A guest post from – Carlos D

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Carlos Dinares wants you to look at these pictures and check at the different upper body positions like the wrists, elbows, shoulders and seating up position. You can see that the rower who is going through the drive is using his upper body strength to hold his body weight away from the seat and hang on to the handle and the footstretcher. Carlos knows that the development of good coordination and strength takes lots of practice and good coaching.

What I can see from these 2 pictures:

1. The rower is seating up straight with his head up and looking forward.
2. The position of his wrists, elbows and shoulders is helping him to keep his core engaged. He is not breaking his wrists, his forearms are parallel to the water. His elbows are pointing outside and not down. Shoulders are down and relaxed. His lats and core are totally engaged. Look at his upper body.

For Carlos Dinares to hold your body weight up you need to:

1. Control your body weight. If you are too heavy it’s too hard to hang because you need too much power to suspend your weight.
2. Develop the right drive coordination. If you don’t have a coordinated stroke you cannot keep up your body weight up even if you are strong enough. To keep your body weight up you need to be connected to the water and keep your gravity center in front of your hips.
3. Have developed the right body strengths. To hold your body weight up during the drive you need to be really strong on your core.
4. For Carlos it is not enough to do cross training or weights to achieve these powers. All this development needs to be adapted to the body doing the stroke cycle movement. You need to transfer this to the rowing stroke by doing the rowing movement.

Part 2 of this post will publish on Monday.  Join our newsletter list to get each post in your in-box.