Today we are going to look at several different videos teaching how to get back into a rowing boat after having fallen in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcPE8-gENLo
This has good instruction from the bank – worth copying
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HkMcpAMmEhk
https://www.youtube.com/embed/nhtv53MOrqA
It is instructional because you can see what she does right and wrong
https://www.youtube.com/embed/I7sBJiK-ixs
This last video shows a large number of beginner adult / masters scullers doing the capsize and recovery drill
https://www.youtube.com/embed/T4iZN2WjbMA
Sam Dutney explains the differences and how they apply to masters rowing.
Different modes of training methodology are polarised and pyramidal. Most of the time people use pyramidal so the training intensity distribution is like a pyramid. It has a large base of low intensity, a moderate amount of mid intensity and a small amount of high intensity. Polarised training skips the mid intensity and has 20% at high intensity.
02:00 Percentages are 60: 30: 10% for pyramidal. Rowing training has been pyramidal for a long time - since 1930s. Polarised became popular in mid 2000s and is based on a study done on elite cyclists in endurance sports.
The benefits of polarised training link well to the benefits of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). What drives the benefits are the high intensity training - the top levels are very similar - the top level training is at or near top efforts. A huge amount of rowing performance comes from efficiency and time in the boat. Develop the skill in a polarised model in the low intensity sessions.
Available time - if you can only train 3 times a week. Do a program with one low intensity and the other two as high intensity. If you are doing 4-5 sessions a polarised model may be more suitable. Pyramidal training is effective in the early season and head racing. because you aren't trying to operate at maximum intensity. So pyramidal can be effective at this time of year.
A 2016 paper on runners compared pyramidal and polarised training for 16 weeks; The results from pyramidal for 8 weeks and then shifting into polarised for 8 weeks was very much more effective than all the others. The polarised hard sessions have to be really hard and the easy sessions need to be really easy. As we get older you don't recover as well that's where polarised training can help recovery for masters.
Top Crew Academy is a coaching service run by Sam Dutney.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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What to take, make a list:- kit, tools, food, comfort, medical.
Resource: Erg Racing Checklist
There is a lot going on and so it's easy to forget things. There are many distractions around you and some may affect your race outcome.
01:50 Write it down on a master checklist
Start with packing the night before you leave.
Buy Waterproof socks https://fastermastersrowing.com/merch/
It's easy to get distracted when others ask you for help and then you miss your own crew race preparation timeline. I set alarms on my phone - an hour before my race time with the name of the alarm e.g. quad race.
If someone asks to borrow your tools and you lend them they can get mislaid even if you name your tools. Ask the borrower to give you their phone or sunglasses while they borrow the tool - and they are more likely to return it.
What is normal for you? What to expect when you track your normal waking heart rate.
Resource: Daily Diary - simple templated record keeping for your training diary
00:50 This is important as we age. It's a free way to track your physical wellbeing. I found out about it from Harry Mahon, the New Zealand rowing coach. Resting heart rate is important for masters because we are too good at "keeping going". Knowing how well you are is key to how you approach training and to give you confidence.
In the longer term it's an indicator of your fitness. The lower your resting heart rate the fitter you are. Heart rates are very individual - what's normal for you is not the same as mine.
It's also useful to determine your readiness to train today. Waking heart rates when tracked regularly show you what number is normal for you. After one week you will see your numbers and what's normal.
The resting heart rate can show if you are incubating an illness - viral or bacterial. It shows up in your resting heart rate before you see symptoms. Before you get symptoms your heart is already responding to the illness. This could also be stress, poor sleep or dehydration - it's not always illness. The heart rate jumps up 10 beats per minute when suffering an illness.
07:00 After being sick and wanting to go rowing again, I have gone out when I still have symptoms but find doing a medium intensity workout helps to clear the final symptoms of the virus. The normal pulse precedes this.
There are two easy places - the side of your neck or the wrist - find your pulse on the thumb side about 2 cm from the wrist joint - use two fingers to locate it (not your thumb because there's a pulse in your thumb).
Take a one minute reading or 30 seconds and double the score. When you start counting, make the first pulse zero and then one, two, three etc. Keep a daily record - use this free daily training diary from our website - to record your training, overnight health and hydration state.
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Flexibility and mobility aide our rowing. What you can do to keep mobility will help your rowing and sculling.
Resource: Functional Movement Assessment – self test
3 Value Bombs
Timestamps
01:00 How can we stay mobile as we age?
Two mornings after a big workout you wake up feeling stiff, tight and tense in your body. Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) has kicked in. Your body does not feel like it normally does.
Mobility and flexibility are words used interchangeably - but medically they have different meanings. Mobility - ability to move through the full range of motion. The rowing positions we want to be able to achieve. Sit at the finish with good poise, no slump in your lower back and pressure on your feet. Rock forwards with a pelvic tilt so your shoulders are sternwards of your hips. Roll up the slide to full compression with shins vertical, arms wide and is your body able to take the strain of the load from the oars in the water, Flexibility - ability to stretch your muscles, tendons and ligaments. IT is possible to be mobile without being flexible.
Webinar Functional Movement Assessment - how does your body move to achieve a particular position. This free webinar can be watched on demand from this link.
10 Screening Exercise Tests
Where is your ability on 10 screening exercises? The ebook (free download) sets out the main positions for rowing and sculling. All are useful for you to work out if you can get into the positions for the stroke cycle. The webinar discusses ways to improve your score on the tests. Rowing with compromises affects many masters rowers. The webinar shows you stretches to help you change your body to improve your screening exercise results. These exercises are useful if you want to make a change in your body.
06:00 Changing your body takes time and regular practice
Muscles, tendons and ligaments take time to change, to lengthen and to strengthen. Old injuries or health issues affect our body postures. Setting up a rowing boat to suit each person's physical mobility is another article. Getting more flexible is something we should all be able to do with regular practice. Morning ritual while brushing my teeth, I stretch my adductors. A challenge for you - improve one or two of your screening tests.
08:00 Coaches can use the tests to screen crews.
Find out whether they can get into the positions you are trying to coach. If athletes cannot get into the positions, you will find it harder to teach technique.
Skill stretch for masters who splay their knees out sideways as they roll up the slide. If you do not have the strength to hold legs parallel. Hold both fists together between your knees and use your legs to squeeze your fists gently. This strengthens the muscles on the outside of your legs and may help to keep your legs parallel.
Find out if your body is mobile and can get into the rowing positions and watch the Functional Movement Assessment free webinar.
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Do you have a split to aim for during workouts? What to do if you don't hit your rowing 500m split and does this matter?
Resource: Make winter ergs fun again - 5 tips
3 Value Bombs
01:00 Psychology of chasing 500m splits on the erg and on the water? Is it beneficial for masters rowing training.
03:45 Before rowing electronics the best way to find out your boat speed was to work on a measured marked distance on your river or lake. Repeating the distance and comparing boat speeds helped to work out your improvements.
The advent of splits enabled comparability between workouts and also use on the indoor rowing machine. Concept2 erg splits are comparable to heavyweight men 4- times on water.
05:30 Splits as a comparable tool but your split does NOT equal your training zone.
The physiology of how coaches write programs to achieve key athlete outcomes. Training each physiological system helps you improve. As we age our base fitness is generally more sustained (we don't lose it fast).
Our absolute strength declines with age and our ability to rate high and train our anaerobic system can be more challenging.
Doing testing allows you to set up training zones aligned to your physiology. The same training program can't be applied to men and women of different ages e.g. 40 to 65 years old. They cannot do the same workouts - not physically capable.
Know your own training zones so you can adapt the program to suit you. In a club with diverse members, you may find that the program is too hard or too easy for you. You may find recovery is insufficient. These symptoms are caused by a one-size-fits-all training program for masters rowing.
Come to Faster Masters Rowing and use our program where you can interpret the program and adapt it to suit you.
Re-testing yourself regularly allows you to measure progress and then adjust your training zones to match your new physical fitness.
Use tools mindfully.
It's fun to look at a number and to try to beat it - this is motivating.
But moving into an adjacent training zone as a result of beating the number will negatively impact your future performance.
10:30 You can choose to focus on a split that is attuned to your body or not.
The program you are following was written with a goal in mind. You aren't supporting your coaches' goals if you do not follow the program. Following the wrong split is a good example of not doing the program.
Getting the correct range of boat types and boat weights to suit your club group is important. What to look for, how to assess your fleet and plan for the future.
Resource: Rowing Club Management Strategy - how to write one
3 Value Bombs
Review the stock of boats and equipment in your club and how they align with the needs of your athletes. We realised we needed to workout if our boat fleet matched the masters group needs. Assess the weight class of boat to the athlete weights in your group.
03:00 What weight class was your boat designed for?
Look for the manufacturer's plate - often in the bow or the front of the stroke's foot well. It shows the design hull type, year of manufacture and the average weight of athlete it's designed for. Club asset registers list all the boats in the club ownership. We added the information about the boat design weight.
04:30 List all the boats in each boat class that you own (8, 4s, 2s and 1x) and classify them to the athlete weight they are designed for. Broadly we chose 3 categories - light weight boats (under 70kg), mid-weight boats (70-85kg) and heavy weight boats ( over 85kg).
Our list included boat name, age of boat, weight class of boat and whether lightweight, mid-weight or heavyweight. We added in how old the boat was and whether it was due for retirement.
It was then clear where to skew of boats matched our athlete weights.
Have we got one boat in each weight class? Which are the most popular boats which athletes like to row? This shows you where you are short of boats by boat class and boat weight to align with what your group needs, frequency of boat use per week/month, and which boats your masters want to row. This is not static, it changes each year as membership and priorities change. This information was then put into the prioritisation for refurbishing boats, fund raising for new boats and spare parts / minor repairs list (consumables e.g. shoes, slides, gates).
08:00 Set out a 3-4 year programme to get your boat fleet more aligned with your group needs.
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The joy of elite rowing is tough racing, close margins and interesting racing plans. For masters, there are lessons we can take into our own practice.
We welcome guest Grant Craies who writes the programmes for Faster Masters Rowing subscribers.
Do the basics well Watching crews from different countries who may row differently stylistically. Despite this they all row the basics extremely well such as blade parallels are accurate, height off the water is the same, they square up at the same time. They are very consistent with these at low ratings as well as when racing. They always look unhurried with their movements. To achieve this you have to be accurate with movements which creates time in the rowing stroke. These athletes have extreme physical capacities compared to us. But we can bring diligence and practice to doing the basics.
Making the boat go faster with a "move" especially in the last 10% of the race affected the outcome. The positions the crews were in at 1500m weren't the same as at the finish line. Fitness is a component of this they would have practiced making pace changes in training. The crews must know how to effect the change and what the call is to do it.
Within the Faster Masters Rowing training programs is a change of pace during a workout to help train us as masters to be able to do this.
The Romanian womens 2x were doubling up into the 8+. They tend to race from the front. In their semi-final they didn't do this - racing in the pack. After 1500m they sprinted hard to win the semi final using the change of pace in the final stages. In the final they tried to do the same thing and couldn't overtake the New Zealand W2x who won the event. Their opposition would try to counter the change of pace because they had seen it happen before. They created a buffer between the NZ boat and the Romanian boat.
It takes around 2-3 strokes before you get a real response from your boat speed. If you can get 5 strokes on another crew before they realise you have changed your pace it may gain you a bit. The opponents have to both match your change of pace and make up the distance you already gained - going significantly faster than you to win the race. It is easier to be in front than to play catch up. You take a risk by sprinting early.
The mens pair race - the British crew were leading by a few feet over the Croatian pair. They countered the push the Croatian Sinkovic brothers did. Coming up to the line the British crew caught water and this slowed their boat. There were only 2-3 strokes left in the race and that was enough for the Sinkovic to win. You have always got to keep going until you cross the line.
20:00 Van Dorp versus Zeidler The change of pace in the mens 1x came from the unaffiliated Belorussian who overtook the Dutch Van Dorp. This race got delayed to after the eights because a bus from the Olympic Athletes Village had broken down and the Belorussian was on the bus.
22:00 Have a contingency plan Things happen. The starting boot failed in one lane and forced lane changes. Know what you are going to do if something happens. This affected the timing of everyone's warm up and pre-race plans. Adjusting your plans to suit the new situation and then execute your race well. Can you filter out the things which are unexpected and re-focus on the new reality.
25:00 Know what is within your control and what is outside your control. Mental training and practice can help you learn not to react negatively when things change. Stay in the zone and produce a great athletic performance. We saw people doing catch drills, legs only rowing, finish drills in their practices after racing was over. All the crews were very careful on the recovery - they were doing nothing to disturb the boat while rolling up the slide.
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https://soundcloud.com/rowingchat/lessons-from-paris-olympics
London RC won the British Masters Championships Victor Ludorum prize in 2024. We talk to coach and captain James Sexton-Barrow about their approach to training, racing and organising their masters squad.
01:00 The plan to win the trophy began with a tracking spreadsheet.
02:30 The common goal for masters at London Rowing Club - it's a very big club membership with 100-120 rowers. The vision to win the trophy started after the 2023 event. The rowing sub-committee set the goal in January.
05:00 There are many sub-groups within the masters membership with their own objectives. A kick-off meeting brought everyone together. The club's founding was about winning at Henley Royal Regatta. We can all do this and get our photo on the wall next year.
We have a limit to number of boats and trailer space - the logistical challenge was addressed early. Also members expectations were managed as all fours had to also be quads to save trailer space. [The regatta does sweep one day and sculling the next.]
Shared goals meant members had to do well in lots of events across a broad base of individuals. Time was allocated to crew boats and balanced against individual goals for the collective goal.
11:00 The members age from masters A but the youngest category race offered in BMRC is B. Crews had to be averaged out to accommodate younger members. Ages from 28 to early 70s took part.
Everyone was happy to mix-and-match. Most people did 3 races over the weekend.
Most crews were in championship age group racing, a few did intermediate category events.
Henley Masters Regatta and next year the Banyoles World Rowing Masters Championships is a future focus. We would like to retain the trophy in 2025 too.
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