Brushing
The research behind instrumented curling brooms
Author’s note: This is joint work with John Newhook, Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University. This article is an updated version of an article previously published on the Ontario Curling Council website on 29 December 2014. Over the past several years I have had the privilege to work on a number of different engineering initiatives related to the sport of curling. One of these is the development of an instrumented curling broom, a device that permits the measurement of force and stroke rate of a player, in real time, while brushing a curling stone. In this article, I’d like to present a brief overview of the body of work surrounding the study of brushing performance in curling, and briefly describe two research initiatives that are helping to increase our understanding of how we can improve brushing performance in athletes of all ages and abilities. CurlSmart prototype instrumented curling brush, developed by Dr. John Newhook, Department of Civil Engineering,
Dryland Training for Open Brushing Footwork
This article is joint work with John Newhook of Dalhousie University. A previous version of this article was published on the Ontario Curling Council website on 12 October 2018. In a previous article we described a simple, wheeled apparatus that an athlete could use to practice closed brushing footwork in the off-season. The closed footwork trainer assists an athlete in (1) keeping their hips closed to the trajectory of the stone while brushing, (2) holding their body upright with a considerable proportion of their body weight on their arms, and (3) practicing half-moon movements with both feet in order to keep their feet behind the hips, in order to maximize the amount of body weight on the hands, which will translate on the ice into helping maximize the amount of vertical force on the brush head. In this article, we describe a dryland trainer for open brushing footwork. The unit includes several features that offer versatility in training, and we
Training tips for dryland closed brushing practice with a footwork trainer
This article is joint work with John Newhook of Dalhousie University. In use, through trial-and-error over the years we have found the best practice surface for dryland training to be the gravel midfield of a softball diamond. An asphalt or concrete surface hinders effective foot movement, which is required to produce the “half-moons” that optimally both propel the brusher down the sheet, and get one’s feet outside of the hip line to provide greater force through the arms and hence the brush head. A ball diamond or a fine gravel driveway permits practice with good foot movement, and moreover the athlete’s footwork evidence can be seen in the gravel after each attempt, augmenting any video taken during the training session. It should be clear that practicing on gravel is not the same as practicing on-ice; the surfaces are quite different. Nonetheless, a gravel surface permits one’s feet to “slide” in a manner similar to what one could do on-ice, and
Building a dryland closed footwork trainer
Since publishing the first article about the footwork trainer in June 2016, a number of people have asked for more detailed specifications and additional photographs so that they can construct their own. The trainer itself is simple to construct. The parts list is as follows: two 30-inch wood pieces of 2×6 glued and screwed together using 3-inch brass wood screws; one 30-inch piece of 2×4 attached to the top, again using 3-inch brass screws; two 18-inch 2×4 pieces for the trainer’s wheelbase. Note that the length of these pieces depends on the thickness of the wheel hubs of the wheels you’ll be using. You might find a length of 16.5 inches works better with metal hub wheels that are 1.75 inches wide. two 24-inch long, 1/2 inch threaded rods that serve as the axles, along with appropriate 1/2 inch nuts, washers, lock-washers, and locknuts; four standard 7-inch lawnmower wheels, purchased from Home Hardware. 8-inch wheels will also work – they’ll
Dryland training for brushing footwork
This article is a revision to an article that originally was published on the Ontario Curling Council website on 11 June 2016. In the Curling Canada High Performance Program coaching manual, under “Technical Development: Sweeping”, you will find the following quote attributed to Darryl Horne: Without doubt sweeping is the most under-coached, under-practiced, under-appreciated, and under-rated aspect of the game. In my experience in working with U15, U18, and U20 teams over the past 14 seasons, a common development issue with athletes is in mastering the biomechanics necessary for brushing effectively, that is insuring that the forces the athlete develops through the brush handle are optimal to the task. To assist athletes with learning the correct footwork for brushing in the closed stance, in the spring of 2016 I built a “footwork trainer” (see video at right) that athletes could use through the spring and summer in order to gain sufficient speed, stamina, and muscle memory in order to achieve
Mapping delivery split times to hog-to-hog times
In a previous article, John Newhook and I described ten reasons why the use of split times can be problematic for a team. Using interval, or “split” times, can benefit the delivering team because an interval time provides a proxy measurement for the velocity of a curling stone at the point of release. With an interval time, the two brushers can utilize the time to assist with their weight judgement, and the delivering player can use a split time to assist their delivery with respect to weight control. One of the complications that we mentioned was that there is no straightforward, easy-to-compute mapping between split times and hog-to-hog times. Not only are interval times subject to user error, but the mapping between a split and a hog-to-hog time depends to a significant extent on a particular athlete’s delivery technique (rate of deceleration during the slide phase, and/or an accompanying arm extension, to name but two variables), ice conditions (the coefficient