Congratulations and thank you for illustrating my first point I am about to make on personality of an athlete or coach. Through your active search, you found me and this article, because you are in search of greater aerobic capacity for either yourself or people you train, which in turn describes you as a motivated individual.
Do rowers and coaches know when to slow down?
In order to achieve maximum results from training, the mind and body need to be in harmony. From personal experience as an Olympic gold/silver medalist and coach I have noticed that athletes too often forget to look for the connection between the two. Such disconnect can be caused from guilt and competitive paranoya of the "what if I don't train..." Athletes are guilty of this as much as coaches. Coaches who don't understand the importance of limiting hard workouts and neglecting to observe the rowers demeanor during and outside of the workouts, fall into a situation in which more injuries appear and morale of the crew becomes gloomy. Slowing down is not in the nature of motivated people it must therefore learned and accepted in order to improve fitness.
Believing that achieving new personal bests is mainly caused when the mind gets stronger... another problem.
I have heard it many times from club and university rowers. As training "progresses" coaches chose to test their crew members to confirm that their training plan delivers better 2K, 6K, and more boat speed. Some of these coaches also tend to favor harder workouts instead of aerobic training sessions. When too few personal bests are recorded the coaches' answer are more high intensity training with team meetings denouncing that the crews are not pushing hard enough and that it is a matter of getting mentally tougher to sustain more pain. For rowers with less coaching interference a similar situation exists. All-out-effort-self-testing becomes a form of security blanket. Unfortunately the blanket is sometimes used in moments of doubt, for example when coming out of sickness such as the flu. In such cases the test which ought to show improvement ends up informing the rower of how much the illness impacted their fitness. More often than not, the result of the test is less than satisfactory and leads the rower down a path of self-doubt mixed with impatience that lead to harder workouts, because of the idea lost time from being ill needs to be made up.
"No pain, no gain, no Spain." Learn from other endurance disciplines, look outside the box.
This was a headline in Sport Illustrated back in 1992 as the world was preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. Rowing is known to be one of the toughest sports and therefore it is easy to imagine that training has to be filled with intensity and pain. Many rowers and coaches believe that rowing success comes from going through hell on water and land. This concept of training is so wrong, it makes me cringe. My coaches' adopted training methods from different disciplines such as cross country skiing, flat water kayak, cycling, and Olympic weight lifting. Learning from mistakes and successes of other successful.
Improvement in rowing comes through a carefully mixed training program that gives the athlete enough time to recover from hard workouts and plenty of aerobic mileage to increase the mitochondria count in muscle cells throughout the body and not just the core rowing muscles. Cross training is crucial to avoid chronic injuries, mental burnout, yet extremely beneficial for total body fitness at the molecular level. As rower, listening to ones body, accepting gut feeling, erring on the side of caution is a better way to becoming a champion. Coaches need to accept that athletes achieve greater performance through mileage and fine tuning, rather then creating a living hell, where mental toughness is the means to an end.
Now go and puke your gut out at CRASH-B and its satellite regattas.
Xeno, Olympic gold and silver medalist, Olympic record holder. Row2go, XenoRowingCoach, Digital Workouts.
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| 1996 Olympics, Derek Porter, Xeno Muller, Thomas Lange, Olympic record 6:44.85 |
In order to achieve maximum results from training, the mind and body need to be in harmony. From personal experience as an Olympic gold/silver medalist and coach I have noticed that athletes too often forget to look for the connection between the two. Such disconnect can be caused from guilt and competitive paranoya of the "what if I don't train..." Athletes are guilty of this as much as coaches. Coaches who don't understand the importance of limiting hard workouts and neglecting to observe the rowers demeanor during and outside of the workouts, fall into a situation in which more injuries appear and morale of the crew becomes gloomy. Slowing down is not in the nature of motivated people it must therefore learned and accepted in order to improve fitness.
Believing that achieving new personal bests is mainly caused when the mind gets stronger... another problem.
I have heard it many times from club and university rowers. As training "progresses" coaches chose to test their crew members to confirm that their training plan delivers better 2K, 6K, and more boat speed. Some of these coaches also tend to favor harder workouts instead of aerobic training sessions. When too few personal bests are recorded the coaches' answer are more high intensity training with team meetings denouncing that the crews are not pushing hard enough and that it is a matter of getting mentally tougher to sustain more pain. For rowers with less coaching interference a similar situation exists. All-out-effort-self-testing becomes a form of security blanket. Unfortunately the blanket is sometimes used in moments of doubt, for example when coming out of sickness such as the flu. In such cases the test which ought to show improvement ends up informing the rower of how much the illness impacted their fitness. More often than not, the result of the test is less than satisfactory and leads the rower down a path of self-doubt mixed with impatience that lead to harder workouts, because of the idea lost time from being ill needs to be made up.
"No pain, no gain, no Spain." Learn from other endurance disciplines, look outside the box.
This was a headline in Sport Illustrated back in 1992 as the world was preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. Rowing is known to be one of the toughest sports and therefore it is easy to imagine that training has to be filled with intensity and pain. Many rowers and coaches believe that rowing success comes from going through hell on water and land. This concept of training is so wrong, it makes me cringe. My coaches' adopted training methods from different disciplines such as cross country skiing, flat water kayak, cycling, and Olympic weight lifting. Learning from mistakes and successes of other successful.
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| Training on Lake Sarnen, Switzerland |
Now go and puke your gut out at CRASH-B and its satellite regattas.
Xeno, Olympic gold and silver medalist, Olympic record holder. Row2go, XenoRowingCoach, Digital Workouts.
Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.
Perfect, someone that actually knows what he is talking about. When to zig , when to zag. When someone is motivated they can't stop because they don't want to let him/herself down. One never is as good as they think they are. Discipline is key! Love It!!
ReplyDeleteThere is more than one way to cook an egg, that much we can glean from certain national teams. However, doing the type of training program you advocate, to me, seems to be the safest and fastest way to continually improve ones performances. The notion that because rowing is painful the training needs to be both painful and reflect a racing environment isn't correct.
ReplyDeleteThe program I am currently in calls for lots of intense threshold work, twice a day, for five days of the week. The athletes fitness usually doesn't improve throughout the season and the coaches knowingly reject training programs that have a scientific backing, and are much better suited to the demands of university in favor of programs they themselves have done, ones that, as I mentioned earlier, are done by national teams, not university students. There is a purposeful ignorance which is holding athletes back because the coaches prefer the cathartic experience of seeing athletes pull hard all the time and fail to progress ogress rather than one which works.
Coaches have and abuse their power, athletes who question are criticized for not buying into the process.
Hi
ReplyDeleteThank you. I was really lucky that I had the right coaches. Even at Brown we were lucky in two different ways. First Scott Roop our freshman coach had the right idea even though he never explained what goes on in the muscle specifically. He had us row by sixes until shortly before racing season started. Stroke rate was 99% at 20. He achieved three goals: 1. a steady boat that prevented getting back injuries, 2. added resistance to build more torque, 3. an extremely great aerobic base. I was able to push 7:30 for 2500 on the Concept2 that spring. He knew that abusing high intensity was not going to lead anywhere. His training partner in the 80ies was Eric Hayden who won several Olympic medals in speed skating. One other lucky deal was that once Gladstone coached us, he tended to work us not hard enough.... the great thing about it was that we had no injuries and we were not overtrained. Hilarious how the two learned from one another. But truly the knowledge about training was brought to me as early as I turned 17 during my first lactate test. I was told that the target heart rate is 147 and if I kept that going for several hours per day, that I would become a gold medalist.....
I am so sorry to hear this. What you are going through does not sound like fun. My blog entry was not specific on actual training on the water. One of the HUGE pieces missing in the US is the lack of properly coaching rowers in small boats. Everything is a cattle drive and last person standing.... That is also why the erg has re-emerged as a prime tool to select crews... which is idiotic at a level that boggles my mind. At least the erg selection "sometimes" uses the weighted result... but even that is very rare.
ReplyDeleteAs you write, the right training information is out there. There are British sites and a Canadian store that clearly explain the benefits of building mitochondria through steady long distance training. Now I will say something that I probably shouldn't... in regard to coaches... you get what you pay for. By default if there is a person who has the time to coach for close to no income is a RED FLAG RED F L A G!!!
The stereotypical coach who pushes the rowers hard is also the kind that would NEVER want any outside information, gosh forbid that something new could be learned.
Anyway good luck to you and I hope that you see some water time soon. Most of the daily abuses occur when the crew cannot be on the water and ERGO bound. That is when the coaches don't have the patience to let the rowers push the miles, and wrongly think that high intensity will break up the boredom.... instead it brings resentment towards training.
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ReplyDeleteOk, which country are you in?
ReplyDeleteI won't ask any further. I know that you want to stay incognito for fear of being treated as a traitor.