therefore be faster.

First let’s look at this video of good rowing:

I like to look at this boat that is the 1x because it is the boat where you are alone and you know if you do it right or not. Nobody can affect your balance or release or set. When you can do it alone then you are ready to go to a different challenge that is to row with more people on your boat. Yes if you do it right but somebody is doing it wrong, the boat will lose balance or won’t be set and you won’t be able to row as well as you want to. This is why it is so important to learn first to do it well by yourself and then move to Team boats. If you cannot do that then you can do it in a pair rowing circles, on a Team boat dropping people or on a Rowperfect3 where the timing and change of direction and coordinated drive is the same as the one you get on a boat.

1) In order to have a good release you first need to have a good catch and a good coordinated drive. What I mean with that is that in order to have a release and good change of direction you need to be able at the release to have still pressure in front of the blade and pressure on your feet against the footstretcher.
2) When you have pressure on the blade at the release then you are able to change direction against the footstretcher connected to the boat and have a clean extraction. For that you need to do it right and have enough blade work skill to manage to get the blade right and feather. To learn that you can slow things down with a boungee or dropping people.

The answer is that a good set boat and a good release has NOTHING TO DO WITH:
- with the speed of the hands away as long as all your rowers on the boat do the same.
- with the moment they decide to feather as long as they do it when the blade is out of the water and all on the boat do the same.
- with the speed of the shell.
- with the speed of the seat moving to the stern.
- with the swing of their body.
- with the level of their hands as long as they don’t touch water.
and many others…

The key to have a good release is:
1) to have a good coordinated drive.
2) good extraction of the blade from the water. If you have pressure in front of the blade and footstretcher this is easy if you time it right with your change of direction.
3) Doing it all the rowers of your crew together.

In order to improve that this is what i reccomend you to do:
1) Make them learn to have a good coordinated drive so they have pressure in front of the blade at the release.
2) Teach them to time corrrectly to extract the blade and change direction.
3) Teach them to feel all that very slowly.

The more I row the more I understand rowing as a combination of Power and Rhythm. The more Power the easier is to get good Rhythm.

What is Rowing Power? Rowing Power is the Power you can generate to accelerate the boat and make it go fast. This Power will be dynamic and will require some really good boat and blade skill to be efficient and actually move the boat..

When this Power is applied during the drive, then is when we can with this increase of speed start generating good Rowing Rhythm. The faster the boat goes the more you can feel this rhythm and the more you can understand the principles of rowing. This is one of the reasons why I like women rowers to row sometimes with men. Men have more power in general and can help them to feel more the rhythm of rowing.

Here is a good way to see good speed and Rhythm

For me it is very important that a rower develops his body correctly overtime to have good power and this power useful for rowing. This means we need the rower to have good coordinated power to move a boat. This Power will be applied to move a boat on a dynamic situation. Eventually this good power used to move the boat will generate the good rhythm.

In this video you can see a boxer training his punch with a bag with rhythm key for a boxer.

If you are a rower and want to increase your rowing skill get into boxing. I can assure you it will help you on your speed, coordination and rhythm for sure.

Good Dynamic Rowing on the land

Dynamic Erg Ropwerfect3

In these videos you can see good dynamic rowing executed on the land. My theory is that if you reproduce the same movement on the land as on the water you will get faster. The movement of the body parts and the way the body gets the load and increases the speed of this load are the key elements. On the water you move on a way and accelerate trough the blade the boat speed. On the Rowing machine you row on another way that needs to be as close as the one on the water and accelerate the flywheel that simulates the blade pushing the boat anchored on the water.

You can see the way the rowers move and also how connected they are on the drive. The recovery part is fluid and easy, the machine comes to them as the boat comes to you on the water.
You can hear the acceleration of the flywheel.
Those videos are done at low rate (16 to 20) and race pace (36 to 40).

The reason why we row at 18 and 20 strokes a minute most of the time for Carlos Dinares is:

Let’s start by having some training ideas clear. When we train for rowing we have few elements involved. One is the engine of the rower. We could call the engine the part of the body that help us sustain the rowing strokes, the cells, lungs, heart, blood quality, lactate tolerance, VO2 max, etc…
Another part is the technique, coordination and ability to produce coordinated power on an efficient way to move the boat every stroke.

If we have a bad engine but are good on the rest we can be really fast out of the start but won’t be able to sustain the workload for the duration of the race.
If we have a good engine but are not good at technique or coordinated power, we won’t be able to use the engine because we won’t be able to really apply that engine to really work to move the boat.

Now let’s try to see that on a car. The engine and the frame of the car, tires and extras. If we have a big engine on a small weak car with very bad tires, as soon as we get the engine going we might lose part of the car in the first curve. If we have a strong car with good tires but a small engine, we will be safe but won’t go very fast.

What we can see is that both are important.

Ok now let’s talk about rowing!

Let’s imagine that we have a rower with a good engine and good technique and good power. He is pretty balanced.
Ok also let’s think that this rower is in good shape and has good speed at different test levels.

Ok in this case this rower will be able to get plenty of good work at 18 and 20 strokes a minute for what we want that is to increase his overall development as a rower and speed.

Said that what I’m going to explain won’t necessarily need to work with rowers out of shape, with no technique or an engine not developed.

When you row at low rates like 18 and 20 strokes a minute you can perform for 30 to 40 minutes non stop every stroke of this period of time with a higher work that the ones you do on your Max 2km race.

Ok let’s review that. What is work? Ok work is the area inside of each power curve. A power curve is the power application of the rowing stroke during the drive. Joulesx stroke that are the area inside the power curve for any given stroke are not bigger is the rate is higher or better. It is not like the split or the Watts that will increase as we increase the stroke rate. Joules x stroke are the amount of work we do every stroke. Said that the lower the rate the easier is to do more work x stroke because we have more rest from stroke to stroke.

Because of that we can sustain a higher work x stroke than at race pace at 18 and 20 strokes a minute, also being able to work at AT if we want. Yes you can work at AT at 20 strokes a minute if you have very good connection to the water and acceleration.

This is why doing the work at 18 or 20 without really doing the work doesn’t take you very far. What many training programs do is target lactate levels or heart rate intensity and don’t do that with the stroke rate. There are Teams that are able to do Max pieces at 24-28 and 32 with same levels of lactate that at 36 for the whole piece. Why? Because when they work at lower rates they do more work x stroke and they can stress the body the same way to its maximum. Obviously the boat is faster at 36 but doing max pieces at lower rates you work more on technique and control of the boat and also develop more power x stroke that you can use later for a fast start and moves during the race.

This is why the stroke rate doesn’t really measure intensity all the time. If you are not connected to the water, or are not use to work hard at low rates you will detrain yourself at low rates. This is the reason why many rowers find useless to row at low rate and cannot make their heart rate go up. They cannot produce more work x stroke. This is a problem because if they cannot do that they are detraining themselves at low rates.

To finish I would like to say that rowing full pressure at 18-20 strokes a minute can be really aggressive. In order to get there you need to first understand that rowing at 18 – 20 strokes a minute is not all the time recovery rowing. For many rowing programs is work time and really ON!

When you start reducing the time of the piece, you start increasing the rate and also the intensity, heart rate and lactate levels. As I said you can max out your engine at 28-32 strokes a minute for some people and don’t need to go to 36.

When I row I spend most of my time at those rates. Many rowing Teams that win very important races do too. Why it is 18 and 20 and not 22 or 24 or 16-14? Why are those rates and not others, what is the reason behind that?

Ok this is a good question and I have my own opinion and answer for that. If you are a rower or a coach, you should try to know why we spend so much time at those rates. It needs to be a reason why people do that. They need to be reasons at all the levels.

I know that in order to progress in rowing one needs to question things and find answers to those questions. In order to do that one needs to work for the answer and compare the answer to his own answer.

If you are a rower or a coach and you row many of your workouts at those rates or around them I’m sure you have your own opinion of why. What is the reason for that?

Why you don’t do like me, write a list of the reasons of why and tomorrow when I list them you can compare them to yours. I will do my own exercise and post all the reasons why I believe we row lots of miles at those rates.

Germans, French, GB, Australians, NZ, USA, Canadians, and many other Teams spend Hours and Hours at those rates, WHY?

I was encouraged to erg so that I could learn to utilized my powerful legs. First I sat on the RP3 just playing, experimenting with my movement and how it felt and how the numbers changed.

The next day, my first day on the water at Lake Samish I was preoccupied with why knowing that my heels were not connected on the drive. I had attempted to fix this with many changes on the boat, raising the seat, angles of the foot stretcher, bat logic, perseverating on a solution. I asked Carlos why are my feet not connected?

In the background I knew that my feet were definitely connected on the RP3. The gift Carlos gave me was my posture. He helped move my body forward like a duck. While stopping the boat at the finish, still connected to the water, I could use my feet to connect to my hands applying pressure on the oarlock and stayed connected to the water. It affirmed my feeling of connection with the foot stretcher yesterday when first playing on the RP3. On the first day, I was free of this concern and able to move on….

One of the main themes of this Tip is that the brain has far more control over strength, speed, flexibility and coordination than most people imagine. Nothing makes this point more clear than the fact that we can dramatically improve our physical performance by doing nothing more than thinking about it.

Numerous experiments have shown that people can increase their physical skills by imagining themselves practicing the skill. Their brains showed objective changes in the neurons that control the skills. How is this possible?

The reason we can improve the movement by thinking about moving is that these two activities are actually very similar neurologically. Performing an act with coordination requires firing the right sequences and combinations of neurons that control the movement. Practice will strengthen, grow and optimize the organization of these neurons. Imagining an act will activate almost exactly the same networks of neurons and will therefore improve them in the same way. In fact, visualizing a certain movement will cause almost undetectable muscular contractions in the same patterns and sequences that control the actual movement. So, if you looked at brain scans of people moving and imagining the same movement, you wouldn’t see much difference. The bottom line is that coordination and skill reside in the brain, and from the perspective of the brain, imagining movement and moving are not as different on the inside as they appear from the outside.

This is a good rowing video to look at:

Here’s a quick experiment you can do to verify this for yourself. Imagine writing your name as fast as possible with your dominant hand. Now imagine writing it as fast as you can with the non-dominant hand. If you are like most people, you will be significantly slower in visualizing action with the unskilled hand. Movement and imagining are both limited by the same thing – your brain’s organization in regard to the action.

So what’s the central message here? That skills, strength and flexibility are largely determined by the actual physical structure of the neurons of the brain, and that these structures are changed by what is essentially mental activity.

Thanks to Todd Hargrove