Brushing
Curling brushes – Try before you buy – Part Deux
On April 13th I’ll be one of the coaches at the Ontario Curling Council U18 Academy camp at the Dundas Valley Golf and Curling Club in Dundas, ON. In the first part of this article I mentioned that one of things I like to do when coaching at a camp is to bring along a large broom bag with an assortment of brushes from my collection, so that the athletes have an opportunity to try out various brushes that are different from the one they use regularly. It is unsurprising to me how frequently an athlete will profess a liking for a particular brush in my collection that is different from the one they have. Most often that difference relates to the handle, and not the brush pad. While debate over the utility of the various brush pads from the different manufacturers continues, what is frequently overlooked are the handles, and the characteristics of a given handle does impact the
Can I use a bathroom scale to test brushing performance?
Recently I was asked if one could use an ordinary bathroom scale to test an athlete’s brushing performance. Obviously doing so would constitute a static test, so its usefulness is limited since brushing is an activity of movement; so much of brushing performance is dependent on one’s body position and footwork when one is moving with the stone down the sheet. Moreover, we also know that brushing performance (typically both stroke rate and vertical force) tails off with stones thrown at higher velocities. And, finally, we also know from mechanics that, formally, there is no generation of power without movement. In a static test with the brush on the scale, no movement is produced. Nonetheless, a static test using a bathroom scale can give an athlete an idea of the vertical force they can generate down the handle of the brush in a stationary position. It is extremely unlikely that this force will be duplicated on an ice surface, but
The Anatomy of a Brush Stroke
This article is joint work with Professor of Engineering John Newhook of Dalhousie University in Halifax. Click on the image above to view the PDF. In 2018 we documented the vertical forces and other characteristics of a brush stroke in order to better convey our understanding of the mechanics of brushing and how we might use this information to improve the coaching of the sport. This article, the first in our Technical Coach Series, is certainly not the first to document the variability in the forces achieved when brushing. To our knowledge, it would appear that researchers in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh (B.A. Marmo, I.S. Farrow, M-P Buckingham, and J.R. Blackford) were the first to document the variability of forces during a brush stroke, and how these forces are generated on the ice, in various papers in 2005-2006 (see references below). Their results were later confirmed by other researchers in 2010-2012 in both Canada and
A short analysis of brushing studies
This article is joint work with Professor of Engineering John Newhook of Dalhousie University in Halifax. Click on the image above to view the PDF. Since we began our collaboration during the winter of 2013-2014, John Newhook and I have been compiling normative data on brushing, John in Nova Scotia and the Maritimes and myself largely in Ontario and occasionally in Saskatchewan. We felt that this work was important since the few studies of brushing performance of which we were aware had very small sample sizes and had predominantly illustrated the performance of male athletes. Since our initial trials in February 2014, John and I have together recorded over 2500 bouts for approximately 775 athletes across Canada. Many of these are Junior-aged athletes that we have worked with multiple times through annual high-performance camps, but we have also worked with younger athletes and with high-performance athletes who play on the Tour. As a result, from our study we have a
Curling brushes – Try before you buy – Part Un
No self-respecting golfer would simply walk into a golf pro shop or retail outlet to buy a new set of clubs without going through the process of getting fitted. Fitting is an assessment process that involves the analysis of a golfer’s swing and physiology to ensure that the golf clubs under consideration “fit” the player, enabling the player to strike the ball square in the middle of the club face with a shaft whose flex matches the player’s swing speed, among other trade-offs. A summary of factors involved in golf club fitting can be found in this article entitled “Clubfitting 101” by MyGolfSpy. While the MyGolfSpy article covers the details of club head variations that can suit different types of players and their style of game, the article also covers consideration of the choice of club shafts, particularly: shaft flex. Simplistically, higher swing speeds warrant stiffer club shafts though this is an overgeneralization. Other factors include release pattern and shaft
Pressure distribution in selected curling brush heads
This research is joint work with Dr. John Newhook, Dr. Michel Ladouceur, and Dr. Ryan Frayne of Dalhousie University in Halifax. John is a Professor of Civil Engineering and the Dean of Engineering at Dalhousie, while Michel and Ryan are assistant professors in the Kinesiology department of the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie. At the 2022 North American Conference on Biomechanics (NACOB) held the week of August 22-25 in Ottawa, we presented our initial work that compared a variety of commercial brush heads in how they distributed pressure across their pads in a static laboratory setup. Forces and pressures were recorded using two 3200E Tekscan (Tekscan Inc., Boston, MA) pressure sensors affixed to the top of an AMTI BP400600 force plate (AMTI Inc., Watertown MA), with the sensel areas abutted. CONFORMat Research software (version 7.1: Tekscan Inc.) was used to collect the pressure sensor data, which was recorded at a frequency of 100 Hz. Our results are