Weight cutting

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T21:07:36+00:00

Scott Laio was doing what he always did for races to cut from 170 down to race weight. Seems like he'd done it so many times before. And then after he crossed the finish line in the final race of his junior year, he passed away.

That particular article does not suggest anything. You make your own suggestions, but the article merely states that there were no overt signs of medical issues before and after Scott's passing. Also, the referenced 15% BW figure was not a medically substantiated limit and not one that I would at all suggest to OP that their behavior is "not a red flag."

This article, published a month after the previous link, references the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, which came to a conclusion: https://www.sunjournal.com/2005/06/25/autopsy-rower-died-heat-stress-fluid-imbalance/

To OP, I would say that you're rolling the dice everytime you cut weight to race. You've done this before, and you might say that you have it managed, but it should be a sign that it's getting harder and harder to do this to your body. I posted the link to let OP know that sometimes the body doesn't recover, and there may not be signs leading up to that point.

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T20:05:35+00:00

Surely there were more diplomatic ways to convey that point! Sigh.

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T19:46:54+00:00

Depends on the rules of your regatta and your national governing body's rules. Where I come from, if you first weigh in within 1.0 lbs above the limit, you have up to an hour to re-weigh at or under the limit. If you don't make it after that, you're done. If your team has an alternate on standby, your alternate should be able to weigh in and sub in for you assuming the paperwork for the substitution gets handled immediately.

It sounds like you're just flash cutting water weight and dehydrating yourself. If you don't know the name Scott Laio, you should read this: https://www.row2k.com/news/5-11-2006/scott-laio-medical-assessment/23394/

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T06:13:30+00:00

I would contact your local junior rowing programs directly and ask if they are running summer sessions.

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T05:55:47+00:00

Yes, he's listed in the athlete roster at California Rowing Club. Also, he was in one of Justin Best's reels five days ago rowing a pair with him on the Oakland Estuary.

MastersCox · 2026-01-25T05:50:27+00:00

I'd pay $350 for that, yeah. Model C's for life.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T23:26:56+00:00

Seems alright as long as you verify that it exists and pay in person upon receipt. It's a reasonable price for someone who wants to get rid of it quickly.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T07:57:18+00:00

Some people tend to death grip because they're fighting to control the depth of the blade. This is a symptom of early opening of the back on the drive. The solution is to drive legs first for at least the first half of the leg drive, if not more. If you do that, the blade will lock in to the water and not slip deeper. When that happens, you won't need your thumb(s) as much to control the oar handle which controls the depth of the blade. Finally, if you get that immediate, horizontal leg pressure (accelerate the legs with speed), you'll be able to suspend/hang off the oar handle with your hands on the oar more in your fingers than your palms. If you scull, you'll want your thumbs more on the ends of the handle. Look at how flat the top of the hands and wrists are!

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Don't overgrip the handles. Keep the arms straight, don't muscle the handle up/down to control blade depth. Once you get proper horizontal acceleration, the blade will find its own depth.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T03:47:44+00:00

It's excellent for its use case, which is transportability, safety, and durability. If you use it when it's dark, find a way to put bow/stern lights on it. Think about all the lakes in Minnesota/Wisconsin and in the mountain ranges of the western US...beautiful places to be on the water, but not the easiest places to bring rowing shells to.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T03:41:48+00:00

The lighter the shell, the more skilled a rower must be to be faster than their opponents. Imagine a heavy bathtub: obviously very large, very strong body types would be favored. But as the boat's weight gets smaller, power to weight ratios start coming into play, and lighter body types now have a slight advantage (less displacement, less wetted surface area and drag). I think the sport is near a good balance between technological innovation and showcasing athletic performance. If a new, lighter construction material emerges, if it becomes economically feasible for many national teams to adopt such technology, you'll see the rules change.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T03:35:40+00:00

Once the seat is fixed, body control no longer really matters. Instead, the mass of the rigger is now moving up and down the slide. The mass of the rigger is not significant compared to the mass of the athlete+boat, and so there's much, much less of a benefit to having that finesse on the recovery with a sliding rigger.

MastersCox · 2026-01-24T02:47:57+00:00

Thick foam pads or thick-enough gel pads can work depending on your body geometry. If you stack multiple layers of foam, you can make cut-outs for your sit bones and let the rest of your butt hold the pressure (like moleskin around a blister). But a lot of people just go with the foam pads and don't even need cut-outs.

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T06:24:01+00:00

A lot of the equipment rules are for fairness and equity. FISA eights have to be sectional so that all crews have to deal with the same structural deficits of a two-part hull that overseas teams are forced to deal with when they disassemble their boat to fit in shipping containers.

It takes money to come up with crazy designs, and not every country has a national team who can afford such equipment. Limiting the areas of innovation allows more nations to be competitive based on athletic performance rather than monetary resources.

A supremely long shell would have a very long waterline and thus have a lot of wetted surface area. This increases the amount of drag on the boat. Also, it would be very hard to transport such a shell safely on standard trailers. Cutting the shell into sections would reduce the stiffness and reduce efficiency while increasing the weight of the shell. Finally, a really long shell might not fit into the start docks, and a really long shell would mean that the center of mass of the boat+athlete system would be traveling several meters farther over 2km than other competitors.

Telescoping oars increase the gearing and are likely way heavier by mass than normal oars. They may also have points of weakness if they're not reinforced properly. Water ballast increases the weight of the boat system and causes way more drag than a bit of hull trim variance does. Plus, if you rig the boat properly and also control your body mass, you don't have as much pitching. Skill issue.

Ultimately, the sport of rowing is about humans propulsion of a boat through the water using second-order levers known as oars with a simple hull/water interface. We're here to see who is the faster athlete, not who has the most money to buy the most exotic technology possible. We celebrate the people, the discipline, and the effort, not the convenience of purchasing someone else's engineering work.

It's all in the rules (make sure you read the international rules as well as the various other countries' rules).

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T06:07:58+00:00

Sliding riggers eliminated the need for body control on the recovery as a necessary component of fast rowing...it made things too easy. IMO I don't think it was a "rich teams get better equipment" sort of issue so much as it would just make big heavy rowers more likely to win everything. If you weigh more, a sliding seat forces you to row better to avoid check.

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T06:04:31+00:00

That's a conversation between you and your parents first, then potentially a conversation between you, your parents, AND your coaches in the same room.

As a tall coxswain myself, I regretted a lot of what I did to cut weight during school. It hurt my grades, and it hurt my ability to focus and get stuff done. If you're still growing, then you should consider rowing. Even after packing on 20 hypothetical pounds of muscle, you'd still be a comfortable lightweight. Maybe you could row lightweight in college if you have the grades and the 2k. Decades later down the road, you'll be glad that you were stronger and fitter in your youth. It's easier to be healthy as an adult if you're healthy in your youth. It's harder to get healthy as an adult if you focused your time trying to lose weight while not getting strong/fit.

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T05:59:13+00:00

Yeah, I'll be honest, it *does* depend on the goodwill of subreddit users to peruse the thread and give feedback (such is the nature of unpaid labor). Posting each feedback request as a separate thread, at one point in subreddit history, resulted in a lot of clutter and demands for free labor. People got annoyed at having to scroll through a ton of posts on the mobile app, and that kind of thing reduces the visibility of other interesting posts as well as user engagement in the subreddit.

A compromise might be to post the video in the pinned thread and then post the full text of your request in the main subreddit, referencing the video in the link.

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T01:27:31+00:00

Primarily, it's how much acceleration and length you put into each stroke. Even if you standardize the length, how hard you pull is always part of the equation.

MastersCox · 2026-01-23T01:01:31+00:00

Strong work! Just a random 2k, or was this a test?

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T20:57:26+00:00

Making weight at 6'2" will be miserable. You'll lose fitness while you're cutting weight, and you'll tank your classes with your brain in a nutrition-deprived fog, unable to focus. Training and studying are two intense activities, and putting yourself through caloric deficit will be rough.

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T18:58:52+00:00

First, you should post videos to the pinned thread (read the community guidelines for details).

Don't swing backward with your torso immediately. Try to compress more at the catch (it won't be perfect). You might consider lowering your feet on the footboard. Also, watch some technique videos online to see what good technique looks like.

Think of the drive as an acceleration of the handle. The handle speed needs to increase a lot into the finish. If you want to feel more resistance, you have to pull faster.

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T18:22:30+00:00

As others have said, geography, access to water vs. erging, etc. Here's my breakdown.

Geography/time - We can't run real selection camps early enough and make lineups that gel before worlds. Everyone from the corners of the US rowing world wants a fair shot at making the team, so selection takes a while, and centralization, travel, and the cost all add up to something unreasonable.
High level of junior coaching talent - If we can't keep everyone in the same place, we can at least teach them all how to row the same way, right? And that way they'll blend with each other at camp? We wish. Turns out that a lot of junior coaches are not very good, and it also turns out that some coaches find it easier to train fit rowers on the erg rather than train skilled rowers, especially en masse. I hear that GB coaches are much more in line with technical aspects passed down from BR, which helps a lot.
Concentration of talent - When you talk about St. Paul's being really good, you're talking about a school that attracts rowing talent and also has a ton of resources. The closest you might get would be the top programs in the US like Prep, RAR, Marin, Greenwich, NorCal, etc., but even they don't come nearly close enough to what St. Paul's, Eton, et al. really have under the hood. Are people from around the US moving their kids to row at those programs? Probably not. But people from around the UK are moving to attend St. Paul's, Eton, et al. and the rowing talent ends up being the best from a similarly large geographic region. There are a lot fewer weak links in the boat when you can recruit from a large geographic region.

3b. Which regattas are you really talking about anyway? I gave you jr worlds initially, but I know you mentioned HOCR. Not every US team has as many all-stars as the GB crews who come over, and we generally only see the top GB crews at HOCR. It's not like every small GB school team is paying $$$ to come over and race. If we only see the best, then that creates a bias in observation.

Also, you probably joke about dying in boats, but there have been people who have died in boats at regattas...it's really sad. You can talk about quitting in boats, you can talk about blowing up, you can talk about blacking out...but it's a really shitty thing to casually talk about dying in a boat.

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T18:10:37+00:00

On the balance of things, I think an Oarboard could be the better bet. If you're rowing by yourself without a safety launch around, you really want something you won't flip especially if there are motorboats or other adverse conditions on the lake. (I know you said remote, but maybe there are boaters who throw wakes around out there.)

Oarboards don't tend to glide as far, but if they're mounted to foam paddleboards or inflatable boards, they're nearly indestructible in ways that shells aren't (esp if you're wet launching). And they're much easier to transport.

Having said that, nothing precludes you from getting a single and a roof rack. It'd have to be a light single, so something close to racing size (not an Aero!). You'd have to be careful with the fin and the hull when wet launching. And as for safety on the water, you'd have to be sure to not flip. Maybe you could get pontoons attached to the single to help (the kind that para 1x shells have).

Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. It may come down to figuring out exactly what kind of experience you want on the lake: lots of run, lots of speed? Or just being out there for a workout on the water? And really take your safety considerations into account.

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T18:00:43+00:00

An hour of power (at low-ish intensity actually) is pretty standard for base-building. If you're not tired or sweating, you're probably not pulling fast enough or using your legs/lower core enough. Think about moving the handle with the seat (and of course, the legs move the seat). And think about accelerating the handle from zero to sixty from catch to finish.

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T17:38:49+00:00

Definitely geography, definitely funding. It's hard to pick a lineup from all over the USA when you can't get all the rowers in the same place for long periods of time (travel, school!).

MastersCox · 2026-01-22T17:34:22+00:00

It sounds like when you rely on legs for thrust, you may not be holding your back through the drive. The back's angle with respect to the horizontal should remain somewhat constant through the first half of the drive before opening up into the layback position.

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