Typical Rowing Stroke – Live Feedback

Every stroke is unique. As a rower, you have experienced this yourself. There’s always wind and waves, vibrations on blade extraction, slight mis-synchronization between the members of your crew… the list of all the factors affecting the rowing stroke and boat acceleration is long. When you want to compare variations in rowing technique, material or rigging the “noise” generated by these factors might easily hide significant differences in boat acceleration resulting from your stroke. A reasonable approach to overcome these issues is to compute the typical boat acceleration from your past strokes. This enables you to get a clear understanding of the effectiveness of your typical stroke – free of most random disturbances.

With the newest update to version 1.3, Rowing in Motion ships a new highly anticipated feedback mechanism that allows you to review the typical acceleration curve of your stroke. Let’s start with the acceleration curve of your current stroke. Rowing in Motion measures and displays exactly what’s going on with your boat. And that includes all forces acting on your boat.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the acceleration graph is not as smooth as you have always thought it would be :-). Welcome in reality, that’s what’s really going on in your boat (and we have verified it). Starting with version 1.3, Rowing in Motion calculates a typical acceleration profile from your past 5 strokes. This profile is then updated every five strokes and displayed on our intelligent acceleration graph behind the current stroke in a lighter color.

The graphs of these typical strokes (light blue in the screenshot above) are much smoother than the current stroke, because they separate structural boat acceleration from the encountered noise. Coaches can review these typical stroke graphs in the Coach App too, of course. We hope this feature will make it extremely easy for coaches and athletes to compare different variations in rowing technique.

There are a few things to keep in mind though. Since only the last 5 strokes are taken into account for the calculation of a typical stroke, noise can sometimes not be eliminated completely. Our online data analysis tools will allow you to get a more stable picture of typical boat acceleration calculated from any number of strokes you select at the full data resolution of 100Hz. Analysis results can be stored and archived so you can track and verify you hard-worked-on technique improvements result in the desired change in boat acceleration and speed.

If you have any questions or suggestions for this feature, leave us a reply in the comments and we will be happy to respond. How does your typical stroke look like?