More Butt

That’s right, “More Butt”. A phrase I have gravitated to saying a lot over the last couple of years. You’re probably thinking, “what the heck is he talking about”. Well, hear me out. Being a disciple of focusing on defensive rowing as the foundation for my instruction, I will first teach students to catch eddies by pulling. So often I have watched my students pull and pull on the oars but they wind up riding the eddy lines, missing the eddy.

The advantage of defensively catching eddies is two fold, you are slowing down the raft’s travel downstream as well as taking advantage of your stronger core muscles of your back. The challenge to this approach is primarily your limited visual reference to the eddy itself. Therein lies the origin of my phrase, “More Butt”.

I realized my students were initiating their “ferry” to travel across the river current at the appropriate 45 degrees to the current, but failed to adjust to the ideal 90 degrees to the river/eddy currents as they crossed the eddy line. Despite my continued verbal cueing they repeated this pattern over and over.

The reason why my students struggled to adjust their boat angle properly was because of their reduced vision to the eddy, forcing them to angle their boat to allow them to “see” the eddy/shoreline, Their angle meant they were entering the eddy with their “hip’, not their “butt”.

I began instructing my students to adjust their boat angle across the eddy line by focusing on their “butt” crossing the eddy first, thereby creating the appropriate 90 degrees of boat angle. I encouraged them to rotate their heads to take quick “peeks” at the eddy and then return to putting their heads down and concentrate on their rowing form and proper boat angle. They began to trust the position of their boat in the current and “feel” themselves getting pulled into the eddy. Hence the phrase, “More Butt”.

Pro-Tip #14: Make sure you don’t quit pulling until your boat is completely in the eddy, ideally stern to shore.

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