The Coach as Engineer

By Howard Aiken

An analogy I sometimes use with my crews is that training them is like building an engine.  I usually mention this when crew members are getting their priorities wrong and attempting to apply power before they have the precision and balance required to handle it.  The engine analogy brings with it useful concepts such as efficiency and smoothness. Like most analogies it shouldn’t be pushed beyond its limits, but within those limits it can be useful.

An engineer building an engine knows that power is last thing to apply to his construction. First the moving parts have to be assembled so that they all move within finely controlled tolerances and exactly in time with each other. Only then is it able to withstand the strain of having power applied to it. Similarly, rowers, or rather their boats, have a heirarchy of needs.  First is timing, then balance and lastly, power. Getting these out of order is only ever going to be destructive – fortunately not as spectacularly destructive as it can be with a real engine but I’m sure many coaches have seen crews (particularly novice crews) ‘come apart’ as they attempt to apply more power than they can actually handle.

In an engine, force has to be carefully controlled in both its magnitude and direction, and forces acting in the wrong direction are very bad news and must be eliminated.  Similarly with rowing, the very worst fault a boat can suffer from is excessive force acting in the wrong direction.  Rowers who pull hard into their laps or who throw their body weight sideways during the stroke are exerting forces which absolutely must be corrected before there is any chance of creating an efficient engine.  An inefficient crew, however hard they work, never achieve the boat speed their efforts should produce because too much of their energy goes into producing a rolling, splashy, jerky movement of the boat.  Many novice rowers completely fail to understand the importance of their body weight and how it moves.   The engine analogy can be helpful in explaining to them that they need to be aware of the precision required in all of their movements if they are going to be part of an efficient crew.

As a coach riding the towpath I spend most of my time watching and listening to these rowing ‘engines’.  I run them first of all at low revs, maybe on just two or four of their eight cylinders, checking for instability and noise. When the engine seems to be running smoothly, I run them at gradually higher revs and higher power.

The engine analogy is of course incomplete in that a crew is much more than an engine.  They are also the ‘suspension’ of the boat, keeping it level, and the gearbox of the boat with a set of ‘gears’ ranging from full slide to hands-only. To all of these abilities they also bring (if you are lucky) intelligence and an ability to learn, so that they get better and better at fulfilling all of these roles as they gain more experience.

It is an immensely rewarding experience to see a crew gradually come together as a single working unit like a good engine, responsive and powerful yet also smooth and quiet.  To be part of such a crew is to experience rowing at its very best and a feeling of shared achievement which few other sports can offer.