Feathering Out vs. Squaring Out

[GettingFaster]

I have been taught that, at the finish, you should keep the blade squared until it is completely out of the water, and then feather it. However, in many of the videos I've seen, ranging from this one of the Marin menhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZhYIBEQkfM to this one of the JM8+ (They start rowing all 8, on the feather, normally, at about 3:30) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp5TrrkOrnE, and this one of the Harvard Princeton heavies this April http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ_Wv3pnPhs, it looks to me like they are feathering out (Although it appears that Harvard is more squared than Princeton). All the videos are of eights, is it that because of how fast and powerful 8s are that it looks like the blades are coming out feathered? Nearly all my experience has been in fours and smaller, and I've raced an 8 only twice, so I don't know much about them. Is feather vs square a style thing that varies from coach to coach? Or are my eyes just totally deceiving me and the oars are all coming out square?

[petermech]

I don't do much work with sweep, but yesterday I did tell a couple of the scullers I was coaching to feather while pushing the hands away. The problem as I saw it was the bottom edge of the blade was not clearing the water at the release and perhaps too slow getting out of the water. I felt they were getting drag from the blade. I tried saying three or four other things such at tap the hands down more....but was not working as well as I liked. Saying feather as you push the hands away cleaned things up. It may still be a work in progress. I believe Xeno advocates feather while pushing the hands away.

[1xsculler]

The blades will feather cleanly all by themselves if you lighten your grip and push the handles away quickly at the finish.

[GettingFaster]

The blades will feather cleanly all by themselves if you lighten your grip and push the handles away quickly at the finish.

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not really interested in how to do it, because my coaches haven't corrected it in a while, but rather if this is something that every crew does or if it looks different from what I think it should look like. Sorry if that's unclear, I'm having trouble verbalizing what I want to say.

[skinny]

...but rather if this is something that every crew does or if it looks different from what I think it should look like.

I would say probably the latter. I know quite a few coaches that teach slightly exaggerated movements at low rates with the knowledge that it will blend slightly once a crew or an athlete gets to higher rates. By my mind, if you teach an athlete to row with a slight feather out of the water at low rates, by the time they reach high rates they could well be dragging a feathered blade along the surface of the water. Whereas teaching athletes a complete extraction on the square at low rates will lead to them extracting properly at higher rates.

Of course, I mostly work with junior/school athletes so the story might be different with higher-performance athletes.

[KitD]

I would say that if you really do wait until the blade is fully out of the water before you feather, you will necessarily end up washing out, especially in an 8. The boat is moving too fast at that point to do anything else without catastrophe. Most coaches teach the "fully square out" to ensure the oarsman clears the water properly before feathering. It is just a question of how clear you need to be.

As it is, however top crews are taught, at high speed they all tend to end up doing the same thing, with the blade coming about half out, then feathering for the rest of the extraction while also starting to move around the turn.

[mightyquinn]

The way I have heard Xeno put it is " don't feather with the hands still moving to the bow" in other words, finish the drive with the blades squared.

[caustic]

Let's take this from an "ideal" perspective to see why finishing square doesn't work.

When the blade is in the water and being pulled, it's constantly putting pressure on the water on its sternward side, and there is a low pressure depression on its bowward side. As the pressure goes down, this depression reduces. When the blade is no longer pulling, there is no pocket anymore, as the blade is no longer exerting pressure and is stationary in the water.

The problem with this is that the boat is still moving, so if the blade is not accelerating the boat, then the only thing it can do is immediately brake because the bow-side water will crash into the convex side of it. The whole idea of a clean finish is to get the timing down so that you can get the blade out of the water as close as possible to that time where it's no longer pulling.

Extracting the blade on the square takes time, and that is time where you still have the whole or part of the blade directly impeding water on the bow-ward side, thus slowing your boat right at the finish. So, the hypothesis would be that if we don't want to stop the boat, we need to figure out a way to extract the blade so that it doesn't slow down the boat by having water "catch up" to it while its being extracted.

One notion, which I subscribe to, is to extract the blade while feathering at the same time, and doing it under pressure. For a sense of scale, this is not starting the feather 8 inches away from the body, or 2 inches away, or 1 inch away. Xeno is right - you should always strive to keep the blades square while pulling, and keeping the pressure on as long as possible. However, sooner or later you gotta stop pulling.

At the finish, your ability to put pressure on the blade reduces due to leverage and the mechanical weakness of the arms compared to that of the legs. The key to getting a clean extraction is to use that last little bit of "pinch" with your shoulder blades to keep the pressure on - while realizing the hands and reversing direction of the blade with the hands by just dropping your wrists. It's not pulling pressure that's being sacrificed - you're just putting in a little last bit of "oomph" to keep that last bit of pressure on so that you keep the pocket behind the blade low enough to start the roll of the blade - and then a quick strike away to get the blades out without the water catching up to it.


Maybe not a lot of coaches really understand that - I don't really know - but that's why they always want you to "squeeze" the finish. The finish isn't moving the boat - the finish is about getting the blade out cleanly so that you don't slow it down.


But, ultimately, the oars and the boat are your guide. A quite finish is a strong finish. A loud rattle is a bad finish. Feeling like someone kicked you in the ribs is a bad finish. Too much wash or an aerated puddle is a bad finish. A good clean finish leaves the puddle dark and slowly twirling.If you just focus on a quiet finish when you're at race pace, I don't think any coach is going to say you have a poor extraction.