I was confused when I first tryed rowing, just think that your trying to pull the rope as far as you can, your legs are the first half of the pull then you use arms.
Love the coaching but the guy in the examples is like 9 and half feet tall! His upper body alone is taller than most crossfitters. I love love love rowing. I row everyday. But at 5’6 I can tell you the mechanics don’t look the same lol
I find it interesting how much you round the back with the proper rowing technique demonstrated in the video. It goes completely against most lifting technique. The pause the crossfitters are doing after the extension is mostly just from fatigue. Most of the videos showed were midway through a marathon row.
How embarrassing for them. They're supposed to be professional athletes, and they can't even do the one exercise they're competing in right. Crossfit is so stupid. No one should be doing it. Lol
These are "box techniques." No one really knows what they are doing at many of these XFit gyms. The coaches have some idea of most things, but may only be truly knowledgeable about, say, lifting or gymnastics. The occasional rower does show up like I was fortunate to encounter, but he was a member, not a coach. That's the downside of incorporating so many disciplines. Lot's of fantastic athleticism is seemingly wasted across a smattering of poor techniques; often this leads to injury.
I love how they have three cameras recording someone with shitty form. As a former rower, it's painful watching other people on the erg. Nobody seems to do it right
as a rower, I am biting my tongue in the gym when i see people row. It is so frustrating because you just see how much they're straining their arms and back, instead of their legs. To all beginners reading this, rowing is mainly a LEG sport. You PUSH, you hardly pull!
This is great. As a lighter guy I need good technique to overcome my lack of bulk and hence strength. Keen to try this at the gym and see if I can get some free speed/distance.
Hi, I'm a rower, and just thought i'd chip in here. Mainly to say that lightness is not at all a problem if you'd like to get good at rowing. I'd even say that bulk is usually a disadvantage (Unless you're really good). The most important is 1) strong core muscles and 2) strong leg muscles. And leg/heel/hip flexibility (forward folding). You are at an advantage if you're tall, are flexible, have a strong core, stamina, and have strong legs. Bulky guys usually have terrible technique because they think it's a matter of PULLING. In fact, rowing is a matter of PUSHing. Hope this helps, have fun! And if you are at all intrigued by all of this, give outdoor rowing a go. It's 100% better than the ergo (:
CrossFit ruins everything. If you expect to see good rowing, handstands, pullups snatch/clean and jerk, or any other skill based motion... Seek out the sport it was derived from.
Chandler Smith appears to scooch his seat up which causes his back to be vertical. This is a big problem I have seen with many people who exercise on the rower.
5:00 in regards to Khalipa specifically, he was kind of notorious for being awful at cardio workouts, and he openly stayed he would treat the row as more of a strength exercise than an efficient cardio one 😅 so it's kind of surprising to hear his actual technique isn't bad in spite of that pause
I learned to row on the Tideway (the Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race course) and won a medal in the UK Finals at the National Schools Regatta at Nottingham Holme Pierrepont - and I have to disagree with your rowing coach. He's criticising people for getting their back solidly vertical and straight before applying leg strength - so he's teaching people to "Shoot The Slide" which is what coaches spend their first month with novices eliminating! If there is power lost at the catch from being curled up, don't curl up so much and your shins should never go much beyond vertical when coming forward. GB rower Cameron Buchan demonstrates this nicely in his videos. To explain: * There are 3 body structures (Arms, Body, Legs - you may wish to sub-classify Body as Upper and Lower separately) connecting the oar handle to the shoes ("clogs" on older boats). * Any rowing effort you make goes through the entire length of these 3 body structures from your hands to your feet. * If you apply force from any one of these 3 at a time when either of the other two are not aligned to completely transmit that force through the skeleton or tendons, you are making the muscles of the first fight the muscles of the other two, which will surely ruin your endurance. * This is particularly bad if you are consistently applying full leg force through a bent back and may cause disc injury and possibly even trapped nerves in the lower back over extended time into middle-age. So there are 3 stages of the power section of a stroke, from the catch to backstops, so that Arms, Body, Legs are never fighting each other: 1. Get the back leaning 10 degrees back from vertical, straight and locked ASAP, while the arms are kept straight and the legs compressed (this is quite easy in a real boat travelling at speed), 2. Drive with the legs while the arms are still straight and the back is solid and pointing in a direction as minimally different from the arms as possible so that there is no alignment energy lost at the shoulders, 3. Pull with the arms while the legs are extended and the back is still solid. Obviously, you then have to work on overlapping these 3 stages as much as possible so that the stroke is smooth but still without muscles fighting each other more than minimally. Sitting up straight helps your breathing too. Over short distances this technique is less important, but vitally important over long distances. For example, when I did the 50km (31 miles) Boston Rowing Marathon in 2018 it took me over 6 hours because the local farmers had been allowed to flush their Drainage Canals full of plant life and weeds into the river *before* the race instead of afterwards - as compared to my (now middle-aged) 50,000m erg time of 4h20m, and James Cracknell's time of 3h31 the previous year - but I still finished unaided.
This is one of the problems with the Crossfit concept - they do so many sports that they don't learn any of them properly. One reason for the horrible injury levels they experience...
@@joaosicari8164 Sorry, but that's a daft comment. First, most people doing crossfit are are ordinary folks looking for everyday fitness. There is precisely zero need to do these risky exercises to achieve that. There are FAR safe exercise approaches that will achieve superior results. Second, even if you are an elite athlete, why court unnecessary risks? I was a national level athlete and trained with European, World and Olympic champions. I never had a significant injury, and nor did anyone else in my training group. It's about being smart, not about being gung-ho.
if you're just using the rowing machine to get fast numbers and don't care about actual boats then shouldn't your technique be different? Why would optimal boat technique be the same as optimal technique for pulling a chain?
You start the video of Mat at the 44 min mark where he's fatigued. There's gonna be technical breakdown in an athlete that doesn't specialize in rowing. Look at how big Chandler's lats and quads are. There's a thing called being muscle bound that rowers and endurance athletes may not be aware of. Not that your points aren't valid but your critiques without context are a little bit misleading in these athlete's abilities to perform a task they are not experts in.
I may have misremembered this, but i think that the only person to get injured on the crossfit marathon erg you showed was the former rower. I understand that youre criticising their rowing form as it would apply to rowers but they arent rowers. If they practiced rowing with a longer front end and were more relaxed it would have a negative affect on the other 90+ percent of crossfit movements that require them to plant their heels and use more glutes. Basically your points may help rowers but probably aren't much help to crossfitters
