Training at the Bookends
GRP Rower Alex Spaulding takes in a recovery row on Hosmer. Photo: Val Stepanchuk
From Troy Howell, Director of Sculling
Since it’s spring, and we’re either getting the boathouse out of mothballs or not able to go to the boathouse at all in most cases, let’s dust off a couple of old training adages:
Most people’s easy workouts are too hard, and their hard workouts aren’t hard enough.
Vary the stimulus.
Both are worthy of some discussion and have much to tell us about what to do right now.
So let’s first define easy in this context. Here are a few guidelines:
Easy means entirely aerobic.
Easy means <2.0 mmol lactate – preferably between 1.0-1.7 mmol.
Easy means a heart rate between 55-65% of your maximum.
Easy means able to converse more or less continually during the activity without getting winded.
If hard means running a mile as fast as you are able, easy means walking a mile purposefully but not so fast that a child walking beside you would be unable to keep up, i.e. not a brisk walk.
If you read definition #3 and said “wait a minute – 55% of my maximum heart rate is 100 bpm, and I’m higher than that after three strokes”, well, you’re exactly who the original saying is talking about, and it’s time to learn to walk rather than running all the time. You’re going to feel like you’re “not working hard enough” during your easy sessions, and being disciplined enough to allow that to happen for the recovery and technical benefits it will provide is precisely the point.
Here’s how to do it: If you have a heart rate monitor, give yourself a cap. Try 70% to start. If at any point your heart rate exceeds the cap even for a single stroke, you must either a) row at less than quarter-pressure or b) stop until your heart rate is below the cap. When you are able to row steady state at <70%, set the cap at 65%, and then 60%. If you haven’t done this before, this may take multiple outings to achieve. Stay with it.
Once you get there, the real fun begins, and you can start working on finding ways to go faster under your cap. One of my favorite recovery workouts is to row several “Head of the Hosmer” pieces (2800m) for time, with my heart rate capped at 100, 110, or 120 bpm, stopping just long enough to turn around and get a drink between each, or to do a 30’ erg piece with a cap of 125 (still easy and completely aerobic – for whatever reason heart rates lower than 120 on the erg elude me in the way that heart rates under 130 once did in the boat).
If you don’t have access to a heart rate monitor or don’t like training with one, use the conversation definition of easy. Check yourself once every 4-5 minutes by doing exactly that: start talking (even to yourself) and find out whether you’ve been rowing harder than a pace at which you can converse.
How often? At least one day a week. Maybe two. Probably not more than three, or you won’t be honoring the second part of the saying. Speaking of which: we’re not telling you not to do intervals, or AT, or distance-per-stroke work at low ratings, if those are part of your current plan. You’ve got other days in the week – use them as you see fit – just learn what a recovery oriented, purely aerobic workout actually is. I once read about a cyclist who said that the nuts and bolts of his training, year-round, boiled down to “once a week, go so hard your eyeballs hurt, and once a week, go so easy that watching you makes the snails yawn – the combination builds speed like you won’t believe.” It’s the same idea with which we began, stated a little more colorfully.
The second saying, “vary the stimulus”, is equally applicable both to competitive and to recreational scullers. For the former, the most practical suggestion is this: Make a point of including workouts in your training that are different from anything you’ve done before. Vary the stimulus is as much about getting you out of mental ruts where your expectations color the way you perform as it is about physiological adaptation. So if your go-to interval workouts are all basic multiplication tables (5x500m, 7x3 minutes, etc.), try doing 400m intervals instead of 500m, or a 1-5’ pyramid. Or do sets of several short intervals, such as three sets of 4x200m on/30 seconds off, or the classic Al Rosenberg workout of 2-3 sets of 5x1:40 on/:20 off (the twenty seconds off is remarkably refreshing – most fit scullers can approximate head race pace or a little faster on the “on”, and as an aside, at lower intensity and stroke rate it’s a fantastic transition from easy work to hard work as part of your warm-up).
Make up your own, or adapt workouts from websites for this or any other endurance sport. As Larry Gluckman is fond of saying, “our only limitation is lack of imagination.” For recreational scullers or anyone not preparing for racing, varying the stimulus can be as simple as just giving yourself permission to experiment with sculling or erging at a stroke rate that is not the one you naturally and habitually fall into, going to a different place on your river or lake than where you usually go, or even finally committing to sculling with square blades or alternating two strokes square, two strokes feathered – again, the only limitation is lack of imagination.