How to Scull

Update August 2024

I have just finished my last regatta, capping off my National Team career with a silver medal finish in the Lightweight Men’s Quadruple Sculls (LM4x) at the 2024 World Championships. Up through the very last race, I continued to learn more about my body, find ways of moving the boat faster, and perform at my very best. I feel like I did hit the peak of my skills and abilities in my very last race, something every athlete hopes to achieve.

The core of this was originally written and posted in 2021. While most has stayed the same, I continue to edit it in various ways throughout the stroke based off of what I’ve learned and figured out since then.

Introduction

This is intended to be a complete description of the optimal sculling stroke as I currently understand it. I think that it gives a clearer, more complete picture than other resources currently available to the aspiring athlete, especially one without a quality coach.

I cannot even begin to pretend that I have figured all of this out on my own. All of the knowledge contained herein has been learned from my coaches and teammates throughout the years, or gleaned from books, youtube videos, and social media posts shared by various coaches of many different backgrounds, and for that I am incredibly grateful. 

Reading this and absorbing ever piece will not make you instantly faster. Knowing what you should do and putting it into practice are two different things. Athletes who close the gap between those are going to be the highest performers. Coming back to these words after a few months of work in one area might shed some light on what you need to work on next.

Quality rowing and sculling coaches are hard to come by, especially in the United States. The number of driven, hungry athletes dwarfs the coaching available. I think that this text will be valuable for those athletes lucky enough to be able to row at a program with a talented coach, and especially for athletes without those resources.

I will use various ways to describe each part of the stroke. I mostly talk about how it feels to the athlete, but also include some postural descriptions, names of muscles you should be using, and mental images to compare the motions to. Some have been heard thousands of times by athletes and coaches, but I hope that you might see them in a new light — see why they are used. 

Style

The “best” technique

There are many ways to move a boat fast. Watch any Olympic or World Championship final and you’ll see a myriad of styles and techniques, all going very fast.

I am not claiming that this is the ~one best technique~. On this site, I am offering a breakdown of what I have found to be a simple, effective stroke that I’ve seen work for many crews — sweep and scull.

Key Concepts

Balance

What do rowers think of when they hear “balance”? Probably keeping the boat set and the oars off of the water. While this is important, it’s not what I mean when I talk about balance as a concept here.

Yes, you should feel like you’re sitting balanced left to right in the boat, so the boat is not tipping from side to side. But you should also feel like you are balanced from front to back on the seat as well throughout the entire stroke. If you are entering the catch without being balanced on the seat, there’s no way that you’ll be able to make a light, precise motion to get the blades in while having your body ready to drive for a long stroke. If you can’t sit balanced at the finish both side to side and front to back, you won’t be able to send the boat away cleanly at the finish and prepare easily for the next stroke.

Reaching, or trying to get as long as possible on either end of the stroke, does not let you stay balanced.

The “Drive” versus the “Recovery”

Any time the face of the blades do not have pressure on them in the water (the drive), you should not be putting effort into driving your legs, opening your hips, or pulling your arms. The “Zero Moments” at the ends of the stroke, where the velocity of your body relative to the boat goes from negative to positive (passes through zero) and vice versa (more on this later), should then be considered as part of the Recovery. You do need to use some muscles to ‘move’ during those zero moments, but you should not feel like you are “driving”.

The Boat Moves

When we think about going from the catch to the finish or vice versa, it is not intuitive to our minds or bodies that the boat moves back and forth under us. Our first instinct is to think of the motion the same way it would be on a static rowing machine — our body moves back and forth while the thing we’re sitting on stays in the same spot. Even the language we use on the water is biased: we say “going up the slide” on the recovery” as if the tracks are in one spot and we are moving our bodies over top of them.

To compound this idea, most (American) rowers learn to row on the erg or in a large team boat (8+ or 4x) while rowing by pairs — where the static mass of the boat vastly outweighs the mass of the rowers moving back and forth. 

However, it is much better to think that your body mass is traveling continuously over the water and that you are controlling the boat moving back and forth beneath you — like an erg on sliders.

It can take a while to really understand the idea that the boat moves under you. But thinking about the stroke this way leads to your body being more balanced on the seat, more in control of the recovery (you only have to bring the 14kg boat to you), and less likely to use your back and shoulders too early on the drive (jacking the back).

Hip, Core, and Low Back

This is not professional medical advice

Throughout the whole stroke, your lumbar spine should be stacked neutrally and stay perpendicular to your pelvis. The alternatives to this are a) a rounded lower back or b) “spilling” your pelvis forward and sticking your ribs out/chest up.

There has been a huge amount written about spinal stability, so I won’t be able to summarize it here. However, I can say from experience that you can row better, lift more, and live a better life when you can move with pelvis, spine, and rib cage organized correctly.

I have found that you can’t ignore the rib cage when talking about pelvic and low back alignment. A helpful image for me is imagining a plane across the top of my pelvis and a plane under the bottom of my rib cage. I want those two planes to stay parallel during the rowing stroke (or any movement).

Your lumbar spine consists of the lowest 5 vertebrae. If you do not have the hip/glute/hamstring mobility to rotate your pelvis forward far enough so that your low back can stay straight while having a forward body angle, those vertebrae will hinge themselves to compensate for your limited hip mobility. Not only does this concentrate pressure in your discs (bad), but when you go to open your body in the second half of the stroke, you now have to use your spinal erectors to uncurl the spine. They are much better at keeping the spine erect, and your hip muscles -- glutes and hamstrings -- are much better at opening the hips. Let everyone do the job they were designed for! 

If you see this information only as injury prevention advice, you’re missing out. You will be able to generate more power per stroke and sustain those strokes for a longer time if you organize your body correctly, not to mention living with a higher quality of life for a long time.

Recovery - Sitting “Up”

Say I asked you to sit still in the boat for seven minutes. Would you rather sit with your knees flat, elbows locked out in front of you, and your body stretched forward as far as your hamstrings allow? Or would you rather sit with a slight break in the knees, around 5 degrees of forward hip angle, and your hands resting over your knees?

If you only have a limited amount of energy available to you during a race, it is best spent on propelling the boat forward during the drive. During the recovery, you should maximize the amount of relaxation you can achieve while still being prepared to start the next drive. On the recovery, sitting in a more upright position with your upper body relaxed (everything above your sternum/HR strap) will help you 1) breathe better and 2) send more energy into each drive.

You still need to hip hinge forward and get on top of the sit-bones. But you aren’t trying to sit “straight” through the torso like you were in church. There is no board strapped to your spine. You want to have your core engaged and lumbar spine in a neutral, supportive position, but your thoracic spine and shoulders do not need to be rigid — everything above your HR strap is prepped but not tense. “Upright” here just means a more vertical angle from your hips to your shoulders. 

Sitting more upright may make you feel like you are rowing “shorter” because you aren’t getting as much reach with the upper body. However, this deficit is made up by achieving a longer leg drive. If you get your heels to your butt, instead of your chest to your knees, your seat can travel further. 

Remember, “length” is the distance of the arc that your handles travel. We care most about “effective length”, or the distance of that arc that you have pressure on the face of the blades. 

Also, in sculling (as opposed to sweeping), keeping the chest “up”, not collapsing forward, in the front end allows your shoulders to open wide as they follow the handles. From the catch position, the legs can fire 1) more quickly and 2) more horizontally than the muscles in your back. So we want to set them up for success. 

Finally, with the chest more vertical and the shoulders down and spread out wide, you can control the blade entry more easily outside the gunnels. With a more aggressive body angle, the shoulders are more likely to rise up towards the ears as the arms reach forward. With the chest more vertical and the arms outstretched, you can keep the shoulder in a strong position down away from the ear while lifting the handle.

Recovery - Approaching the Front End/The Front End Approaching You

With the boat sliding towards you, keep your body angle the same after half slide. This is easier to achieve if you picture your body staying static in a strong position and the footplate moving towards you. Again, it may feel “shorter” — this may be a sign that you are accustomed to reaching further after the wheels have stopped.

You need to apply some pressure on the feet for the wheels to stop — to hit zero velocity relative to the hull. We want this force to happen as late as possible and as close as possible to when the force goes onto the blade.

“Boat check” (aka negative hull acceleration) is unavoidable, but the best crews in the world have a very strong and quick check, “quick” meaning that the time between when the hull is slowing down (as they put pressure on the feet) and the time when the hull is speeding up again (as the blade is connected to the water) is short.

So, if you continue to reach further once the wheels have stopped (without the feet coming towards your seat), then you already have pressure on the feet, and it is only movement of your torso and your shoulders that is getting you the extra “length”. This creates a longer “check” moment before the blades are in the water.

Recovery - Hand Position and Squaring the Blades

In our framework, the handles have to move from your finish position to your catch position by the time the feet get underneath you. Throughout the recovery, you should have weight on top of the handles, not just behind. You do not have to think about pushing the handles from the bow all the way to the stern. Having the weight of your hands behind the handles only allows for control of the oars in the horizontal plane (backward and forward). With some weight on top of the handles, you can manipulate the oars in the vertical direction with much more control.

Start squaring the blades early enough so that they are completely square while the footplate is still coming towards you. You need the blades to be square before you start placing them in the water. Squaring when your hands pass over your ankles/feet is a good starting point. It may feel unnecessarily early at steady state, but at race pace, since the recovery speed is so fast, you need to start that early.

Recovery - The Top Six Inches

Your arms should be close to full extension, but you still need some agility to be accurate with the blades and have a sensitive feeling about how fast the boat is traveling through the water. 

Since the blades are not in the water yet, you should not be contracting any big muscles, but you can be aware of the load to come so that the body does not get stretched out once the legs start to drive. Again, the body does not have to do anything here -- it is the feet and the legs that need to be ready to change direction.

The blade entry begins while the footplate is still coming towards you. The hands only need to move a short vertical distance, so there should not be an exaggerated movement from the arms or shoulders.

The Zero Moment - Front End

At the point where your feet can no longer travel further towards your body, it is time to start pushing the footplate away. Since you don’t have a load on the blades at this point, you are only moving a 14kg boat (1x) or a quarter of a 52kg boat (4x). Therefore the shift from negative to positive relative horizontal velocity can happen quickly and without much force.

Similarly, in the vertical direction, the only things that need to move are your hands/handles, so you should be able to place the blades in the water pretty quickly. Your oars each weigh about 1.4 kg. Some quick and dirty math shows that each handle is pressing up into your hand with about 2 pounds of force. If you only need to move the handles each about 3-4 inches to get the blade fully covered, that shouldn’t take too long — about 0.1 seconds if you’re good or 0.3 seconds if you’re sloppy.

No matter how quickly these changes of direction can happen, it will always take some amount of time. You are trying to make these windows of time as small as possible, and you are trying to match up the timing of the two actions. 

The shell/rower system is running through the water towards the bow. If you don’t move the shell relative to the body (sitting still at the front end) and put the blades in vertically, you will check the boat. If, as is commonly asked for by coaches (more on this in a moment), you put the blades in as the feet are still coming towards you (as you are still “moving up the slide”), you will check the boat even more. So, in order to minimize the negative forces going from the boat/rower system to the water, the vertical component of the blade entry should happen right as you begin to push the footplate away from the seat. 

If you are accurate, you will have a moment where the blades are going in but have no pressure on them — this means that your horizontal “handle speed” (speed of the handles/seat vs. the boat/footplate) is in perfect relation to the “boat speed” (speed of the boat/footplate vs. the water). If you start to put the blades in before this moment, as the blades enter the water, the “handle speed” is slower than the “boat speed”, so you get some splash towards the bow (backsplash). If you start driving the legs down before the blades are covered in the water, you will not be as connected as you could be, and your blades will slip. The ideal is to have a “V” splash or no splash. 

Through that first inch or so of the slide, when your blades are still entering the water, you want the legs/feet to move, you don’t want to push. This gentleness can be accomplished by just thinking of pushing away with the toes instead of jumping with your big leg muscles. 

As the boat speed and the stroke ratings go up, this window becomes smaller and smaller, so getting the timing right becomes more important and more difficult.

Why do coaches tell you to “catch on the recovery”? Because almost no one errs on the side of putting the blades in too early. Dropping the blades too early gives immediate feedback — it feels terrible to push the back of the blade into the water as you are trying to take a smooth stroke. So, the only error coaches ever really see is people “driving the blade in”, or not getting the face of the blade connected to the water until a decent amount of the leg drive has been used. So, in order to get an athlete to connect earlier, a good trick is to try to exaggerate the change. Also, while the boat is coming towards you, you definitely do need to prepare the blades and start the motion of the blades towards the water.

If an athlete is used to the feeling of the static erg, she will have to retrain his brain/muscle sequencing around the change of direction. On the static erg, around the front end, before you connect to the handle, you need to 1) apply enough force to change the momentum of your body weight and 2) use your core/back to stabilize your body as your legs and hips change direction. In the boat, you only need to apply enough force to change the momentum of the shell, and your body weight can stay prepared but relaxed around that moment.

Once the blade is in the water, you can begin driving.

The Drive - Theory

A quick aside into some physics here. A greater understanding of what you are actually doing can help you propel the boat through the water better.

Through the drive, although the blades do move slightly through the water, we can essentially treat them as a stationary object. The oar is a lever. Technically, the blade is the fulcrum, the oarlock (which is attached to the shell) is the load, and the handle applies the force. So, you lock the blade in the water and move the handle past the oarlock, which translates into motion of the oarlock (the boat) relative to the blade (the water). Good. 

Traditionally, the way athletes and coaches think about the drive is handle-dominant stroke. Unsurprisingly, this is the same as on a static erg — your feet are stationary and you are trying to accelerate the hands back, away from the feet. Turn the motion ninety degrees, and it would look like doing a clean in the gym. 

We should think about it in a slightly different way. The pressure on the feet must always be in relation to the pressure on the handles. 

So, inside the boat/rower system, instead of the handles moving away from the feet, you could think about pushing the feet away from the handles, or moving them apart from each other in a scissor motion. This moves the focus and effort in the stroke from the upper body to the lower body. The overall stroke pattern won’t change drastically, but it can affect how an athlete moves around either end of the stroke.

In this framework, athletes are less likely to use the shoulders and body in the catch (“jacking the back”), and less likely to swing too far and dump the body weight down onto the bow deck at the finish. 

If you are concentrating on moving your handles away from your feet at the front end, you are more likely to utilize (contract) your upper back, shoulder, and arm muscles in order to match the boat speed and find connection. Instead, the feet should find the boat speed, while the upper body (really just the arms/hands) should only be concerned with the vertical motion of the blade entry. Then, through the drive, the feet and hands work against each other in a purely horizontal direction.

Additionally, towards the finish, ignoring the pressure on the feet may allow for a longer layback or late arm draw that is not doing much to actually move the boat. If, alternatively, I am always feeling my feet press away from my handles, as soon as I start to lose connection to the footplate, the stroke is done. Remember that the footplate is rigidly connected to the oarlock through the shell. So, if the feet are not pressing on the footplate, your lever doesn’t have a stable load to move. 

The Drive - Execution

Everything should happen horizontally, against the face of the blade. Any vertical motion will take energy that would be better spent moving the boat horizontally. 

As we move out of our “catch” position, with the blades connected, drive the legs hard. Because of the angles and the load, your handles do not come back into the boat quickly if you do it right, so it will look patient. You should keep the shoulders and hands down, keep the core strong, and start driving the footplate away from you using the legs and hips. 

Before the knee angle gets to 90 degrees (roughly half-slide), you should be using the knee extensor muscle (quads) and not your rear chain (hamstrings, glutes, and spinal extensors). Because of the torque of the hamstrings, using the rear chain muscles before that point (opening the hips/body earlier) opposes knee extension. You don’t want to be fighting yourself trying to extend your knee/drive the legs.

The core and shoulders/arms connect the leg drive to the water. They do not need to contract in the front end, but they should be engaged to send the load around your mid-back as you load up blades with the legs. In the front end, your seat and your handles should then move at the same relative speed. Letting the seat drive away from the handles (“shooting your butt”) means that you are not connecting through the core — not connecting the full power of your legs to accelerate the boat. Sitting with the torso more vertically, less hunched over, puts your core in a stronger position, which will decrease the likelihood of shooting the butt. Be aware that if you make a change that causes you to be more connected to the water, your legs may drive the feet away more slowly due to the increased load. 

The body swing and arm draw happen concurrently to hold the load as the feet move away faster in the back half. The arms do not wait until the legs are completely done driving. If the legs are flat (done driving) and the hips are open already, then your arms cannot add much — if any — speed. So, better to start them earlier to add to the connection created by the legs and body. 

The body opening starts from the hamstrings, glutes, and core after your knee angle passes 90 degrees. After 90 degrees, they can help open the hips and pull the knees down to the deck. It is just like any hip hinge movement in the weight room -- squat and deadlift are the easiest examples. Keep hinging from the hips, not the low back!

In sculling, you do not need a significant amount of swing amplitude, especially in team boats. It may feel like you are not doing much at all. Personally, if I feel like I am moving only 5-10 degrees forward and back, it looks pretty normal.

The biceps should be engaged and contracting before the shoulders start to draw backward.  The shoulders and hands keep the blades shallow, and the elbows stay perpendicular to the handles, on the same plane. Keep thinking about driving against the face of the blade completely perpendicularly. A good visual for the last few inches of the arm draw is opening a bag of chips — you need to pull the shoulders and elbows back and (slightly) out, not down and in. Throughout the second half, then, the forces are acting totally horizontally against the blade. This helps keep the connection and avoids sending the bow down into the water. 

As your legs finish driving, the “drive” finishes. The pressure should come off of the feet and the face of the blades at the same time. Your knees lay flat and your pelvis is slightly rolled back. Your core is supported by your deep core muscles — your lower abs and pelvic floor muscles.

The Recovery - Back End

As soon as pressure comes off, you are on the recovery again. The major concern in the back end is to get out of the way of the running boat. There is no need for a pause at the release or for a super fast hands away motion. I am a fan of constant athletic motion around the back end, with the body and handles going out the same speed that they came in.  

Since you finished the drive so horizontally, there shouldn’t be any need to sit back up out of bow.

The blade extraction happens in the last few inches of the arm draw. This motion also takes some time, so waiting until the handles hit your chest and jerking them down will not result in a smooth boat run. In those last inches, push down and away against the handles with relaxed hands. As you do this and open your fingers, the blades feather. 

As your torso and pelvis rock to the front of your seat, the torso pushes the hands away. There is no need for a sequenced hands-body-legs recovery. This may be a helpful visual for novices, but at race pace it is impractical. The shoulders, arms, and hands should stay relaxed and loose, not stretching out fully. The left hand travels out first so that it stays in front of the right hand. The wrists are flat, the handles rest in your fingers. As the shoulders pass the hips and the hands approach the knees, the knees break, the boat is running underneath you towards the finish line, and the footplate starts pushing your feet up towards your seat. 

Repeat.