The recent passing of Norris McWhirter means it's far more difficult to get a straight answer if you want to know who was the oldest ever cat and which tree has the most leaves. Fortunately, however, three-times Olympic rowing coach Terry O'Neill has volunteered to step into the breach. Unfortunately, he can only step into the rowing and training related and the losing systems at roulette breaches. Still, if you've got a question on either of those areas, send it to [email protected]. Nigel Gildersleve: Just a quick question - it occurred to me to train the back and arms by rowing using straight legs to develop power/strength and endurance in the back and arms What sort of 500m split should one be able to do using straight legs if one is aiming at a fast 5,000m time as his personal goal - fast for him being about 17 minutes.Terry O'Neill: 17 minutes is a pretty respectable time for 5k.Although you say it is a quick question the answer is not so simple. The reason is there are actually two issues in your question.Rowing using only the arms and trunk will build strength and endurance in this area. If, however, you wanted to row a timed 5k using only the upper body, you would need to modify your technique.Whereas the stroke length can be divided 50-50 between the leg drive and the upper body, the distribution of the power is 70-30 in favour of the legs. This is because the legs are used at the beginning of the stroke when the flywheel is moving at its slowest and a greater force can be applied. As the stroke develops and the flywheel picks up speed, so the amount of force that can be applied to it decreases. It is over this later stage of the stroke that the arms and body come into play.By not using the legs, the upper body will take on a greater load than rowing normally, so it will feel very different and so will need some time to adapt. In the normal sequence of the rowing stroke it would be legs > body > arms; without legs this would become body > arms. The muscles in the back used to swing the trunk are mainly used as stabilisers and, as such, the muscle fibres are predominantly slow twitch. The muscles in the quads, which start the drive of the stroke, are predominantly fast twitch. The difference is that fast twitch muscles provide power whereas slow twitch have a high level of endurance. This means that the back muscles are not suitable to take the beginning of the stroke and snatching with the arms would be better. Using a much longer layback could make up for the loss of length. This would put a lot more loading on the abdominals and would increase the cost of effort considerably, as the abdominals would be used on the recovery and therefore not have any effect on your score.You can see that if you want an absolute best time not using the legs it is a little more complicated, because you would need to reconsider the conventional rowing technique. If you did modify technique as I have laid out, and trained using the exaggerated lay back and taking the catch with the arms, you would be surprised how close to your normal time you could get. I would think you could get under two-minute splits per 500m.