Adrian Ellison was a recent RowingChat guest and during that discussion he mentioned the equipment he chose for his amplifier.
What I like about the Coxmate SX is it gives you all the information you want all in one go – it has so many readouts, strokes
The Coxmate SX audio amplifier with GPS speed measurement
per minute, distance traveled, time elapsed, but also the split.
And I have been coxing a crew of British ex Olympian women who raced at the Head of the Charles – we’ve done it twice in the Masters division. We worked out precisely what speed we needed to be going in order to have a reasonable chance of winning the event while we were training back in the UK. We did a lot of long distance training pieces, at fixed rate, below race pace where we were looking to move the boat at a specific speed upstream as we would be at the Head of the Charles.
I found that the feedback I could get from the Coxmate specially looking at boat speed was probably the most useful thing we could have. It really helped the crew tremendously to know whether we were on target, or even above target, or below target, going faster than we expected to.
How did the crew adjust to the speed information you gave?
My feedback from the girls was that it wasn’t a question so much about the amount of power, it was more the relaxation and the efficiency of moving with the boat and not slowing the boat down [that affected the boat speed]. We discovered that the technical efficiency of the recovery phase was at least as important as the power application in the water.
If you would like to test out a Coxmate SX for your club, get in touch for a 2 week demo. The only cost to you is to post it back to us afterwards.
