Erg Technique

Last post of drivel. However i was thinking that some of the scores that people are posting are probably not representative of how good they actually are. However, nor will their 2k scores be. The reason for this might well partly be because people are not really thinking about their technique carefully enough on the erg. While it is slightly less important than in the boat there are still a few key principals that need adhering to if scores are going to be good. Using people from M1 as examples (so that if you have videos from the filespace you can watch and see what I mean), here are a few things that will pretty much screw your scores up (the people concerned probably should take some time over the holidays to make sure that they have got these habits very much out of their systems!):

Richard - tends to pull with the arms very early in the stroke. The arms aren't strong enough to do this and you will only end up pulling yourself towards the handle. You will then waste leg drive (as your legs will still be going down) and a worse split results. Try and hang from the handle with straight arms until the end of the stroke.

Paul - jerking the shoulders at the catch. This is trickier to describe, but essentially it means that at the catch you move the shoulders actively rather than ust taking up the work in your lats and hanging on the handle. I used to do this a lot and it was a big help when I stopped myself from doing it (this involved a mirror and a lot of practice).

Ben - Opening the back early. This just means that you don't use the leg drive effectively (nor indeed the back. You sort of feel like you are falling out of the back of the stroke every time. The way to deal with this is probably to do a load of legs only stuff and then try and add the back in later than you think is sensible.

Pete - overreaching. The problem with this is that after going for extra length you end up in a weak position that you can't push effectively from. This leads to spending half of the length you should have sorting yourself out into a good position. Better to row shorter and get a longer effective length.