Andrew Mangan: Rigging and Seat Dynamics of a PR1 Rower

I have been rowing for the past 8 years: three years of that as an able-bodied rower before I was injured and the rest as a para rower following my injury. For the first portion of my rowing career rigging was always a chore that needed to be done, but never something that I put too much thought into. Most of the boats I raced in were fours and eights so by and large the only adjustments I would make would be spacers (and sometimes inboard / outboard for the oar.)

This Laisse-Faire approach to rigging contrasted heavily with all the ins and outs of rigging an adaptive boat that I have become accustomed to over the past couple of years. I now spend a significant amount of time tweaking different aspects of the boat. Thankfully I have awesome coaches who help with this burden! This was reiterated recently when, after I received a new single, I spent the better part of three days measuring, drilling, angle grinding (a first for me) and bolting everything together to get it to where I wanted it.

Of all the different aspects that can be adjusted on the PR1 single, the seat plays the largest role and can have the biggest impact. I wanted to share a bit about my own journey over the past three years, homing in on my current seat set up, as well as shed some light on the new USOPC Technology and Innovation Grant that USRowing was awarded to further study and improve the PR1 and PR2 seats.

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The PR1 (fixed back) seat consists of a"base" that is attached to the hull with tracks (these allow the seat to be moved forward and backward in the boat relatively easily), a seat pad, and then the "backrest" that can be adjusted to different angles (affecting how much layback the rower can get.)

When I started rowing as a para-rower I used a "standard" seat that had a fiberglass flat base and a backrest that consisted of two aluminum pipes and canvas between them, very similar to the one above. Below is a picture of me using that seat on an erg two years ago; notice how bent my lower and mid back is.

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When I broke my neck and was paralyzed, the last muscle groups to regain movement were my core and low back. As a result, these are the weakest muscle groups (which is why I am a PR1 rower as opposed to PR2). This seat set up that I rowed with for two years forced me to pick up the weight of the boat with my low and mid back which caused me a lot of back injuries. Another big problem with this seat was that the cross bar at the top (the part covered in pink foam) would always cause serious bruising and abrasions on my spine where it contacted, no matter how much foam we wrapped it with.

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Last summer, my coach Sasha and I built a custom back and padding to solve both problems. For the backrest we used a weightlifting pad and a wheelchair pad to build up enough cushion that I was no longer putting all of my weight on that narrow aluminum bar. For the low back issue, a temporary solution we devised was to cut two foam wedges for the seat pad. These wedges faced forward so my pelvis was tilted forward. This allowed my pelvis to tilt forward better at the catch, which in turn made it easier for me to engage my core and back, without putting as much strain on my mid and upper back. You can see that new seat below.

This was the seat that I raced with at Worlds and have been training on since, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Ellen Minzner, the Director of Para High Performance and Tom West, the Para National Team engineer are working with a USOPC grant to better study the PR1 and PR2 stroke and understand how to optimize the PR1 and PR2 seats. Although my seat is now pain free, there is still a lot of opportunity to improve it further. This includes determining where in the boat the seat should be, where in relation to the riggers, the foot stretchers, or how high the padding should lift me (and at what angle).

This experimentation is happening around the world. The GB PR1 rower and many other countries' PR1 and PR2 athletes have completely custom molded seats, for example, so I am very excited to work with Ellen and Tom to try to standardize and improve the research and development around seat design in the U.S. I really look forward to the changes that this will bring to the entire Para rowing community at all levels of performance.