Serious Sculling

Why You Should Care About Posture

...Even Though There’s Not Much at the Olympics

I was recently reviewing some Olympic races online, and one thing that struck me was how few of the athletes have good posture on the second part of the recovery and the first part of the drive.  This disturbs me.  It seems to be part of what I call the “Maria Callas” style of coaching, where coaches will aim for short-term results without considering the effect of not changing a maladaptive rowing style because that would mean postponing competition for an otherwise promising athlete.  Or not emphasizing good posture more may come about because coaches don’t understand the implications of poor posture. 

A snippet of a conversation I had a few years ago might serve to illustrate my point:  I was talking to a local coach who heads a large rowing organization and coaches elite rowers as well.  He and I were shooting the breeze as a group of his scullers was launching.  He told me things were generally going well, and pointed out one sculler in particular who was excelling.  “However much work you give him,” said the coach, “he just keeps improving.”  Despite that, though, the sculler was having some back problems.  And as soon as the guy started rowing I could see why:  He rowed with his back in a ‘C’ shape.  “You should tell him to row with his lower back straight,” I told his coach.  “No!” he replied.  “I don’t want to make it worse!”  While I respect this coach’s desire not to make his sculler’s back pain worse, I questioned his conclusion that allowing his star athlete to continue rowing with a very curved back would be the way to not make things worse. 

Let’s investigate why rowing with a curved lower back predisposes a rower to injury.  There are several reasons, which I’ll express in both intuitive and in more technical ways. 

When you sit with a curved lower back (flexed lumbar spine), you’re not using the muscles near your backbone and in your abdomen to keep your vertebrae in a neutral position.  You’re relying mostly on the connective tissue, tendons and ligaments, to do the job of keeping your back from collapsing like a deflated balloon.  When you then apply a load to your back, as when you initiate the drive, you’re still not engaging those supporting muscles.  The tendons and ligaments are what take the force of your drive.  But connective tissue doesn’t have nerves, so you don’t feel pain if these tissues are damaged.  You only feel pain if neighboring structures impinge on (pinch or press on) muscles or nerves – at which point innervated tissue becomes inflamed.  That can happen if the neighboring structures change position over time as a result of abnormal muscle activation on one side or the other. 

Connective tissue also doesn’t respond to exercise like muscle does:  it gets stronger and thicker, yes, but slowly and not much.  But exercise will make the muscles you do use stronger, and they will get stronger faster than the connective tissue that’s taking the brunt of the muscles’ force.  The muscles that aren’t being used stay weak, and you will end up either relying more on smaller muscles to do large jobs, or on muscles to do jobs they aren’t really in a good position to do.  Over time, poor positioning and the adaptations your muscles make to it will increase your chances of experiencing pain and injury. 

Bubble wrap is another reason why rowing with a curved back predisposes you to injury.  Think about it:  when you pop the bubbles in bubble wrap, you don’t press your finger down directly on top of the bubble.  That would just spread the air inside uniformly to the edges, and it wouldn’t create enough pressure to break the plastic anywhere.  If you really want to pop a bubble, you squish all the air to one side so that it makes the plastic bulge out on the opposite side, and then you keep pushing the air into the bulge until the pressure bursts the plastic with a satisfying pop. 

Something similar happens with your vertebral discs.  They’re made of a concentric series of ring-shaped connective tissue with gel inside.  Again, that connective tissue has no nerves – so when you repeatedly squish the discs’ contents to the back, extruding the gel through one of the inner rings, you won’t feel anything.  Only when the outermost ring starts to bulge or when it breaks will you feel it.  If the bulge presses on a nerve, you might not feel pain but numbness or tingling.  If the gel squirts out, you’ll definitely feel it – because the herniated disc releases something called “tumor necrosis factor”, which causes inflammation, pain, and further disc degeneration. 

But even if you’re not currently experiencing pain, rowing with a curved back still isn’t doing you any favors.  Instead, it’s sucking speed out of your stroke.  If your hips are curved underneath you, your gluteal muscles aren’t in a position to help you open, or extend, your hip joint.  So, instead of taking advantage of these powerful muscles to give your stroke that good swing in mid-drive, you’re letting them stay dormant and allowing them to atrophy.  Your drive won’t be as powerful as it can be.  If you’re bending back and forth at the waist to create body angle and swing, it’s as if your trunk were six inches or so shorter than it really is.  Furthermore, over time, moving repetitively in the slumped position will cause your quads to shorten – and that will decrease their maximum power output. 

Finally, because connective tissue doesn’t actively resist being stretched like muscles do (muscles contract!), a lot of the force you generate with your legs on the drive will now just go into stretching tendons and ligaments instead of being transferred to the water.  In other words, by not having good posture, you’re more squishy and a less efficient transferrer of your own power to the water. 

I can’t explain to you exactly why elite coaches allow their rowers to row with curved backs, though I do know that not all of them pass it by without comment.  Of the athletes you see at the Olympics, you don’t know what they are all working on, technique-wise.  You also don’t know their history of injury – whether their rowing style has really caused them injuries. So concluding that rowing like they do will get you as fast as they are, or will allow you to be as healthy as they are, isn't justified. 

Because there are rowers in the medal rounds who row curved, we might guess that the difference in speed between good and poor posture isn’t large.  If it were, all the good-posture rowers would be winning consistently, right?  But that’s a very hard point to prove, because it’s so difficult to find perfectly-matched control rowers.  If you could find 20 or 30 of them, pair them up, and teach one of each pair to row with good posture while keeping everything else about their training regimens the same, you might be able to show a significant increase in speed for the good-posture group over the course of a year or so.  But it might well take that long.  When you make a technical change of that magnitude, you won’t row faster right away, and you might actually be a little slower for a while.  The long-unused muscles are relatively weak and take a long time to gain strength and endurance to be commensurate with the muscles you have been relying on.  This long lag between change in technique and increase in speed acts as a big disincentive for the coach to make such a dramatic change before the Olympics -- especially when his job depends on results that can be achieved within that season and not at all on the rate of back injury in middle-aged alums. 

I’m not saying that rowing with good posture will mean you’ll never be injured.  Nor am I saying that rowing with poor posture guarantees injury (though others might; see here).  What I am saying is that poor posture during rowing increases your chances of certain types of injuries, injuries that are extremely painful and potentially debilitating; and that the more you row, the harder you row, and the older you are, the even more likely these injuries become.  Rowing slumped is a habit that can be reversed, and changing it will decrease your chances of back injury in the same way that wearing your seat belt decreases your chances of becoming severely brain-damaged or even dead when you’re in a car accident. 

Next time, we’ll talk about how you might go about correcting your posture as you row. 

Shoulders, Entry, Catch

I've gotten a couple of comments in response to my post about where and how to "take up the slack" when you're placing the blades in the water, and they've caused me to screech to a halt and do some more homework.

I proposed that the slack – the slight movement of the handles toward you – as the blades enter the water should feel like it’s getting taken up by having your shoulders feel like they’re coming more into joint.  Steve from OH pointed out that videos like that of Zac Purchase and other technically proficient scullers don’t show evidence of a fore/aft movement of the shoulders, like I describe. 

It’s a good thing he pointed this out, too, because it raised some useful issues that needed to be discussed.  One is that I don’t necessarily mean to say that how I describe the way sculling feels to me should be taken literally.  Fine:  but how would you know this?  Especially when I do quick web-searches to try and justify my intuitions.  Well, you have to ask (like Steve); or rely on me to self-police, -educate, and -correct. 

In the spirit of providing accurate information for you all, then, I thought I’d check with my friend Denise Frost, who’s a physical therapist and sculler.  She works at Spaulding Rehabilitation in Boston and has a private company, Coordination Dynamics, as well.  Though she and I have clients in common and often refer people to each other, I have no stake in the financial success or failure of her company, nor she mine. 

She's written a paper called “Cuffs and Slingshots” (sorry; I'm not able to link to it today, but I will do when I see that the website is up again.  Either that, or I'll ask Denise if it's OK to link directly to the pdf).  It describes a common set of problems that scullers and rowers encounter.  It’s also what we’ve been trying to think about!  Its largest point is that when you initiate the drive, the rest of your body has to be firm, and your joints well-supported, in order to transfer the force you’re generating with your legs through your body, to the blades, and out to the water.

The next important point is that the small muscles of the shoulder that I mentioned last time aren’t up to this task by themselves.  It’s the larger muscles around the shoulder that should be taking care of this, muscles like the trapezius, the serratus anterior, and the latissimus dorsi.  If those large muscles aren’t engaging properly, whether because of injury or habit, your posture as you come into the front end will look curved, not upright.  As Denise says, you’ll have “rounded forward shoulders and a slumped upper back.”  The muscles that stabilize your shoulder blades will be elongated, which puts them into a position where they can’t effectively stabilize the joint and transmit the load from your legs to your blades.  Instead, your powerful leg drive will just make the muscles and connective tissue stretch more.  You may feel like you're hanging on the oar – but because tendons and ligaments are not well suited to the task of stabilizing joints, you might also feel like your shoulders are stretching out of joint, almost.

Muscles are perfect for stabilizing joints, as long as they’re in the right position. If you’re over-reaching or slumped coming into the catch, instead of having the large muscles extrinsic to the shoulder stabilizing your shoulders, the small, deep intrinsic muscles of the shoulder will be trying to do so.  That’s not efficient from a rowing point of view, and it will greatly increase the probability of injury, which may give rise to symptoms like the ones Denise describes in another of her documents: 

• numbness & tingling in hands and fingers
• radiating or shooting pain throughout your arm
• elbow pain
• neck and/or upper back pain
• shoulder pain due to the “ball” of your upper arm bone mashing your rotator cuff muscle (the supraspinatus) against the acromion, which is next to your collarbone and above your humerus. 

One of the technical corrections that Denise recommends is: “at the commencement of the drive, ensure that the scapula is engaged against the rib cage and that the latissimus dorsi is engaged.”  That’s the clue that we were trying to figure out, and it seems so obvious because “use the lats” is such a frequent refrain in coaching. 

If you look at the video of Zac Purchase that Steve showed us, you can see (faintly, because of the lighting) Zac’s lats jump out at each catch[1].  I think that it’s this feeling which I’m calling “feeling your shoulders come more into their joints”.  My previous shoulder movement example, with the invisible glass wall, was a way of trying to evoke the sensation for you all, but emphasized the action of the wrong muscles. 

Let’s recap:  Steve asked how you get your blades into the water without either (a) checking the boat down and flipping or (b) missing water.  I said, among other things, that you need to have your arms and shoulders relaxed and taut as you place the blades, to a level somewhere between God and Thanksgiving. Your belly-button is pressed against your thighs, and your chest is up and open. 

You also need to be stabilizing your seat in position (I have this down as a future topic) so that, as the water you’re moving past takes your blades, you’ll be able to absorb some of that feeling of movement of the handles toward you by getting a good grip with your lats – this is the feeling of your shoulders coming more into joint.  Maybe a better term would be “the feeling of your shoulders stabilizing themselves”.  If your hands are gripping the handles only as much as needed to prevent the oars from rotating as you lock on, and if your biceps and triceps are equally balancing each other out but not clenching – again, if you’re stabilizing your elbow joints, not immobilizing them, per se – you may feel the oars bump against the sides of the oarlock.  First you’ll feel them bump against the sternward side of the oarlock, then against the bow-ward side.  At least, you might feel this at steady state, when it’s calm, you’re not steering, there aren’t too many sunspots, and Mercury is not in retrograde. 

If you were peeking at your blade on one side, you’d see a pretty symmetrical splash, as long as you weren’t initiating the drive yet.  Only once the blades are fully under the water, and you’ve felt the oars moving around in their sockets, are you allowed to start the drive.  That’s what we’ll talk about next time. 

---

[1] Or at least near the catch.  Since for the majority of the video we can’t see both the shoulder and the blade, we don’t know much about the timing of the two.  Let’s be charitable and assume that they happen at the same time. 

Oh, My Aching...

Hands.  Most of us have them, and we use them to hold the handles of the oars.  And I am reminded of my hands much more in the weather we’re currently having in New England than I am in other types of weather. 

 

It’s summer, you see; and that means it’s humid here.  I really, really hate humidity.  It makes me feel like the stick of butter on my kitchen counter looks:  sagging and oily.  Granted, my hair turns nice and curly, but there are products that do that year-round, so it’s not worth enduring the sweaty, sticky, heavy weather we have now just for a good hair day. 

 

It could be worse, I know.  I could live in the Washington, D.C. metro area like I did as a teenager.  Somehow, I managed not to die from it, but now I can’t imagine how not.  I recall leaving a movie theater once on a mid-August afternoon near DuPont Circle, hitting the moist, superheated air, and thinking, “Why did that invisible person just microwave that wet facecloth and then throw it at my face?  Why?” 

 

One of the commenters to this blog, Eugene, lives in the American South – Mississippi.  My witty metaphors fail me here.  I just can’t imagine how people manage in that weather. 

 

Normally, I’m not such a complainer.  It just happens that I had two funny lines about the humidity, and also it made me think of how much worse my hands blister when it’s humid.  Then, during my third shower of the day, I saw the pumice stone I keep in the tub, and it occurred to me I could make all this pointless suffering into a post.  A post on hand hygiene.  [And a disclaimer.  If you usually read this while eating, be warned:  it’s a little gross]. 

Now, even though they don’t much bother him, I would say that my husband's hands crying out for hygiene.  They are covered with old blisters, rough with snagging dead skin, and pocked with blisters in progress.  Your typical rowers' hands.  Nothing’s infected; I don’t mean that.  I just mean that I have a whole regimen for keeping my hands more socially acceptable than his.  Granted, he does work for a living, while I spend my time blogging performing sophisticated, computerized, acoustic analyses on the speech of individuals with neurological disorders. 

 

Let’s start with my theory of blisters.  [I know:  I have a theory for everything.  Talk to my shrink.]  My theory is that blisters form not just because of rubbing.  Instead, it seems like they form on my hands during rowing when the topmost layers of skin stick to the handles, but when there is a shear zone under those layers.  That is, the top layers seem to stick while also pulling back and forth.  The pulling tears the skin a few millimeters under the surface, and voila!  Pillows.  Painful pillows. 

 

Once you’ve got blisters, there’s not too much to be done except wait them out and take care of them.  I know that some people have regimens of caustic chemicals that they swear dry the blisters up and help them go away faster.  If you’re one of these people, please weigh in.  I’m the kind of person who incessantly plays with my blisters, and then they pop (usually in a small seminar, an important business meeting, or a crowded elevator for maximum humiliation).  Then, I’m stuck with the problem of how to deal with a potentially infectable wound on my hand.  The important message here is:  DON’T POP THEM.  Yes, it’s fun, and yes, they hurt when they are puffy, and yes, they will probably pop during tomorrow’s practice anyway.  But really, there’s no sense exchanging a sterile hand injury for a breeding ground for all of the stuff you flush down the bathroom pipes, which is now floating in your home river, before you’re forced to. 

 

If you do have an open wound, keep it clean.  Soap and water, with lots of rubbing, is the best thing to start with.  Purell or other hand cleaners will disinfect but they’ll also hurt like hell because of the alcohol.  If this is your thing, more power to you!  But I like hydrogen peroxide because it is less painful and I like to see the bubbles.  However, this compound does actually destroy skin, so some people don’t like it.  If you can keep the wound covered until it heals over, even better. 

 

There are some methods of wrapping one’s hands with athletic tape that I’ve found, through painful experience, will help reduce blister formation or help preserve the integrity of the ones I have.  I tend to get blisters between the joints of my fingers, usually the index, middle, and ring fingers; and on my palms just below the lowest finger joint.  The finger ones I wrap with a nice wide piece of tape, wide enough so that the tape wads up a little when I bend my fingers.  This isn’t pleasant, and it does leave a sticky residue on the handles, but it generally doesn’t result in the formation of more blisters at the edges of the tape.  And since the tape strips are pretty wide, they still cover the sore parts even when they wad up. 

 

The ones at the roots of my fingers, though, are another matter.  You can’t wrap the tape horizontally around your palm without it really wadding up and creating a whole crop of new, puffy sore spots.  Instead, you have to use a strip of athletic tape that’s at least an inch (~2.5 cm) wide and long enough to go from your wrist up between your fingers and back down to your wrist on the other side.  Then you tear it in half the long way, about halfway down, so it looks like a very skinny Y.  Put your finger between the two halves of the torn tape, near the crotch of the Y, so that the unsplit part of the tape covers the blister on the palm of your hand.  Then, stick the two arms of the Y to the back of your hand.  Do that for all of your blisters.  If you’re worried about the tape peeling back off your sweaty wrist, secure the ends with a bracelet of tape.  

 

Of course, most blisters pop eventually.  And when they do, I think it’s best to remove the dead skin.  Lovely!  You can use nail clippers, though I find that the curved blades of this tool tend to create more little ends that then need trimming, or else they go too deep and hurt.  I use the scissors on my Swiss Army knife, but you could easily use nail scissors or any small cuticle scissors that are flat.  Lay the blades of the scissors flat against your skin, press down slightly so that you can cut to the very bottom of the dead flaps of skin, and trim the excess away.  Don’t just pull the skin away, because your skin has a grain like wood, and you’ll do what I’ve done more times than I care to admit:  pull the dead skin away, then start pulling live skin away, and end up bleeding all over your notebook.  Or your business suit, or the elevator buttons.  Really unsavory. 

 

Of course, once you’ve trimmed most of the dead parts away you’re still left with the little bitty ends, and as they dry out they like to snag on fuzzy clothes, leading to the problem I just described.  My solution here is to use a pumice stone, like the ones they sell at The Body Shop  (This one isn’t actually pumice; it’s polyurethane, so if you’ve got some clean scraps of that you’re in luck).  You can also get actual pumice stones in most health and beauty aid sections in grocery stores or drug stores, like this one they sell at CVS in the US.  Be certain, though, that the implement you use will actually smooth your skin.  As with sanding any other substance, you’ve got to use the right grit, or you’ll end up making the problem worse.  I like a pretty smooth stone for that reason.  Oh – and remember to rinse the dead skin off your smoother each time, or it’ll get really disgusting really quickly. 

 

I use my pumice (or polyurethane) smoother when I shower.  The water helps soften the callouses and dead skin, and giving my hands a minute or two of sanding really helps keep those little snags from happening.  It’s also good callous maintenance to keep them medium-sized, too.  If you don’t, they get too thick, and you’ll develop a shear zone underneath them as you row.  A blister will then form under them, and the whole thing you’ve worked so hard to acquire will peel off.  And then you’ll be rowing on, like, baby hands.  Gotta love the double blisters you get that way. 

 

A final use for those pumice stones:  sanding the scars from boat bite.  I get boat bite like crazy, and I’m way too vain to wear knee socks.  So, the ends of the tracks just rub through that one layer of skin and make a barely visible sore on my calves.  I usually don’t even notice until I’m in the shower, and then YOWEEEEE!  Then, the next day, I have a wicked gross scab forming.  Through diligent experimentation – I am a scientist, after all – I’ve settled on the habit of putting Bag Balm or antibiotic ointment on the sore, then band-aiding it up.  Change the bandage every day or twice a day, and there’s much less scabbing and scarring, and they heal faster too.  Also, your doctor doesn’t look earnestly into your eyes and ask, “Are you safe at home?” 

 

But once the scab is gone you’re left with a very visible purple scar that takes about two years to really disappear.  I’ve found I can reduce this time to, oh, a mere year and a half by gently sanding the scar tissue off.  You can’t do it too much, or you’ll make a new sore and then have to start all over again.  But doing a little home dermabrasion really does help minimize the appearance of these unsightly scars.  [Like that phrasing?  I got it from a cosmetic commercial!]

 

One last comment:  If I have to row on painful blisters, I’ve noticed that they hurt the worst when I first grip the handles.  If I can just manage not to ever take my hands off the handles during a practice, then I won’t have to suffer through pressing all the fluid back into my hands and squeezing the swelling down again.  And then I’m sort of okay. 

 

…Until I need a drink….

Training by Pace.

Most of you will have rowed on the erg.  And most of you will know what I mean when I say I hated the erg all throughout my competitive career.  I hated it because it showed me just exactly how much I was deteriorating throughout a piece or workout.  Rowing on the erg made me feel like a workout was just something to get through, rather than that I’d built fitness or anything else. 

A few years after I retired from competitive 2K racing, I decided to try something I’d toyed with for a while.  I decided to train for the 500 meter dash.  I feel like I’m predominantly a strength athlete, which is not such a great trait when you are a female lightweight sculler (remember, our races take the longest of any boat class, biasing this event more toward the endurance athlete than the strength athlete).  The stress not just of making weight, but of maintaining it throughout the year when I was also worn down from training, made me wonder what it would be like if I could just row – no making weight.  So I emailed Ed McNeely, the physiology consultant for the Canadian National teams. 

If you haven’t met Ed, I’ll tell you about him.  He’s a strength athlete, too! so you can see how I took to him right away.  He’s also tremendously knowledgeable, empirically-minded, and a wonderfully supportive coach.  The workouts he assigned me were phrased in terms of splits, derived from a 20’ piece I did every 6 weeks, that I was to keep up for a particular workout.  These splits represented 5 aerobic (and 1 anaerobic) training categories, and you can read more about them in Ed’s book Training for Rowing.

I’d like to talk today about what was so useful about training by these splits.  I think that using this system makes it possible to learn pacing, it helps maximize the efficiency of the stroke, and can make an athlete feel much more positive about him- or herself. 

It is fairly straightforward to use these training splits on the erg.  Let’s say your athletes were planning to do some Cat VI, the “easiest” level of steady state, representing “all intensities up to and including the aerobic threshold.”  (McNeely, p. 32).  This level of effort specifically targets the slow twitch muscle fibers, and is the kind of long, easy workout that one can even chat during.  For many, rowing this low is difficult.  These athletes like to pull relatively hard at steady state, and they end up in something more like Cat V, which is between aerobic and anaerobic thresholds.  That’s a kind of “vigorous steady state”, where one can get out the odd word now and then but not really chat.  But pulling too hard on steady state cannibalizes aerobic development, never allowing that part of the metabolism to be targeted specifically.

Being given a specific split to maintain provides a very specific goal for athletes to work toward.  Keeping up a consistent pace for an entire workout allows them to feel how the perceived effort varies – increases – toward the end.  The “traditional” way of rowing at a constant perceived effort means that you watch your pace slow as the workout wears on.  I think this is counterproductive in two ways.  First, it makes the feeling of pulling harder at the beginning and going slower throughout the piece too familiar.  Second, it associates doing pieces with getting slower, in a sense.  But maintaining a constant pace is not only more metabolically efficient, it also gives athletes a real sense of “I did it!” after every piece. 

Of course, to maintain a constant pace, athletes will have to slightly increase the perceived effort over the course of the piece.  The most straightforward way to make that happen is by increasing the rating as the piece goes on:  one might start at a 20, for example, and end up at a 24.  It is quite productive to set a goal of staying at the initial rating a little longer each week.  If the athletes are on a training plan where they test every six weeks or so to obtain new training splits, then the workouts will feel easier each week after the first one (until the beginning of the next six-week cycle, that is).  The feeling of adapting to the workouts by doing them is another morale-booster. 

Even in workouts where the rating is to vary widely, as in pyramids, experiencing how it feels to keep up a particular pace at a 20 and the same pace at a 26 is instructive.  At the lower end, you must maximize your efficiency in order to keep the pace where you want it.  By watching the numbers and correlating the small variations in your movements over the course of a workout, you really will get a better idea of how your movements make the flywheel spin faster (or not).  Over time, you will center on a more efficient stroke.  Having figured it out yourself, just by watching the tiny fluctuations in the numbers, makes it more likely that you’ll retain the new technical adjustments. 

At the top end, maintaining a constant pace even as the rating increases teaches you how to decouple pulling hard from rowing high.  This is important because it teaches you how to row high and light, without rushing and without building up too much lactic acid on any one stroke.  This is a key to better racing – keeping up the boat speed by chipping the boat along, rather than by jamming the legs down hard on every stroke. 

Keeping a constant pace that you are assured of being able to hold helps teach pacing at higher speeds as well.  You can get used to how “easy” the pace feels at the beginning, as well as to how the pace feels when it starts getting to the point where you wonder if you can keep it up.  But since a constant pace is more efficient than going out too hard, that point happens much later in the piece than it used to, if it happens at all.  Once you internalize this new pacing strategy, using the numbers as a guide, you can then rely on it in racing. 

When you train by pace on the water, however, there are a lot more caveats to be aware of.  On the water, more factors affect boat speed than just level of effort.  Chop and going around turns slows the pace that a speed coach shows, but wind can work either way.  Current won’t affect the pace from a speed coach, because it always measures speed relative to the water.  Sitting motionless on a river, floating with the current, the speed coach will register zero. 

So when you trains by pace on the water, you have to take your splits with a few grains of salt.  To calibrate perceived effort with a particular pace, find a windless (or less windy) straightaway with no other boats and row on it.  Then, memorize how hard or how easy you have to pull in order to maintain the correct pace.  In wind, or going around a corner, you can just keep the perceived effort constant and return to watching the speed coach’s pace when the wind dies down or after steering. 

In a boat, there will be more moment-to-moment variability in speed than there will be on land.  You will need to think more in averages than in moment-to-moment numbers, and that encourages planning the pace for an entire piece or race, not just the “I’m doing a power ten” mentality. 

If you are in your single and don’t wish to switch to a training plan where you test every six weeks to obtain new training splits, you can still train by pace.  When you do a piece at a particular level of effort, if it’s a calm day you can note your average pace.  The next time you do that piece, aim to keep the pace constant at your average pace.  If you can raise that constant pace by a small amount over time, so much the better.  Regardless, you should be able to use your speed coach to help you with the tiny refinements in technique that come from associating your movements with changes in boat speed. 

Try it!

Proxies

This post is about what measurement you “should” use as you train to monitor your on-water performance.  I see a lot of people at the clubs where I coach sign up for lactate testing once a year or once every few years, and it makes me wish they would pay me instead of that person.  (sigh)  And every once in a while I come across someone who has just discovered the heart rate monitor and is all excited about using it during training.  But then I listen to the collegiate coaches and coxswains tell their rowers “bring it up to full pressure” and it gets me to wondering what the best way to monitor yourself during a piece really is. 

There are a few options:
    Rating
    Perceived effort
    Heart rate
    Lactate production
    Boat speed relative to land
    Boat speed relative to the water

All have their advantages and disadvantages.  I’ll come out right now and say that my favorite is to use boat speed relative to the water, because it’s a fairly easy quantity to measure and interpret – though not completely straightforward [see my next post for more information].  But I’ll make an effort to discuss the pros and cons of each method so you can decide for yourself what you want to use. 

Let’s start with rating, or number of strokes per minute. Everyone who’s ever rowed (or walked, for that matter) knows that the more strokes (or steps) you take per unit time generally correlates with speed.  So it’s often convenient to phrase workout intensities in terms of strokes per minute -- I do this on the fly, when I have to explain what a certain workout is like.  An easy workout might be done at 18-20 strokes per minute, while a hard one would be above a 28.  But the more experienced you get at sculling, the more skilled you will be at separating effort from rate. 

This is a very good skill to learn, in fact.  It’s usually easier to learn to pull hard at low rates than it is to be light and quick at high rates, but both are important skills.  Pulling hard at an 18 or below allows you to practice long, locked-on, efficient strokes without building up too much lactate, so you can do these workouts for long intervals.  And if you’re doing something like a bungee row, or towing a can, or tying plastic shopping bags onto your bungee, you’ll get the perfect rowing-specific lifting workout.  I like doing low-rate, high-pressure workouts (in moderation) to develop the efficiency of my stroke.  If I do too much over the course of a month or two, it starts to aggravate an old overuse injury and I get sore, but bits of it here and there sprinkled throughout the training year really do help me stay long and locked on when I scull. 

The harder skill to learn is how to pull lightly but at a high rating.  And to those of us steeped in the dictum never, ever to rush the slide, it’s even more of a conundrum.  But the reason it’s advantageous is exactly in racing.  If you think about rowing high and light, you’re racing much more aerobically than if you’re just muscling it every stroke.  It took me a really long time to learn this, and I wish I’d gotten it a LOT sooner.  (but such is life)  You can practice it yourself if you have a SpeedCoach or if you’re on an erg.  Start at a moderate pace, something you can keep up for 30 to 60 minutes, and note your splits or speed.  If you start at something like 20 strokes per minute, then stay at that rating for a few minutes to establish a rhythm.  Then, take it up two beats per minute every three to five minutes (depending on how long you plan to stay on the erg that session).  The important thing as you do this is to maintain the same speed throughout.  That is, if I’m at a 2:25 per 500m at 20 strokes per minute, I want to be at a 2:25 at a 24, too.  There’s a limit to how much you can push this; if you’re trying to do the same pace at a 20 and at a 32, you’re going to have to rush horribly at 32 to get that same pace.  In fact, you might find you’re working harder on the recovery than on the drive.  But if you’re at a 24 and rowing lightly, then you will feel a little like you’re just going back and forth, which is a  different ratio than you might be used to.  That’s okay. 

And that also leads us to our next proxy:  perceived effort.  This means “go by feel”, and it’s usually measured in terms of what’s called a “modified Borg scale.”  You can read more about different RPEs (ratings of perceived effort) on that link, but the basic idea is to make “no effort” the lowest number on your scale and “all out” the highest number on your scale.  Of course, this description creates several questions right from the get-go.  For example, while “no effort” is usually pretty straightforward, “all out” is a little more complex.  In rowing, particularly, does that mean “the hardest you can go at all?” Or does it mean “the hardest you can go for a particular distance?”  If 100% effort (or “full pressure”) means the first thing, then you wouldn’t really want to race a 2K at full pressure, would you?  Unless you didn’t care at all about lactic acid building up and making you stiff and unable to move.  Instead, you might decide, after some practice pacing yourself and calibrating your RPE to different times, that your optimal racing pressure was 75% or thereabouts. 

But a lot of high school or collegiate coaches don’t like to phrase race pace like this because they are afraid that their athletes will undershoot what they are actually capable of and go too slowly.  Instead, they will call race pace (for whatever distance their athletes are going to race) “100%”.  This communicates to the rowers that they must pull as hard as they can for the distance, and makes it more likely that every athlete will be giving their all.  Of course, this scale also has its own drawback, which is that it biases rowers toward pulling too hard at the beginning of a race.  And, in fact, the “fly and die” phenomenon is quite common among novice rowers. 

And, of course, you’ve already figured out that both scales correspond to something inherently subjective.  That means that not only can different people’s “100%”s correspond to different actual speeds, but also that one person’s 100% might yield one speed on a good day and lower one on a bad day. 

That’s partly what spurred the movement toward more objective measurements, like heart rate.  As you well know, the harder you work, the faster your heart beats.  So, heart rate is correlated to perceived effort and might yield a better metric than “I feel like I’m going all out.”  Also, you can measure it without any equipment at all except your heart and a finger on your pulse, though for trained athletes it's better to use a heart rate monitor because their heart rates start to slow down within about 20 seconds after stopping hard work. 

The first, and most simplistic, way of using heart rate to monitor exercise intensity is simply to express all workouts in terms of a percent of maximum heart rate.  Maximum heart rate is simply the fastest your heart can beat – but even there, there are some problems.  One is that your maximum heart rate decreases with age.  Another is that max heart rate differs by person.  My max won’t necessarily be your max, though they might be close.  And what about doing the experiment to ascertain exactly what our max heart rates are – even if we survive, it’s NOT going to be fun.  So, here again, there is some estimating.  The rule used to be “220 – your age”, so that my max heart rate when I was in college would have been something like 200 beats per minute, and now would be more like 180.  I haven’t done all-out full pressure with a heart rate monitor on in a long time, so I don’t know whether I can still get my heart over 180 beats per minute.  But I do know that by the time I was in my early twenties, the highest heart rate I saw on my monitor was something like 187.  After that, the tunnel vision would set in, so if my heart rate went up I didn’t know about it anyway. 

Another issue in using heart rate as a proxy for exercise intensity is that if you use a straight percentage of maximum, you would never get below some number.  That is, you would never get to, say, 5% of maximum.  That’s because your lowest heart rate isn’t zero.  This number, the “resting heart rate” again varies according to person and with fitness level, but for trained endurance athletes it can range from 35 to 70. Even when I was training, my heart rate never went below about 75, but then I was a complete stress bunny all the time.  I actually suspect my heart of being reluctant to increase its beat rate, preferring instead to just beat harder, at least for a while.  Gotta love that pounding-chest feeling… 

Anyway, the Karvonen, or heart-rate reserve, method of calculating % of max heart rate is a way of taking the resting heart rate into account.  It involves first determining the dynamic range of your heart rate.  To do this, you find your max heart rate (either by formula or empirically) and subtract your resting heart rate.  You are supposed to measure your resting heart rate first thing in the morning when you wake up, averaging over a few days to make sure you weren’t just really excited the first morning.  The problem with that for me was that my heart rate always shot up when my alarm went off, because I knew I was going to have to get up and start working out, and most of the time I would much rather have stayed in bed.  In any case, you could then calculate (say) a HR corresponding to 50% effort by halving the difference between resting and max heart rate, and the adding that amount to resting heart rate.  So if my max is 190, and my resting HR is 70, that gives me a range of 120 to play with.  Half of that is 60, and if I add that to my resting HR, I come up with 130 beats per minute as my 50% effort.  (Which, I might add, was always too easy for me for a 50% effort row.  But then I could have been working too hard). 

There are still some caveats for using heart rate as a proxy for effort, though.  One is that there are several factors that can cause heart rate to increase that don’t mean you’re working harder.  One of them is body temperature, and this turns out to be a very important one because your body heats up as you work out, irrespective of level of effort.  In practice, this means that as you try to hold a constant level of effort or a constant pace, your heart rate will creep up.  People have tried to get around this by simply specifying a range that your heart rate should be in for a particular type of workout, but given the amount of variation in individual heart rates to begin with, this method often turns back into perceived effort

Another cause of elevated heart rate is lack of sleep – and I’ll tell you I suffered from this all the time I was training.  I suppose if I’d been independently wealthy, or willing to live in my car (oh, wait; I didn’t have a car), I’d have been able to give up working and would have had more time to rest.  But no rich uncles appeared to leave their money to me.  (Ernie?  Steve?  Bill?  I’m still waiting.  Just sayin’).  And with no car, that kind of changed the whole equation.  Plus, everyone’s short on sleep sometimes. 

Given these problems, some people have decided that measuring lactate concentrations is the way to go to tell whether your training is helping or not.  The theory behind it all is that [one of the things] you want to find is the fastest speed that an athlete can keep up without building up so much lactate that their performance over the relevant distance suffers .  Then, if you do the same thing after a macrocycle or two of training, and you found that there was less lactic acid for the same speed, you would know that your training worked.  So if the buildup of lactic acid in the muscles is what one wants to measure anyway, so why not just go ahead and measure it? 

One issue that comes up is that the buildup of lactate in the blood is not the same thing as the buildup of lactate in the muscles.  Lactate only diffuses into the blood after it’s already built up in the muscles.  Optimally, you would want to measure the buildup of lactate in muscle during actual exercise, but this is impractical.  To do this, you would need to take a small biopsy of the muscle, freeze it, and then analyze it after the fact.  And muscle biopsies hurt.  Not to mention, that kind of analysis is really pricey – so most people who measure lactates do so by making the measurements from blood samples, and they take those samples from either the fingertip or the earlobe.  (Again, lurking in there is the assumption that the level of lactate in the blood taken from those sites will give you an accurate estimate of the speed at which muscle lactate increases).  Oh – and don’t forget – you need to take universal precautions when dealing with blood or blood products.  That alone makes this method less than appealing to me for club rowing, even aside from the expense of the equipment. 

Then, you need to have your athlete do pieces at increasing speeds, measuring lactate after each piece, to make a graph of how lactate increases with increasing metabolic demands.  There is a fair amount of complexity in interpreting the results, which I won’t go into here.  But the would-be lactate measurer does need to put some thought into what precisely he or she would like to find, why that might be important for a particular athlete, and how training might be expected to change the results.  (You would be looking for different changes for a longer-distance athlete than a shorter-distance one, for example; and if you wanted to make sure that a person’s strength and power output increased, you’d have to know what effect that would be likely to have on the lactate results). 

In addition, there are several factors which can give you anomalous results.  How much glycogen you have in your muscles is one.  If you carbo-loaded the night before, you will appear to perform “worse” (i.e., have more lactate for a particular speed) than if you are a little carbohydrate-depleted.  This seemingly paradoxical reaction happens because you can’t engage in anaerobic metabolism if you don’t have enough glycogen.  So if you’re glycogen-depleted, you will need to rely more on aerobic (non-lactate-producing) metabolism.  But that might put a cap on the top speed you can achieve, which is why it’s not recommended as a race preparation plan.  Likewise, drinking caffeine before testing will increase fat metabolism and make it look like your anaerobic threshold has increased, when in fact it hasn’t.  (This might be a good race prep plan, though). 

Hard training within 24 hours before a lactate test will make you produce more lactate for a certain speed, too, because of the change in amount of stored glycogen or because of muscle damage.  Time of day makes a difference, as well:  You’ll usually be able to go about 2% faster in the afternoon than the morning, with no change in aerobic capacity.  Then, of course, you need to do a second set of measurements after one training cycle, in order to determine whether training has had an effect (and to determine what effect it has had).  Once you’ve verified that your measurements of the correspondence of lactate concentration to rowing speed are correct (by measuring a third time), you’ll be able to prescribe training speeds for an athlete.  These will be designed to improve performance in one or another area so as to ultimately improve racing speed. 

Finally, you might think that you can use lactate-to-speed correspondences to compare individuals.  That is, you might think that if So-and-so has X millimoles of blood lactate at such-and-such a speed, you might aim for that same correspondence yourself.  But be careful:  for middle distances like 2K races, the contribution of anaerobic threshold to differences in speed (for Olympians, a relatively homogenous group) is only about 80%. The shorter the distance, the less contribution anaerobic has to speed differences.  So it is difficult to predict race results on the basis of threshold speeds alone. 

It is for these reasons that I prefer training by speed best.  First, it is noninvasive – a huge win, in my opinion.  Again – the use and interpretation of speed as a way of monitoring training isn’t completely transparent, but I feel its convenience outweighs a lot of the drawbacks. 

First, though, comes the decision over what distance to measure your speed.  Research [see Ernest Maglischo’s book “Swimming Fastest” for a beautiful exposition of all of the research on performance monitoring] has shown that a 30 to 35-minute piece, all out for the distance, provides a very accurate estimate of anaerobic threshold.  It is so long that you really can't go much over your anaerobic threshold.  The caveat here is that you must row it as evenly-paced as possible.  If you go out too fast, your average speed will be lower than your threshold pace because you will have put yourself into acidosis too early – you’ll have flown and died.  In fact, if you pace yourself well, you’ll get a more accurate estimate of your threshold speed than if you used blood measurements to begin with.  And if a half-hour long piece isn’t to your liking, you can still get accurate threshold estimates with a 20-minute piece. 

I particularly like this because many head races are approximately 20 minutes in length.  Since I coach primarily on the Charles, my scullers can get practice steering the Head of the Charles course at the same time that they do a 20’ piece for meters.  Because there are many turns in the river, there is often wind, and sometimes there’s even a current, it’s not the absolute speed I will be interested in – only the improvement from training cycle to training cycle. 

Which of course brings up the issue of factors that can cloud the interpretation of speed results.  This will depend on what method you use to measure speed, of course, and there are two main ones:  GPS-based (or ground-based) measures, and SpeedCoach-based (or water-based) measures. 

If you’re measuring speed relative to some objects on the ground or in the sky by using the start and finish lines of a particular racecourse or by using a GPS method, your results will be affected by both wind and current.  How they’ll be affected is pretty intuitively clear:  a headwind will slow you and a tailwind will speed you.  Rowing with the current speeds you and against it slows you.  Turns are a little more complicated, but since they affect ground- and water-based speed measurements equally, I will leave them out of our calculus here.  Water temperature also affects both types of measurements (it’s really the density of the water – if it’s colder you go slower; if it’s warmer you go faster). 

By contrast, the measurement of speed using a SpeedCoach will be affected by wind in just the same way as with ground-based measurements.  But current won’t affect you at all, because the impeller measures your speed relative to the water itself.  If you’re in a strong current just floating along, your speed will be zero.  If you’re rowing, your speed relative to the water will be the same regardless of whether you’re going with or against the current.  (It’s just hard to get your head around this if there are trees in the background of your imagination, because then you’ll go faster relative to the trees if you’re with the current than if you’re going against it.  Ignore the trees). 

Of course, speed relative to the ground or water will be affected not only by physiological improvements, but also by improvements in technique.  This isn’t a bad thing, to me; because it’s really the overall improvement in my athletes that I want to measure.  I might not care whether that is coming in this macrocycle from increased fitness or better technique.  It’s all going to come down to increased speed on race day anyway.  There are certainly issues of training efficiency, and whether improvements in technique might be canceled out by a poor training regimen.  But at the end of the day, my scullers care about whether they are going faster.  So measuring it and showing them improvement is good for their psyches. 

In the next post, I’ll discuss training by splits (water speed).  The complexities I’ve mentioned above will come more to the fore there, but are not at all insurmountable.  In fact, they will turn into advantages.  Stay tuned.