Inboard and Outboard Settings for Rowing

Oar and boat gearing is a common topic for discussion among coaches when it comes to which settings are correct. Long story short, its all physics, or relative to the body its biomechanics. If the oar has more length on the inboard section relative to the outboard section then the boat will feel light and easy to move - but too much length and you don't go anywhere. That's not all that goes into it but you can see what I am talking about in the image below detailing the sections of the oar.

Rigging is like a muscle, if you dont use it, you lose it.

Over the years I have played with different setting lengths. Some coaches like to put numbers behind their settings and call them gears, or gearing - just like a bicycle has gears. These gears are an arbitrary number without a unit. To help calculate the gear you can use equations, but I prefer to use the Rowing Calc App by Decent Rowing in Australia. The app provides the equations that calculations are based on too, although I am not sure if it still available.

A former coach of mine, Ciaran Glynn said that he likes to gear boats light and teach rowers how to work hard over time. Some advantages of gearing light mean no matter what intensity you prescribe for an on water session, your rowers have to work harder to get to that intensity. In contrast, if the boat was geared to feel heavy, the rowers have to work hard regardless of the intensity the coach prescribes. Gearing light means an easy, low intensity, session is exactly that without it costing the rowers too much energy or effort. This is especially important for weekly load management. When higher intensity is prescribed, they just work harder to meet the prescription.

Where to Start?

As a starting point I have included the table below which details gearing and rigging settings of 1x to 4x+ in the J16 to J18 categories. You may want to adjust this to be lighter if you know you don't have podium crews rowing these gears. However if you have a very good crew I would be happy with these numbers being applied to them. If you need more info on numbers for sweep rowing, you can contact me here for some advice.