summer workout

[kbaktidy95@gmail.com]

Is this workout to much? I wanted to get other peoples opinion before i started.
Monday thru Saturday morning- 10k steady state
Monday night- chest and back lift then 10k steady state
Tuesday night- 14k steady state then 4x500
Wednesday night- quads and abs lift then 10k steady state
Thursday night- off
Friday night- back and hamstrings lift then 10k steady state
Saturday night- arms lift then 10k steady state
Sunday - off
Thanks for any response.

[jamesg]

Try it and see; too much for what target?

[SwedeRow]

I dont know if it's customary to do cardiowork and weight lifting in the same session in rowing, but usually it's not optimal. Why not do a 2-split, with the weight sessions occuring as far apart from the erg-work as possible during the day. Preferably with the session involving deadlift, squat and bench row being done on the day before your off day, for maximum recovery.

[sheehc]

Given up on your summer teams training plan I see?

A) You can lift and erg in the same session. While it is not optimal, it is sometimes necessary just due to time.

There is no point in doing steady state and intervals in the same session. Pick one and stick with it, maybe do a long cool down after the intervals.

C) You are attempting a bodybuilding split, not a sport specific split. If your goal is mass, then you should eliminate the erging after it or be sure you are eating a truly astonishing amount of food (you will probably have to do this anyway). If you goal is rowing speed, then you need a different lifting program entirely or should just drop the lifting and stick with erging.

Here is a dose of truth, it's half way through summer and you are still asking about the "perfect plan". You are wasting your time. Do something, do it a lot, do it consistently. Even if it's not optimal you will get faster at your age.

[aharmer]

I don't know the perfect erg/resistance training mixture. What I do know is if you want to gain size and erg related strength you need to do very few exercises. Do them heavy and do them a lot. Squats, deadlifts, power cleans, pullups, dips, Hill sprints, Explosive jumps.

Do them very heavy one session. Next time do them moderate weight but higher rep and very high intensity. Combine them in creative ways when doing the high intensity work. You'll be shocked how much strength and muscle you can pack on. Good luck!

[kbaktidy95@gmail.com]

The reason I laid out my program like this is because last season our coach mad us do a lot of steady state and lifting, many times I would do more after practice, the opposite of what I did at practice. While doing this I dropped almost 20 seconds in 2 2k's. I am still experimenting, on a program because I want to find I good workout program for the winter, where I will be preparing for Crash-b's
Thanks for the responses

[kbaktidy95@gmail.com]

After taking what you have said and my past experience i have revised the workout plan,
Monday thru Saturday morning- 10k steady state
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon- Circuit style lift
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night- 10k steady state
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night- 8x500 or 4x1000
Sunday- off

[ThatMoos3Guy]

That's a lot of volume and intensity! You either have circuit style lifts, or hard intervals every day. As well as a lot of steady state. If you can handle that, go for it. But I know that plan would bury me within a couple weeks. Sometimes more isn't always better.

What's your age, ht/weight and 2k?

[mikvan52]

Hi All:
Interesting reading.
AS an older man, I often wonder how much lifting I should be doing.
For reference: I only get into a lifting routine infrequently these years... but I do heavy labor (farm work).
A summer work-out involving lifting might also include hiking with a loaded back-pack for a few hours on steep terrain.

WIth all the sculling I do,
This combination seems to keep me in the low body fat /highly fit category... IOW not really feeling the desire to lift free-weights...
I still wonder if I'm missing something... If anything, I'm drawn towards core work.
I feel I can still break 6:50 for the 2k erg and going sub 18:00 is usually no problem for 5k....

Another reason I avoid weights is that, as I get older recovery time is longer and I would suffer discomfort for 1hr+ rows on the water (or 1hr + rows on the erg if I had to substitute)...

Again: My goal is not to achieve a cut look but to, simply, win on the water...
Perhaps, in this forum setting, it is very important to remember to keep in mind how individual goals matter along with the age of the athlete.

My standing goal is to win the (3 mile) head of the Charles at age 60 ... a little over a year from now. I will pick up with the core work regularly again when it gets colder (Nov-Feb). Weight work always tails off when I get on the water. I simply don't have the energy anymore. The thing is, I'm not slowing down that much which confuses me a little...

[mikvan52]

One thing to KEEP IN MIND for "summer workouts"

Erging/Rowing sessions need to cover the UT1, UT2 , AT, TR , & AN spectrum in the various percentages accorded them following seasonal periodization...
Except for early season aerobic building... just saying 10k steady-state is probably not specific enough.. IOW it's too vague as it does not indicate which "energy pathway" you want to be working on...
Many people often let 10k SS work it's way up to near AT without having adequate volume in the UT zones....

[ThatMoos3Guy]

Hi All:
Interesting reading.
AS an older man, I often wonder how much lifting I should be doing.
For reference: I only get into a lifting routine infrequently these years... but I do heavy labor (farm work).
A summer work-out involving lifting might also include hiking with a loaded back-pack for a few hours on steep terrain.

Some people feel that lifting helps them a lot, however that really depends on their strengths and weaknesses. I've found that sometimes when I'm not doing a lot of cardio, weight lifting can sort of help me maintain my level of fitness. That said, I've also found that a lot of times it doesn't do much. When I PRed on my 2k I hadn't been regularly lifting for months. I also was 10lbs lighter than the previous year, and had almost identical max watts.

I'm of the opinion that as long as strength isn't a limiting factor it's not going to hold you back. Volker Nolte has a table of strength standards for different age and experience levels in his book Rowing Faster. He says that as long as you have that level of strength you won't benefit much from further resistance training. Not sure where my copy is, or else I'd post it.

Strength training can also be done OTE/OTW (high-resistance low-spm erging/rowing with bungees). This would theoretically transfer over better to actual rowing.

One reason to think about doing more lifting is that as you get older your body naturally loses muscle. A little bit of maintenance lifting should be able to help keep that. Of course, maybe the sculling and erging + core work is enough to do that.

It really comes down to personal preference, however almost all national teams do some sort of lifting, so it can't be useless, right?

[SwedeRow]

[...]Strength training can also be done OTE/OTW (high-resistance low-spm erging/rowing with bungees). This would theoretically transfer over better to actual rowing.[...]

This is probably not true. Atleast that's what I've gathered from reading up on the matter, though mostly from biking literature.

Hunter Allen, quite the expert, has this to say:
"...However, it appears that few, if any, of the people who recommend strength endurance training have actually considered whether the forces generated during these sessions are in fact sufficent to cause beneficial adaptions to occur. Instead, most seem to have simply assumed that just because the cadence is lower than usual, and hence the pedaling force higher, there will be an increase in muscular size and strength, and hence in maximal power. In fact, the average effective pedal force during strength endurance intervals is generally too low to represent a significant overload."

On the matter of transferring work done with the weights onto OTE/OTW, I'd say the legpress isn't that far fetched when it comes to mimicking the legdrive.

[sheehc]

kbaktidy: check your private messages. I sent some advice on how to approach building a schedule.

[ThatMoos3Guy]

SwedeRow, That's a very interesting quote! Thanks for posting it.

Physiologist/rower Stephen Seiler posts about rowing specific strength training here: http://web.archive.org/web/200710190405 ... owstre.htm

He feels that it does help, however he doesn't have any studies referenced. Maybe because in rowing when you're at such a low rate there's more of an overload applied? My guess is that not a lot of mass would be gained by this strategy, but their could be a neural gain. On the other hand Seiler could also just be wrong.



Another note about weight training and rowing, since I mostly row sweep I like to do one-armed/one-legged movements to keep my body balanced out. At the end of the season I normally find that my left leg and right arm are stronger than their counterparts. Over the summer I try and address this.

[SwedeRow]

SwedeRow, That's a very interesting quote! Thanks for posting it.

Physiologist/rower Stephen Seiler posts about rowing specific strength training here: http://web.archive.org/web/200710190405 ... owstre.htm

He feels that it does help, however he doesn't have any studies referenced. Maybe because in rowing when you're at such a low rate there's more of an overload applied? My guess is that not a lot of mass would be gained by this strategy, but their could be a neural gain. On the other hand Seiler could also just be wrong.

Well, In favour of Seilers claims, and against my own using cycling as an analog, is that in a pedal stroke the force applied is restricted by the athletes body mass. This isn't the case in erging, so perhaps there is some truth to it. I guess a good starting point would be to calculate the force applied in e.g. a low pull from a stand still att max df. If I only knew physics...