The Head of the Charles and all head races demand a good performance. How to find the ideal stroke rate for your crew.
Resource: The Ultimate Head Racing Guide for Masters [free download]
3 Value bombs
- Racing is hard and uncomfortable – learn this
- Use training to figure out your ideal rate
- 3 things to practice in training: rate higher, rest more, work harder
Timestamps
00:30 Do you have a question in your mind about whether you’ve got the correct stroke rate for race day?
A story about a crew and an experienced coxswain – they had 2 races in one day. In the first race he drove them hard, with pushes, focus points and technique improvements. Before the second race the crew told the cox that they felt uncomfortable and hadn’t enjoyed the race. They wanted to have a stroke rate that they called “long and strong”. The cox disagreed with them, but he did what they wanted. What happened? In the second race, the crew was 20 seconds slower than in the first race.
02:30 Why did the crew go slower?
They felt comfortable in the second race, they felt confident and that they had everything under control. In the first race the cox pushed them close to their limits. It did not feel nice, they felt close to their limits, they felt awkward, out of breath, not fully in control and yet the boat went faster.
03:15 Your Training Pieces
You will be doing workouts at different stroke rates from 18 up to race pace. Your trial test races will also be planned into your program. This is where you try different things. Training pieces are often at specified rates – get a boat speed measurement in 500m splits or meters per second (m/s). Download your workouts and put them into an analysis program like www.rowsandall.com [free] Find out how fast your boat went at different stroke rates. This is your base level of data. What was your average split in the piece. Where did you go slower or faster? Note wind and waves that upset your base speed.
05:30 Boat speed at different stroke rates
Look at how the speed changes when the rate varies. Learn the inter-relationship between these two things. Our program for October 2024 includes ladders with changing rates. These show your boat speed at each rating. Rating is the only variable in the ladders. Use the data aggregated over a few weeks to review with your crew where the boat felt good and went fast.
See all our programs and webinars.
07:00 Effective rate and boat speed
Learn how the boat speed and rating combine to learn which ratings are best for your crew. Remember they may be odd numbers (not even number ratings). Then test out the best rates in trial pieces and test events. Can you deliver the same boat speed under pressure of race conditions? Use what you learn to adjust your race plan.
07:30 Learn and revise
The key learning is to test your upper limit. As you train at higher stroke rates you get better at rowing at higher stroke rates, you get fitter too and more used to sustaining those rates. So your upper rate limit is changing over time. Take account of this – being good at 28 this weekend doesn’t mean that next weekend you will still be good at 28, it may have lifted to 29 or 30 strokes per minute.
08:30 Three things you can do to push your upper limit stroke rate
- Rate higher – if you try one number higher than what you think is your top rate. Generally rowing boats move one boat length per stroke. They go faster at higher rates – but the relationship between stroke rate and speed is not linear, it does plateau. And it can slow down the boat speed at very high rates.
- Work harder – can you push the oar through the water from catch to finish. Improve your work rate for any given rating.
- Rest more – improve your ability to relax on the recovery to give your muscles a break before the next catch. If you can slow the boat down less each recovery, your average speed will have increased.
Practice these three in every single workout you do. Then bring this to your training pieces as you work out your ideal stroke rate for the race. This gives you “tricks” to pull out of the bag or levers you can pull in the race to improve your performance.
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