Controversial Rowing Training Opinions

Rowing coaches and rowers agree on a lot of things. I like to ask coaches for their rowing training opinions that they feel are controversial, or at least counter-cultural. What do they do differently than other coaches? This is a much more interesting discussion than yet more of how we all love pause drills and why the gather-at-the-release isn’t actually a micropause if it smooths out at higher rates.

A Craftsbury coach gave me an answer about strength training. He feels that it is often presented as a “get stronger to row faster” solution, but his controversial opinion is that this often fails people who haven’t developed good enough technique or fitness first to support the strength increase.

You may be surprised to read that I agree, at least in the short-term picture.

Fitness and technique (time in the boat!) will have greater short-term effects on improving performance. Strength training is a long-term investment, not a short-term solution. We can improve technique in a single session with good coaching and learning, which can pay off immediately to improve performance. We can improve fitness with a good training plan, or a 4-6-week progressive increase in training load followed by a taper to improve performance via peaking.

Remember my points from last month’s, “Why strength train before you need to?” post. It usually takes around six weeks to see neural gains when beginning strength training. At first, the main change we’re making with strength training is improving the neurological connections between the central nervous system and coordinating a muscular response. It typically takes 2-3 months to see structural change in terms of increased muscle fiber size. Both neural coordination and muscle fiber size can improve rowing performance, but not in a “get fast quick” kind of way.

The question often comes up online and in my inbox: I want to improve my time for a test/race in six weeks, what strength training should I do?

Strength training probably won’t help you much in six weeks, as there just isn’t enough time for significant structural adaptations to occur to improve your performance. BUT, strength training will help you in your NEXT test or race. You go faster in six weeks from improving fitness and technique; great. Where do you go from there? Unless you’re retiring from competitive rowing at that point, you probably want to go even faster in another six weeks. That’s 12 weeks away from originally asking the question. If we started strength training then, we’d see a bigger effect by 12 weeks that we wouldn’t see in six weeks.

If we’re always thinking in six-week chunks, there’s never a good time to start strength training. If we’re thinking in long-term athlete development, then there’s always a good time to start strength training. Start building now for your next PR.

My own controversial opinions about rowing training are more about what I don’t do or use in the gym than what I do.

For one, I typically don’t use “staples” of mainstream strength training with rowers: barbell bench press, back squat, and conventional deadlift.

Performance in those lifts, at least 1-rep max performance, is the sport of powerlifting. They are often fine for general fitness or recreational exercise as well. However, they have a few specific downsides for rowers pursuing specific rowing goals that get them on my “no” list compared to better alternatives.

The bench press puts direct pressure on the rib cage, at the posterior against the bench and anterior if the rower is too aggressive about bar-to-chest contact. Ribs are a costly injury in rowing, so I avoid doing things that increase stress on the chest wall area. I use dumbbell benching and pushups to gain and maintain strength and muscle mass in the horizontal pushing movement and muscles to be sufficient for rowing. These exercises also train shoulder stability better than barbell bench press. I’ve yet to coach a rower with pushups and dumbbell benching and found that their chest or triceps development was the limiting factor in their rowing performance. There are plenty of rowers who would row better/faster were it not for rib injuries.

I find that the back squat is too easy to do incorrectly or “cheat” for the sake of grinding out more reps or weight. The front squat is a superior exercise in a number of ways. Likewise for the conventional deadlift, compounded by the average tall/long-limbed rower build making it challenging to get into a good starting position at the bottom of the lift. I find the hex bar deadlift superior for rowers in every way.

I also rarely use Olympic lifts with rowers. My first coaching experience was a year-long internship with a collegiate varsity track and field team. We spent eight weeks in the fall teaching athletes 3x/wk to do the clean, clean-and-jerk, and snatch. These are talented, coordinated, explosive athletes training for triple-extension performance (which rowing isn’t). We started with PVC pipes, then lightweight training barbells, then empty barbells, then lightweight bumper plates, before beginning to challenge with load and force production during winter training to peak in the spring. We still did conventional strength training exercises during this whole time, because they sure weren’t getting stronger from the light Olympic lifts.

Potentially inflammatory among some rowing circles is my opinion that the bench pull is at best a waste of time for rowers, and at worst a significant injury risk for the all-too-common rib injury. I have recently updated my “Why I Hate the Bench Pull for Rowing” article, though, because–hold onto your seatpads–we’ve been doing them a bit with the GRP.

The rowers are expected to do bench pulls when they go to national selection camps, so we need to prepare accordingly. Fortunately, it’s not a complex exercise, so by “a bit,” I mean that we do one set of 10-20 reps at a self-selected weight as part of our warm-up series. Anyone with active or history of rib pain does bodyweight rows instead. I coach it like any other exercise with good technique (shoulders down as an upper body pull), full range-of-motion (arms straight at the bottom and squeeze at the top), and tempo control (2:1 lowering:lifting ratio). I did a new video for all of this here. This technique gets more out of the exercise and also reduces the weight that the rowers can do, therefore also reducing rib stress. Then we move on to the important work and the bench pull bench resumes its useful role as a notebook stand. In the actual workout, we do all the other horizontal pulling exercises that I prefer for better transfer and less/no rib stress.