Effects of Intensive Crew Training on Individual and Collective Characteristics of Oar Movement in Rowing as a Coxless Pair Mathieu Feigean, Mehdi R’kiouak, Reinoud J. Bootsma, Jérôme Bourbousson To cite this version: Mathieu Feigean, Mehdi R’kiouak, Reinoud J. Bootsma, Jérôme Bourbousson. Effects of Intensive Crew Training on Individual and Collective Characteristics of Oar Movement in Rowing as a Coxless Pair. Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers, 2017, 8, pp.1139 - 1139. 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01139. hal- 01580418 HAL Id: hal-01580418 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01580418 Submitted on 18 Apr 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. fpsyg-08-01139 July 4, 2017 Time: 16:3 # 1 ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 06 July 2017 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01139 Effects of Intensive Crew Training on Individual and Collective Characteristics of Oar Movement in Rowing as a Coxless Pair Mathieu Feigean1,2*, Mehdi R’Kiouak2, Reinoud J. Bootsma3 and Jérôme Bourbousson2 1 Institute of Sport Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2 Movement, Interactions, Performance EA 4334, Faculty of Sport Sciences, University of Nantes, Nantes, France, 3 Institut des Sciences du Mouvement, Aix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France This case study examined how two rowers adapted their rowing patterns following crew training as a newly formed coxless pair. The two participants were expert (double-oar) single scull-boat rowers. Performing as a crew in the coxless-pair’s sweep-boat, where each rower operates a single oar, on-the-water data were collected before and after a 6-week intensive team-training program. Rowing patterns were characterized by the horizontal oar angle, oar angular velocity and linear oar-water velocity profiles during Edited by: the catch (minimal oar angle) to finish (maximal oar angle) half-cycles of the propulsive Nancy J. Cooke, water phase. After crew training, rowers demonstrated a tighter synchronization and Arizona State University, United States a closer correspondence in oar angle at the moment of catch, together with a closer Reviewed by: Jamie Gorman, matching of the evolution over time of their subsequent oar movements. Most likely Georgia Institute of Technology, due to the inherent asymmetries involved in sweep-boat rowing, the stroke rower also United States developed a somewhat longer-duration larger-amplitude oar movement than the bow Rob Gray, Arizona State University, United States rower. Remarkably, both rowers revealed changes in the inter-cycle variability of their *Correspondence: individual patterns of rowing. While the initially more variable stroke rower improved the Mathieu Feigean consistency of his rowing pattern over practice, the initially highly consistent bow rower [email protected]; [email protected] on the contrary relaxed his tendency to always perform in the same way. We discuss how the crew performance changed over training and to what extent it was associated Specialty section: with changes in individual behaviors. Along the way we demonstrate that the often- This article was submitted to Performance Science, used measure of average continuous relative phase does not adequately capture the a section of the journal particularities of the coordination pattern observed. Overall, the results obtained at the Frontiers in Psychology individual level of analysis suggest that team benefits were obtained through distinct Received: 31 March 2017 adaptations of the rowers’ individual rowing patterns. Accepted: 21 June 2017 Published: 06 July 2017 Keywords: joint action, rowing, synchrony, crew behavior, individual pattern Citation: Feigean M, R’Kiouak M, Bootsma RJ and Bourbousson J (2017) Effects INTRODUCTION of Intensive Crew Training on Individual and Collective Joint action is considered as a form of social interaction whereby individual agents coordinate Characteristics of Oar Movement in Rowing as a Coxless Pair. their movement in space and time so as to reach a common goal (Sebanz et al., 2006). Front. Psychol. 8:1139. While a considerable amount of research has focused on the nature and stability characteristics doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01139 of coordinative states resulting from informational coupling between individual agents Frontiers in Psychology| www.frontiersin.org 1 July 2017| Volume 8| Article 1139 fpsyg-08-01139 July 4, 2017 Time: 16:3 # 2 Feigean et al. Intensive Crew Training as a Coxless Pair (see Schmidt and Richardson, 2008, for an overview), the tasks efficiency (Hill, 2002; Barrow, 2010). Well-trained crews may considered generally did not have a specific supra-coordinative thus be expected to have developed strategies to overcome this goal. On the other hand, in tasks like dyadic manual precision (Hill, 2002), while at the same time incorporating the inherently aiming, where one participant controls the position of a pointer different roles resulting from the in-line placement (i.e., one and another participant controls the position of a target (in behind the other) of the individual rowers (in both scull and the discrete task version, Romero et al., 2015) or a set of two sweep-oar boats). Indeed, as a result of such in-line placement, targets (in the reciprocal task version, Mottet et al., 2001), the the stroke rower is not able to directly see his/her teammate(s). supra-coordinative goal to have the pointer coincide with the Because there is no cox (short for coxswain, an oar-less crew- target(s) naturally structures the required between-participant member responsible for steering and race strategy), rowing as a coordination. Focusing on variance in the upper-limb joint coxless pair is self-paced. It is typically the stroke rower that is angles, Romero et al.(2015) indeed demonstrated that inter- in charge of setting the rhythm, thereby potentially giving rise to personal synergies were stronger than intra-personal synergies, leader-follower roles within the crew (Seifert et al., 2017). while Mottet et al.(2001) demonstrated between-participant In this light, we investigated how changes in the individual compensatory variability at the level of the two end-effectors (i.e., rowing behaviors of a coxless pair were observable over a the control of the positions of the pointer and target-set). large time span (i.e., across 6 weeks), after participants had More generally, in joint action tasks the individual agents’ been involved in repeated crew coordination practices. The movements are shaped both by the current needs of their investigation started from the very first step of their crew training. collective behavior and by the singular task demands that It ended after a one-month-and-an-half intensive team practice each individual agent faces. In this light, expertise in collective focused on enhancing their coordinative capability. The goal of behavior tasks has been considered as the capability of individual the study was to simultaneously characterize the changes in the agents to identify and achieve a specific contribution (e.g., Duarte collective and individual rower behaviors. et al., 2012; Benerink et al., 2016), thus reflecting a coordination of labor within the social joint-action system. Embedded in a process of compensatory variability between individual agents, MATERIALS AND METHODS the collective behavioral states may be expected to depend on the individual agents’ abilities to adapt their own intrinsic behavioral Participants and Procedure dynamics to the needs of the cooperative effort. In order to Two 17-year-old men participated in the study. Having been characterize such adaptations at the level of the individual agents, admitted into the French National Rowing School (Pôle Espoir in the present study we examined how a pair of rowers adapted Aviron – Nantes), both were qualified as expert-level individual their contribution to the joint action task of moving the boat rowers. Each rower had more than 10 years of experience in single forward after having followed an intensive crew-training (CT) scull (two-oar) rowing. Rowers individually performed in the program. By selecting a newly formed crew pair of expert rowers, national competition and belonged to the French top 10. While the present study moreover provided an optimal framework for both had rowed in crew boats during training sessions, neither addressing task-goal driven adaptations in individual behavior in had experienced dedicated crew training. Before engaging in the a real-life joint-action task. present study they had never rowed together in the same boat. In competitive crew rowing the individual rowers need to Data were collected during two on-water rowing sessions as coordinate their actions in order to move the boat forward a coxless pair (i.e., in an asymmetrically rigged sweep-oar boat as fast and as efficiently as possible. Perfect synchronization where each rower operates one oar) that took place before and of propulsive oar movement has often been cited as being after a 6-week training program dedicated to crew rowing. We a prime requirement for efficient rowing (e.g., Wing and will refer to these two data-collection sessions as pre-CT and Woodburn, 1995; Baudouin and Hawkins, 2004; de Brouwer post-CT, respectively. The intensive CT program was managed et al., 2013; Cuijpers et al., 2015, 2016; Seifert et al., 2017). It is by the national coach and comprised 26 (i.e., 4C per week) on- important to realize, however, that such a requirement cannot be water practice sessions, for a total of almost 50 h of coxless pair indistinguishably applied to the two different types of boats used rowing practice.