Rowing Program

We showed a lot of good speed in last week’s race pace work workout.  That’s really promising for how we can do as a team in the upcoming Mile High Sprints.  This week’s workouts will give us an opportunity to build our base conditioning and raise the floor of our sprint pace.  These are long rowing workouts, keep you focus on pace and technique throughout.  This will give us a good chance for video review.

Base Work

Workouts:

Primary –

2 x 12’ Utilization Training 1: Row at 70 - 80% of Race pace, u pick fan setting, cadence 22-27 spm, rest 6min.

Secondary –

2 x 9’ Anaerobic Threshold: Row at 80-85% of Race pace, u pick fan, cadence 24-30 spm, rest 4 min.         

Nice work on last week’s 9x1 workout.  This week we are going to back off the pace a little bit and practice rowing at our 2K race pace.

Racing & Recovery

Workouts:

Primary – At your race pace

1 –250M (2 min. rest);  2 - 500M (3 min rests);  3 – 750M (4 min rest); 4 – 1000M (5 min rest); 5 – 1250M; 2K race pace cadence and fan setting.  Five stroke start for each piece and right down to race cadence

Secondary – Steady State training

2 x 15’ Utilization Training: Row at 60-70% of Race pace, u pick fan and cadence.

Anaerobic

Anaerobic work is intense physical activity that requires the body to combust its primary energy source adenosine tri-phosphates (ATP) without oxygen.  Anaerobic combustion produces less total caloric output per molecule of ATP than aerobic combustion, in addition it also produces the byproduct we all know and love – pyruvic or lactic acid.

Anaerobic (AN) and Anaerobic Threshold (AT) workouts are designed to raise the floor of when we go anaerobic.  Think of it as moving the red-line of your tachometer higher.  This will allow us to push to a higher level of performance before hitting “oxygen debt”.  The second benefit of this training is that it will expand our anaerobic performance window, allowing us to sprint longer and faster than our previous limits.

The only drawback of anaerobic workouts is that they are miserable.  Fortunately, they are short.  Go as hard as you can on each piece and track the meters covered.

Primary Workout - Full Anaerobic: 

9 x 1 min; above race speed but at race cadence; rest interval 1.5 minutes (switch as fast as possible with your partner).  You do these as fast as possible, faster than your 2000m race pace.  If your performance fades that is acceptable. 

Secondary Workout - Anaerobic Threshold: 

1 X 13 min piece at 80 – 90% of your 2000m race pace.
Anaerobic threshold work asks that you work right below your “red-line” and keep it there.  You should be breathing too hard to talk, but able to get enough O2 to prevent going anaerobic. 

Post row land work

To swim one stroke requires a specific mix of strength, endurance and power.  As it does to run one stride, turn one bike crank revolution, or x-c ski one kick and glide.  But of all the traditional means of manual transport – running, swimming, biking, skiing – rowing has the highest strength component.  Successfully prying a 12’ 6” lever, pre-supposes you’ve already acquired a fair degree of strength.  Rowing well assure that you have significant amounts of muscular endurance.   This is why rowers tend to be bigger than most traditional endurance athletes.

The drawback of this mode of training is that it exhausts the body.  Tour de France cyclists can ride for 100’s of miles in a workout, swimmers can spend 4 – 6 hours a day in the pool.  But rowing takes such a toll on the body you can only row so far.  The upper limit seems to be around 18-22 miles for a workout.  A coach who takes his crew beyond those limits more than once every two weeks will wind up with little more than a slow boat. 

Consequently most teams row for less than 16 miles in a workout and then spend time in post row workouts.  In a post row workout, it is understood that everybody is 2/3rds gassed from rowing in a driving crosswind in early March, but has enough energy to successfully do crude exercises like squats, bench rows, pull ups and dead lifts.

A post row, much like a CrossFit workout, requires you to quickly move through a bunch of functional movements that exercise the muscles of rowing yet have a lower demand for precision, thus allowing us to fully develop our power capacity – aka - Big Diesel.

Workouts:

Primary – 2 x 8 minutes; 80 – 90% of race pace;  24-30 spm;  fan setting = u set;  rest interval – 4 minute if alone; 4 x 22 air squats (w/ plate) on the minute between pieces if sharing.

Secondary – Post Row Workout:

• 8 x 22 air squats on the minute interval (hugging a 10, 15 or 25lb. weight)
• 28 dead hang pull ups
• 200 shoulders off the floor sit ups
• 160 - 55lb – 75lb Romanian dead lifts

Any rep scheme – minimize rest; reps for squats, sit ups and Romanians must be 30/min or faster.   Like with all rowing workouts you are training your muscles to fire against load at a pace of 30 strokes per minute or faster.  Slow reps do not make for fast boats.

Big Diesel

Rowing requires a ton of oxygen.  Every major muscle group except for the Pectorals is called into service when rowing.  When rowing hard and fast the demand for oxygen is huge.  Big Diesel workouts are one way to build that capacity.

The maritime diesel workout that all rowers know well is the 3 x 20 minute row.  Good crews can easily cover over 12 miles in this workout.  We will be doing the mini diesel version of 3 x 10 minutes.  As we build our capacity we will crank these pieces at just below race pace.  But this time through we are going to focus on steady work output and good technique.  This might be a good workout to track your drag factor stats.

Inevitably in these workouts you will hit a point maybe in the third minute of your second piece or the eighth and ninth minute of each piece, where the fatigue will tempt you to round your low back or let your shoulders, rib cage and head drop forward thus choking off your lungs room to work.  If we can build the mental discipline and resolve of character to say, that “this level of inattention and physical sloppiness is not how I get dressed in the morning, is not how I brush my teeth at the end of the day, and damn skippy,  it is not how I row”.  If we can cultivate that focus and precision for 30 minutes of duress, then when it comes time to rip off one 2000M piece, those dance steps will be automatic and the only question becomes how much wood you want to toss on the fire.  Good luck.

Workouts:

Primary – 1 X 10 minutes.  Pieces 2: 22 spm, first 2 min, 24 spm, next 2 min, 26 spm, next 2 min, 28 spm, next 2 min, 30 spm, next 2 min.  Pieces 1 & 3: 22-30 spm u pick; fan setting = u pick; rest interval – 4 ½ minute (if alone).   If sharing a machine we will do video reviews between pieces.  Work effort is between 65%-80% of your 2K race pace.

Secondary – 10 X (3+30) above 28+ spm; experiment with fan settings do at least four pieces with fan at - 4 guys, 3 girls; Rest plenty.  At race pace not above (no sprinting).  Rest is 20-30 paddle strokes.