The proper grip in rowing is essential for speed and endurance. Learn facts and skills for competitive rowing in this rowing video.
Use a feather-like grip on oar
Keep hand at the end of the oar
Keep light grip
Charles is the head coach/chief instructor at the Texas Rowing Center and has been a rowing coach for many years. He loves heading outside to row every morning and enjoys the view.
CHARLES BARKSDALE: My name is Charles Barksdale. I am here with the Texas Rowing Center. I will be giving you a brief introduction into the world of rowing. The first thing I want to cover is the grip. As with most sports, the grip is very important. What we want to do is have a featherlike grip using the fingers with the thumb on the end of the oar. This is going to keep the oar extended; having the thumb on the end is going to keep your oar extended in the proper position. Just hold onto it with your fingers, you have a nice, light grip. This is going to allow you to square and feather the blade properly which is one of the most important things in rowing. We square the blades by turning our fingers and locking the blades straight up and down. There is a flat spot that matches up with another flat spot here in the oarlock that helps it speed itself, then we go ahead and turn it back to the feather position and it locks itself into place. You also keep your hand on the end of the oar to give you the best leverage. This is a simple lever and if my hand was to walk down here, we would loose a lot of leverage so you want to keep your hand right on the end so you get the most out of reaching every stroke. One thing people do in rowing is they hold on very tightly and what we want to do is think about keeping a nice, light grip so it's to keep our upper body relaxed. Imagine yourself hanging from a pull-up bar; you do not need to grab the pull-up bar to hold on to it. You just use your hand as a hook. And it is very important we just use our hand as a hook to draw the blade into the body. This keeps us nice and relaxed and helps the stroke work fluently. One of the things about this, like golf per se, is there is a lot of technology built into the oar, so if we let the oar do some with the work it is going to help us out.
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