Rower and coach here and glad to see others on here are getting into this, even if I know many will just hop on the erg at the gym, butcher technique and eventually make it so the bungee needs to be replaced on the erg and/or a multitude of other issues with it.
For any who are interested I blog for a site http://rowingillustrated.com/liquidmercury so feel free to check it out. Working on a few different articles right now, and unfortunately due to time constraints in that thing called life my postings are sporadic at best.
Rower here. Someone asked if anyone did Crash-Bs…I competed my senior year of high school. Not the best place to do a 2k. Best 2k erg in HS was 6:23, have not tested it in college yet. Doing lots of 30 minute pieces for head season.
Would be great to keep this topic alive…
I also raced at Crash-B’s while in college. Fastest I ever went was 6:20.1. After taking a year off post-grad, I’ll be back in it at some indoor races on the East Coast (no Crash-B’s though, too far these days…)
Crafting a training plan that works for you, on your own, is pretty much the most difficult thing in the sport. If you are capable of coming up with one that works, I salute you.
In my time rowing and coach (rowed at a reasonably fast college in the US, coached novices at a university club team in the US) I’ve learned a few things relevant to training outside of a coached, team format:
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Quality is the goal. 10 good squats beats at 135 lbs. beats 20 lousy ones at the same weight. 8x500m with 3 minutes rest, all out, will be difficult to get through and certainly make you faster. But try 8x500 and take as much rest as you feel you need in order to put up your best splits, and you will attack each interval like a rabid wolverine, and teach yourself a lot about where your limits are.
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Active recovery is key, and most people have a tendency to overdo it. Active recovery is also different, IMO, than steady state. Doing a 20k at 24 strokes/minute will develop efficiency and nudge your anaerobic threshold just a bit higher.
But if you’re doing double sessions every day, try 30-40 minutes (really, really) easy in the morning, and hit it hard in the afternoon. It’s a way of letting quantity enable quality.
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The way you practice is the way you race. Do squats with poor technique, or dog it during active recovery, and you’ll get smoked on race day by someone who spent the past few months trying harder.
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Raw strength is way too often overlooked, but can be developed in just about anyone. Elite male heavyweight rowers nearly all produce 1000 - 1200 + watts on an ergometer during a one-stroke, all out max test. That equates to a low 6 minute/sub 6 minute 2k erg score. If the hardest you can pull is 600w, what do you think you’re gonna go for 2,000m?
Canadian coach Ed McNeely schooled us all with his “peak power” protocols - it turns out that someone with a pitiful max wattage, if he follows McNeely’s workout protocol, can increase it dramatically over just a few weeks of dedicated training. It’s lifting, on a rowing machine.
- Rowing is hard. Rowing well is really, really hard. The best of the best haven’t decided what the “right” stroke is - just look at the Canadians at the Olympics, rowing next to the UK. To a trained eye, it looks like a different sport. But the fundamentals of strength and endurance prevail. Get really strong, and get really fit.
The path to this isn’t mysterious (lots of squats, lots of meters in the boat/erg, beat your times from last week) but the fact is that it is really, really hard. Beat yourself up for not being able to achieve something you think is “easy,” and you’ll fail. Embrace your goals as hard to achieve, and you’ll blow right by them.
- To be even kind of fast, you have to really, really like working out.