by I’ve been coaching a trio of very experienced masters rowers for the last two years, and will share some observations in this post. One is a woman and two are men, in their early 50s, training from home gyms with a moderate, though not extensive, amount of equipment. All rowed in college and for high-performance programs after college and have been rowing continuously since. They did strength training in college and after, took a break during their 30s-40s, and began again 5-10 years before we started working together.
They focus on head race events with HOCR as the culmination of their training year. They do a few 1-6km races of lesser importance along the way, and are very good about “just racing” those races and not sacrificing training time and focus. The men took second in the double this year, improving their time by 5 seconds from last year, and the woman won her event in the eight. We’re starting year three this month.
Use Athlete Experience
They’ve been rowing for longer than I’ve been alive. We’re all missing out if I’m not tapping into their accumulated knowledge of rowing, training, and most importantly, how their bodies feel and react to training. I have general ideas of where I want to go and what I want to do in their training plan, but I also ask a lot of questions and double-check things as we develop each month and phase.
One recent example is their training plan approach for HOCR and how they use middle-intensity training (MIT or “anaerobic threshold”) in their rowing plan. Middle-intensity training is typically known as a lose-lose training situation. It’s not enough duration to improve aerobic endurance as effectively as lower intensity training, nor is it high enough intensity to develop anaerobic peak power as effectively as higher intensity training, and it’s also physically challenging and hard to recover from. It can largely be avoided through use of a polarized training plan, but not when you’re racing head races that fall directly in this energy zone. I appreciated learning how they manage race pace MIT along with the other sessions for duration (endurance) and intensity (power), and how we can schedule the strength work around that to better support all domains of performance.
Basic S&C Fundamentals
We do video feedback every month or so, more often in our first year together. My comments typically focus on the basics: using full range-of-motion, using a 2:1 lowering:lifting tempo, shoulders down on pulling movements, elbows about 45-degrees from the torso on pressing movements (not flaring them out at 90 degrees), and balanced forefoot/hindfoot pressure on lower body movements (not shifting forward onto the forefoot).
Strength Training to Fill Gaps
All needed more glute work and more focus on heel pressure during lower body movements, especially in the first year. This is very common for rowers, and especially ones who have spent the last three decades running or cycling anytime they aren’t rowing. That’s a lot of quads and forefoot pressure, so strength training needs to fill the gaps around those dominant activities.
We also added plyometric exercises to their training. Plyos train rapid force absorption and generation and are a great tool for mitigating age-related losses in maximal strength, power, and bone mineral density. We’ve removed these at times when tweaky knees have interfered with training, which has been related to running volume more than anything else. These had not been a part of their training before, at least not for low reps and power, and all have come to value them in the plan.
Health is Performance-Enhancing
A quote from one of our rowers hit on a key theme for masters rower strength training: “At our age, one of the main goals of the training cycle is just to get to the starting line, not just fit, but also uninjured.”
Health and performance-enhancement is a “yes-and” proposition. This is true for all rowers, but I think the importance increases as total training time and the consequences of a setback increase as well. After 10, 20, 30, and more years of training, the amount that you can improve from one intense session is just not that much. Your base is already so high, that just being able to show up and “go pretty hard” year after year builds a great amount of performance ability.
Strength training offers tangible benefit to performance, and maybe plays an even bigger role in preserving that ability to show up each day. Are you able to get out there, train hard, and perform for another session, day, race? We’ve had a few back and knee tweaks over the two years with the trio, but nothing that has derailed more than a week or so of training.
Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) was a new addition in their strength training, instead of a percent-1RM system. RPE helps adjust the output targets on each exercise to the athlete’s readiness on that day, instead of attached to an earlier, perhaps irrelevant standard of performance.
We use more variety in their strength training than they did before, especially in the assistance work exercises. For example, we use one-arm dumbbell rows, two-arm landmine rows (towel grip), one-arm landmine rows (side or front handle), and bodyweight rows in different amounts at different times of the year. This keeps training engaging and focused on comprehensive muscular development, while also avoiding overtraining individual exercises physically and mentally. Assistance work variety helps keep the effort on the input (muscular effort), less on the output (weight/reps). They also all do a lot of off-season aerobic cross-training, including biking, running, and skiing to further reduce overuse risks.
Another key addition was regular deload weeks in strength training, at least every 8-12 weeks and sometimes down to 6-8 weeks. Deloads had previously been more incidental or forced due to some other factor. I find it helpful to schedule them, push hard up to them, and stay just ahead of recovery needs. We’re usually able to line these up around times of busier employment or pre-planned vacations. They often do an erg/row test week during a strength training deload, which also kept the volume low on the rowing side.
“With ad-hoc self-training, we would be less likely to deload, more likely to try to ‘do more,’ and ultimately someone would hurt themselves…”
Mistakes
Evaluation is a challenge in online coaching, and we should’ve done more earlier. There were some lifting technique problems that we could’ve caught earlier with more use of video. I’m now more encouraging of rowers to use video review more often within the first few months of working together, to make sure that our ideas of the exercise and good technique align.
We started working together just before the canceled HOCR 2020, with HOCR 2021 as the main goal. 13 months was too long for a continuous, mostly single-goal training cycle. A better use of time has been to spend the first 2-3 months after the race in the lower load, cross-training environment before building up around 10-11 months out.
We now take a whole month of rejuvenation time after HOCR, and then two months of more flexible off-season programming before settling back into more structured training around February. Strength training consists of a smaller amount of main work and more assistance work, with more variety, higher volume, and an emphasis on unilateral and lower-load strength training. This easier “on-ramp” phase of training is still very productive in the big picture, and leaves us more room to increase with each block closer to race prep.
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