Dragon Boat Paddling Resources

SpeedCoach Mobile

If you have an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4, go to the App Store and pick up SpeedCoach Mobile. Yes, it’s costly for an app, but compared to the alternatives, this is an extremely inexpensive and awesome piece of kit!

SpeedCoach Mobile is licensed from Nielsen-Kellerman (NK) and takes their SpeedCoach to a whole new level.

On my main screen, I have 10 fields with pertinent information displayed at a time. Everything from stroke rate, and meters per stroke, to current speed, 500m pace and distance remaining in the current work piece. This is used for immediate feedback while training or racing.

You can build practice plans within the app and execute them on the water. All training sessions are maintained in a history with the ability to export to a tcx file to import into Garmin Training Center for further analysis. I use the history during training sessions to analyze each work piece to better tailor our training sessions to our results in near real-time.

Configuration

SpeedCoach Mobile can be configured for rowing, it’s genesis, paddling, or Dragonboating. This allows SpeedCoach to tailor it’s stroke detection to the appropriate sport, making it as accurate as possible. Stroke detection uses the iPhone’s built in accelerometers, and has additional sensitivity settings in the app’s advanced settings. Each of the data fields on the main screen are selectable from a growing list of data sets. These are well thought out, making it a simple process.

Workouts

Creating workouts is also a simple process. You have the choice of creating repeating interval sets, with the work piece based on time, distance or a number of strokes, and the rest piece based solely on time. You can also create custom sets, with multiple interval progressions. Each interval has the same selectors of time, distance and stroke count, and the related rest. With this set of options it is easy to create most any practice plan to run your practice by. The one drawback of the workout creation process is that the is no way to repeat individual interval pieces within a custom workout, so creating a pyramid set, for example, needs an entry for each step, and all repeats are manually entered.

Using it

When you open the app, it comes up in with the Just go workout chosen by default, so if you just want to track your paddle, then hit the start button and away you go. You will get all the feedback from the data fields you selected as seen in the view below.

In order to select a specific workout from those you have created, hit the Workouts button and select the workout. You can select a 15 sec, 30 sec or no countdown. Once you have the app activated, you will hear a 15 second warning bell prior to each work piece, and an siren at the end of each work piece. The siren had my paddling mates worried at first, as it sounds like a police siren… Kinda fun.

On water feedback comes in two forms, first the immediate readout, which uses the previous 10 strokes to calculate your current pace, stroke rate and other calculated fields. The second form is found in the History tab. Once there you will see the your workout history and be able to dive into more details by work piece. You will see selections for each workout type accomplished on any given practice time, and within the detail you will see the Interval number, the time, distance covered, # of strokes, average speed, average stroke rate, and heart rate (if using one of the additional monitoring devices available) this information is great to test options in race plan, or see the difference in feel vs. reality. (i.e. a higher stroke rate always “feels” faster on the water, but may not be.)

Conclusion

Having tools that provide this kind of feedback and result can only make us better coaches and athletes. The key is coming up with the testing plan based on this feedback, and implementing changes that the athletes can carry out without impacting other aspects of the race or practice plan.

We have used Speedacoach to aid in choosing the best stroke rate by race length, racing start and finish. I have seen this tool help carve more than 10 seconds off a 500m sprint time in Dragonboat and outrigger canoe.

This is HUGE.