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Does your drive length vary with stroke rate?

Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 9:45 am
by MaxMacLaren1
Hello All,

Please can you help me! For the last 3 months I've been focusing on rate capped rows and have been using Ergdata for the first time which shows my drive length is usually around 1.39 or 1.42. However over the weekend I tried some old routines, 6x1.5 mins and 4x4 mins at free rate which was 32 and 34 spm. I was shocked to see my drive length was in the 1.20s. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong??? Advice welcomed.

Max :(

Re: Does your drive length vary with stroke rate?

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:16 pm
by Wolfmiester
Hi Max,
in the absence of any other (sensible?) reply, here my educated guess.
please take this as nothing but experience from doing this for over 10 yrs, I'm no coach or expert.
However, I'd say that yes it would be somewhat natural for stroke length to shorten as the rate gets higher.
I think that might be for 2 reasons a) technique would easily become a little ragged at higher rate and b) rowing quicker would naturally lead to a tendency to shorten.
So in other words, really focusing on technique might help.
Just my thoughts on it, any by no means would it stand up in court :lol:

Re: Does your drive length vary with stroke rate?

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:24 pm
by gregsmith01748
Hi,

Here is what my drive length looks like versus stroke rate. Stroke rate is along the x-axis and drive length is on the y axis. I was rowing a rate ladder with
- 5' at 20
- 4' @ 22
- 3' @ 24
- 2' @ 26
- 1' @ >28

I was rowing this on slides.

Image

You can see that the drive length is pretty consistent up to about 30 and start to get shorter, but not by as much as you are seeing. I think you might want to do some more work at stroke rates in the 28-32 range to increase drive length so you can get more power into those ranges.

Re: Does your drive length vary with stroke rate?

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:02 am
by MaxMacLaren1
Thanks Wolfie and Greg, that's really helpful. So it looks like a little shortening is normal but not to the extent I'm seeing. I'll take your advice and work on technique at higher rates.

Update... Rowed today for an hour and experienced snapping hip syndrome and my drive length shortened significantly. So I'll add extra stretches and some dreaded foam roller work as well.

Max