| Use of Silence |
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| Articles - Coxing from a Tigercox |
| Written by tigercox |
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After getting many conflicting feedback reports from individuals within crews I was coxing, I did some research some years ago now, involving recordings of pieces, correlated with coxswains post race write ups of what worked, and how good responses were, and tied this in with the 250m split times clocked by the coach. Then worked though the tapes on two levels - first the semantics of what the cox was saying, and secondly completely disregarding what was actually said and looking at the intonation and pauses in the speech, both related to the reported boat response (obviously also able to be tied in with data from speed coach/pace coach regarding measured boat speed). For the purposes of simplicity, as training calls by coxes are more a question of personal style, and would produce far too many inconsistencies, I worked on 2k races. I accumulated a huge amount of data that tied in the various elements - far too much to be worth going into here, and of course skewed by the choice of coxswains that I eventually selected for direct comparison in the end report, but for the purposes of this topic there are a couple of points that came out. First - as a generalisation, rowers will understand all of what you say in the first 3rd of a race, most of what you say in the middle portion, but in some cases as little as only a third of what you say in the final 3rd if they are properly going flat out - and if you are talking non stop. Introducing even brief pauses of silence, improving your enunciation, and effectively giving them a third of the information (that you might otherwise get carried away with trying to pile into them early on) in the latter stages of the race improves the response time to calls made, and dramatically increases the comprehension of what you are trying to communicate. Secondly - to improve comprehension without compromising the amount of info you need/want to communicate, identifying an athlete or unit of crew by name very clearly before making the call, allows those not affected to zone out', therefore not wasting any mental energy or blood flow to the brain in attempting to complete the process of comprehension of what you are saying. You can also make more effective calls by tuning your voice to the required response within the stroke cycle structure, again making it easier for them to understand the meaning without having to go through the brain processes that identify the differences between various words they might be listening out for. Familiarity with the crew and a correlation between expectation of a call due at some point soon, and reaction to the auditory initiator signal means more of the process is pre-programmed/instinctive, and therefore less complex, and more effective. These type of response initiating sound' calls must be preceded by some silence, even as little as a stroke off, in order to have a chance of achieving the desired effect. One of the best tricks I know of to help you to think about how this could be achieved was one used by a well known and very successful GB junior coach, who - in order to reduce the amount actually said, and to make the cox think about how it was related- turned to his coxswain while preparing the crew to paddle a 2k track stepping the rate up at each marker, and gave him the instruction that he was only allowed to use words associated with breakfast to command the entire trip, right from the command to paddle off - eg "Sausage and Eggs", "Cornflakes", "Porridge", "Toast". No "back stops", no "bow four", no "next stroke" etc allowed. See how much you would utilise silence to elicit a response from your crew using such an exercise! tigercox |