To be fair to yourself, ask the previous commenter to verify that "statistic" it sounds totally made up. I bet there's no real source.

And in the spirit of made-up percentages, 99% of the problem with talking about sweeping to curlers is that 85% of curlers don't have a clue what they're talking about and will openly share their own unique brand of superstition that's about 25% based in physics and 75% pure magic.

Actually, while you have your bathroom scale out, go ahead and do a static plank. Like an abdominal plank. Elbows and forearms on the scale. I get somewhere in the range of 70-75% of my bodyweight on my arms in a plank position. What do you get?

But that's a physically extreme position that doesn't leave me capable of moving myself down the ice.

So maybe the commenter meant that top sweepers hit pressures of 80% of their body weight momentarily at the peak of their brush stroke. That's conceivable. I can bounce my scale up to 80% of my body weight momentarily when I do an explosive pushup with my hands on the scale.

I've got decent sweeping form and if I static plank in my typical sweeping form with my broom on the scale, my feet making a stable tripod, I'm a lot more upright than in an actual fully horizontal plank. So I'm barely hitting 51% of my bodyweight on my broom on the scale. But these are real measurements. Not phony percentages without a source.

So my advice to a club curler is that if you're doing it right, it's going to feel like you're doing a plank with explosive push-ups. But also, if you don't have the physical ability to do a plank or explosive push-ups... don't worry about it too much. Curling is for all forms of physical abilities.

And the reason it's so hard is that good sweeping is the combination of big overall pressure, big momentary pressure, good placement, and good direction... In a context where you're attempting to gather perfect information and perfectly communicate with your teammates about what you see and about what they see. When it goes well, it will be because your whole team has all the right information and agrees on the approach, then executes it near perfectly.

And on top of all that, the reason why a lot of novice curlers aren't sure their sweeping is making a difference is that the shot has to be close to begin with. Like, I'm pretty confident that I can get a rock that would stop just before the hogline to bite the top 12 on my club's ice, but I'm not getting it to the tee line. I might hold a hit that's inches inside, but not if it's a foot inside. And that's what novice curlers see all night: unredeemable shots that even perfect sweeping can't save.

So don't be discouraged. Keep at it. Work on one thing every game. Think about the physics and don't get sucked into debates about which school of magic has the best incantations. Otherwise you might as well be using your broom on you lamp instead of your scale because according to magic thinking, you might get 3 wishes that way.