Equipment
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
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
Applying toe-dip to a curling shoe
This article was originally written on 7 December 2012 and published on the Laurier Golden Hawks High-Performance Curling website. During a curling delivery the trailing (hack) leg can produce such significant drag that it can impact the ability of the curler to achieve what coach Bill Tschirhart calls an optimal “window of velocity” during the slide, and hence can impact both the speed and accuracy of the curling stone. Consequently, many curling shoes arrive from the manufacturer (Asham, Goldline, Balance Plus) with a toe coating on the hack shoe, made from a tough, hard resin that has a much lower coefficient of friction on the ice than leather. That toe coating is commonly referred to as a “toe dip” and in this article I will illustrate how to apply a toe dip to a shoe that doesn’t have one from the manufacturer. In this case, I’ll apply a toe dip using “Tuff Toe” onto a pair of two-tone Asham “Slam”
The use of technology and AI in curling
The header image for this post is a photograph of Randy Park, a practicing engineer from Hamilton, and Randy’s portable rock-throwing robot, called SweepTracker, which he constructed himself in order to conduct research on the forces involved in curling and, more specifically, the changes to those forces when a stone was brushed. In this IEEE Spectrum article by freelance journalist Elie Dolgin, Elie takes a look at some of the technologies now being used in the sport of curling. My own conversation with Elie included such things as smart glasses for weight judgment in brushing, instrumented brushes, artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, and analytics. Myself, Sean Maw of the University of Saskatchewan, Curling Canada’s Mick Lizmore from London, and Emily Zacharias of Winnipeg were just a few of the researchers from around the globe that Elie interviewed for this article. It’s a really good read.Â
Calibrating the CurlSmart instrumented brush
Frequently, the athletes that I work with on brushing – over 550 since the 2014-2015 season – complain about the CurlSmart instrumented brush for two reasons: it’s, well, heavy. Including the 9V lithium battery, the CurlSmart brush head weighs 534 g, somewhere between 2x and 3x the typical weight of a commercial brush head due to its steel plate construction. The black Cordura nylon fabric on the brush head, which we use for its durability, doesn’t have nearly the same “feel” as a World Curling-approved brush head. Cordura nylon is used on the CurlSmart brush because replacing the fabric on the brush head is a fairly involved procedure that requires disassembling the head, stapling in the new fabric, and reassembling. Moreover, replacing the fabric usually merits a subsequent calibration test of the brush to ensure that the procedure did not impact the brush’s accuracy. Nevertheless, we chose to replace the black Cordura nylon with SportLite+ fabric from Balance Plus in