Blog
Curling brushes – Try before you buy – Part Quatre
This article is joint work with Dr. John Newhook of Dalhousie University. This past weekend featured Provincial men’s and women’s championships in most of the Canadian provinces, and what was interesting to me was the number of teams who switched to Balance Plus brush heads for their respective territorial championships. As one example, Saskatchewan hosted the combined men’s and women’s provincial championships in Kindersley. All four of the teams in the men’s and women’s CURLSASK finals are regularly Hardline users (if not sponsored by the company). However, during Provincials two of the teams – Steve Laycock on the men’s side, and Nancy Martin on the women’s side – switched to using Balance Plus RS or RS XL brush heads with prismatic Hardline Hybrid handles. This situation was the reverse of a number of instances last season that saw teams (Kaitlyn Lawes in particular) use Balance Plus LiteSpeed handles with an IcePad brush head. While we are some ways away from
Curling brushes – Try before you buy – Part Trois
This article is joint work with Dr. John Newhook of Dalhousie University. In earlier articles, we documented the mass of commercial brush heads and in addition documented that today’s commercial brush heads distribute pressure across the brush pad in very different ways. In parts 1 and 2 of this article on “Try before you buy”, we argued that brush handle characteristics do matter and, in the second part, presented measurements of various commercial handles with respect to handle diameter. In this, the third part of “Try before you buy”, we present measurements of another important characteristic of brush handles: flex, or more properly their bending moment, or flexural rigidity. As curling equipment manufacturers continue to offer lighter-weight products, athletes may discover that there are significant differences amongst the various commercial offerings of handles in roughly two dimensions: weight and flex, in much the same way that today’s hockey sticks come in a variety of “flex” degrees as do tennis or
Book review: What’s your Call?
This delightful book, published in October 2022, is a collaboration between Scotland’s Doug Wilson and long-time Alberta skip (and Curling Alberta board member) Mickey Pendergast. In addition to the book, Doug runs the Daily Curling Puzzle group on Facebook, which boasts 23.5k members and offers frequent strategy puzzles for education and comment. What’s Your Call is a unique book in that it couples a particular on-ice scenario from an actual competitive game with a video clip that shows the setup and then the actual shot attempted by that particular team in that game. For the most part, game scenarios are taken from Canadian Season of Champions games so as to avoid geo-blocking from World Curling events. The book contains 50 such real-life scenarios. Unlike many older volumes on strategy, the scenarios are taken from a variety of fairly recent matches and so the 5-rock FGZ rule is in effect (but alas, not the more recent “No-Tick” rule change adopted this
Should I brush faster? Stroke rate, displacement, and vertical force
This article is joint work with Dr. John Newhook, professor and Dean of Engineering at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Over the past year we have been asked numerous times by athletes and coaches alike if they should brush faster – that is, with a higher stroke rate – than what they are doing currently, with the underlying assumption that brushing more quickly will lead to improved brushing performance. A possible reason for these questions is the success of several of the women’s teams from Asia over the past few seasons, who from observation do brush a bit more quickly than their typical Canadian competitors. However, as with many things brushing any answer is dependent on a number of variables and trade-offs, and in no small way is also dependent on the force profile(s) of the particular players. In this article, we’ll take a look at the science in the available literature, coupled with our own experiences, and try to supply
Toe-slide versus flat-foot slide: what is better for the athlete?
Perhaps there is no other sport that causes unilateral, repetitive strain injuries more than curling. A 2004 study of competitive players competing in two USA National events found a high incidence of back, knee, hip, wrist, and shoulder injuries amongst competitors of both genders: Sweeping the stone (55%) and delivering the stone (50%) were the skills most provocative of symptoms (fig 2A–C). Collectively, symptoms of knee (54%), back (33%), and shoulder pain (20%) were most prevalent (table 2). Knee pain was most often reported in the ‘‘tuck’’ knee, which is typically flexed well beyond 90˚ during stone delivery. Sixty-two per cent of those with knee pain were symptomatic in their tuck [slide foot] knee, while 31% complained of bilateral discomfort. Reeser and Berg, September 2004 Our intent in writing this article was two-fold: one, to make other coaches aware of the prevalence of anterior knee pain in youth curling, particularly with young women, and two, to recommend that athletes who
Brushing video analysis with OnForm
While an instrumented brush is ideal for capturing the force profile of an athlete, video analysis is equally essential so that the athlete can get visual feedback on their technique, and know if they have made the correct and desirable adjustments to their technique on subsequent bouts. In this article, I’m going to use Celeste Gauthier, of Team Émilie Lovitt and Toronto Metropolitan University, as a model to describe some useful tips in video analysis of brushing. What is OnForm? OnForm (formerly Hudl Technique) is a coaching application that supports recording and playback of video along with the ability to annotate video with diagramming or audio overlay to provide coach feedback. Videos are stored in the cloud (instead of on your device) and can be shared with athletes (or other coaches) on a coach license. In addition, OnForm now supports multi-camera inputs so one can capture simultaneous video from different camera angles, similar to other apps such as Switcher Studio.