Just outside my office, under the shade of some firs and tamaracks, our ski shop director sets up a slack line, horseshoe pit, bean bag toss/cornhole game, and volleyball/badminton court. You might look it over in passing and see just a modest collection of picnic party games, but what I always see is an ideal playground for teaching the nervous system things that will improve my sculling and coaching.
When I've got ten minutes between tasks or in a gap in the sculling camps' daily schedule, I like to wander over there and spend a few minutes alternating between getting out of my comfort zone on the slack line and tossing beanbags and occasionally horseshoes. I confess that I haven't yet figured out how to include badminton in a way that specifically benefits sculling, but someday maybe.
Here's what I continue to learn and reinforce nearly every time I do it:
1) Faith in the plasticity of my nervous system and proprioception. Three or four years ago was the first summer I spent trying to learn just to stay on the slackline for more than a second or two - I did more falling off than anything else that first year. By the second summer, I could stay on it pretty well, and in the third year, I developed the ability not just to walk on it but also to change direction and sometimes to be able to jump from the ground to the line and stay on. Simple stuff, but remarkably satisfying. And from the "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" process-oriented school of thought, if someone had told me even a year ago that in order to move forward with learning to slackline what I needed most was to begin to feel the upward force of the line supporting me, I'd have had no idea what that even meant, and yet recently I have spontaneously begun to feel exactly that. Unexpected epiphanies abound if you're receptive and open to them. And if my nervous system learns something about balance and stability on a tightrope/slackline, I'm confident that I can apply that to balance and stability in the boat.
2) A new appreciation for allowing looseness in the joints and the muscle groups that move them. I had already learned this lesson from both horseshoes, golf, and darts, but apparently not well enough, so I needed Cornhole to seal the deal. What I've noticed lately is that if I can truly let go of my deltoids and pecs and let my arm and shoulder relax and truly swing like a pendulum, I get a much more consistent flight out of the beanbag and a much higher percentage of throws landing on the platform and/or dropping through the hole. It is not hard to tell when something seizes and gets tense on the downswing (or anywhere in the cycle), and the result is usually a toss that misses its intended mark. I can even verbalize whether a throw is going to be successful as it's happening ("Off!" or "On" just before I release the beanbag) and I am almost always accurate in my assessment. I've written on this topic before, and will only add this: the difference between genuine looseness in the joints and limbs and even a little bit of needless tension is subtle but crucial. And unfortunately for scullers, the feedback is not immediate and therefore not as obviously important; a boat rowed by a tense person can still go fast for quite a while, while a beanbag tossed or a golf ball struck by a tense person shows the error immediately. This, in my opinion, is why sculling is so difficult to refine - it fails to punish us for small errors and rewards us for effort, so we are fooled into thinking that more effort is always the best solution. It's a conundrum. Paying attention to the nervous system's subtle feedback is the way out. Pay attention!
