What are off-strokes?
When looking at a piece graph, you will see that you can look at off-strokes as orange bars on the graph.
Off-strokes are strokes that an athlete takes that are significantly slower than the previous 10 strokes and the next 10. During hard pieces, sometimes rowers hit a point where they don’t believe they can pull the same splits anymore. In some cases, these same rowers will let off the pressure to take a momentary break. When the rower is able to get back to the same split after a few strokes off, these strokes are called off-strokes.
Because rowers usually return to a similar split after taking off-strokes, it is assumed that these are mostly the result of focus/mindset lapses, rather than physical exhaustion.
What is potential split?
Potential split is a proprietary measure by RowHero which indicates how fast the athlete could have gone if they did not experience lapses in their mindset. It incorporates off-strokes today and may incorporate other measures in the future.