Holiday challenge experience

[Jerome]

As steady state appears to be the answer to everything from improving 2K times, to curing hammer toes and the meaning of life, I used the holiday challenge as an experiment to see what happens when you seriously ramp up the volume.
Slightly late to the party due to covid-recovery, I managed to pull 207k from 1 to 24 December. Which might not seem much to some of you demigods, but for me is at least a doubling of my usual volume. And comes down to a solid 60k per week. Most sessions ranging from 10k to 60’, 20spm, pace around 2.06, depending on mood and how serious I took my heart rate. For me, this falls within the range of challenging but sustainable.

Without further ado - my experiences:
Weight: gained some 1.5 kg. Could be the holiday season, but didn’t eat or drink exceptionally. So with all the calories burned, this was a little bit of a surprise.
Heart rate: steady around 5 beats higher than my normal resting heart rate. Again, quite surprising, as I expected to see a slight drop and I didn’t feel like I was overtraining.
Pace: about the same. Didn’t see any major improvements based on effort or heart rate.
Mentally: seriously fed up with rowing. By the end of the challenge I both dreaded and loathed the erg. I pity the 200k a week athletes.
Physically: no real complaints. Which is once again surprising as I’ve been dealing with calf/achilles tendon injuries for the past two years.

Although I’m aware this is reasonably quite a short period of time, I still was hoping to see that some of the steady state magic had seeped into the system, so I did a 1k at my 2k goal pace (1.45, I know, not really original). No perceived difference compared to 200K earlier. The other day I did some 10’ intervals at 5k pace, again.. no difference.

So overall conclusion: overwhelmed by the volume, underwhelmed by the results.

In the past I’ve hit by best times (though nothing to brag about compared to some of you) with a low volume, high intensity based approach.
Which is slightly against the grain, but the volume approach doesn’t seem to be working or to be sustainable (mentally) for me.
But for me now, this raises the question of how to go forward.

[Sakly]

Hi, 3 weeks are way too less time to talk about volume and steady state results.
I started erging in January and ramped up the volume in the last month:

Code: Select all

 
Month	       Total Meters	Total Time
May 2022	215,864m	15:35:46.5
June 2022	 61,870m	4:19:36.0
July 2022	100,308m	6:58:40.4
August 2022	103,440m	7:35:51.6
September 2022	232,562m	16:34:33.0
October 2022	204,913m	14:23:55.2
November 2022	160,974m	11:03:20.5
December 2022	231,965m	15:57:46.2

You see, I am calling 200k high volume
Yesterday I did a HM @2:00/500m, HR ~150 all the way through (except the last k which I did faster).
Last season or beginning this season I did 30min sessions at the same pace and got already 160bpm at the end of the session (without ramping up the speed). So my body adapted to be able to work at the same level for much longer time than before and at lower heart rates.
To get these results it took a few month, so you have to put in the work (and time).

I was already very fit when starting on the erg. Combining it with 3 gym sessions per week, mostly bodyweight.

[btlifter]

Yikes, Jerome,

Great job getting aome serious mileage in! There are a few things I'd share though:

1. You said the pace was "challenging but sustainable". "Steady State" is not physiologically challenging. If it is, well... you'll probably burn out.

2. Volume needs to be built gradually. Most recommend about 10%/week increase at most. If it's more than that... you'll probably burn out.

3. Results from steady state tend to be measured over years, or at minumum maybe months. Certainly not weeks. Trying to get results quicker than that is a recipe for... well, you get the point.

4. Intensity must be layered on top of the volume. Volume alone will build a great base. But for that base to translate to a faster 2k quality sessions must be included.

[Dangerscouse]

207k in 24 days is a lot of metres for the majority of us, so don't underestimate how much that will take out of you.

In addition to the great comments, the fact that you're recovering from covid sounds like another issue to consider. I'm firmly in the camp that I wouldn't know I had post-covid issues if I didn't exercise, so inevitably, there's a fine line to pushing too much.

My biggest issue is my impaired recovery, which used to be one of my biggest strengths. Nowadays, it's getting better, but it's still not what it used to be. I wonder if this is the same for you, but it's hidden to some extent as you've doubled your weekly distance, so you're not aware of what to expect.

Did you feel like you had to reach a specific amount of metres so you would have taken a rest day (or two) in other circumstances?

We are all different, and your genetics may mean that you don't benefit as much from longer & slower sessions, albeit the timeframes as mentioned do need to be measured over months, and using a sustainable plan that is closer to guilt inducingly slow, rather than challenging. You allude to other people's results and times, so I wonder if you're letting comparison rule your decisions?

James Clear makes a very good analogy that applies to steady state:

Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degrees (Fahrenheit). All the action happens at 32 degrees.

Sometimes, there's progress happening, but you need to see it through to the full extent to actually see what's happened. I always say that you need to learn to love the process, and not only the results

[Tsnor]

You've described all the classic symptoms of not having enough recovery time. Google overreach to confirm (example: https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/ ... ertraining). Not a big deal for a month, but you don't want to continue this way.

Your volume is excellent. (200K)

Likely your results were from a sudden spike in workload volume, or by doing the volume at too intense a level. Check the recommendations below and see if its different than what you were doing. Aside: glad you did not hit back/arm or shoulder problems with your uptick in load.

To get good results from volume (more than 5 hours/week of exercise) you need to

1. Have one or two days each week of REST/RECOVERY. All exercise, no recovery --> very bad results. This rest must be from all your sports/activities, not just rowing. Taking a day off rowing to hike up a mountain is not rest/recovery.

2. Only do hard efforts 2 or 3 days a week. This seem odd, but the max of 2 or 3 hard workouts a week is supported by a ton of case studies over a number of sports (running, biking, rowing, swimming, etc) and is true for all ages and ability levels. You need recovery time after a hard effort to see gains. Doing more than 3 hard sessions/week is counter productive. At a guess you rowed strongly for 200K during the challenge, worked up a sweat too often and did not get enough recovery. Note the 2 or 3 hard days is across ALL of your sports and activities.

3. Add as much time as you can at low effort activity. For rowing low effort is rowing at a pace where you can speak conversationally. If you can't recite a paragraph without needing to breathe hard then you are in the hard zone not the low effort/easy zone. Rowing at this low effort level will feel strange -- seems way to easy. Do it for a few months and you will see results, especially if you mix the low effort with one to three days/week of harder efforts. If you have a heart rate monitor low effort is 70% of the highest heart rate you've seen while rowing. Anything above about 75% counts as a hard effort. Your body is binary on this -- a workout is hard even if you only spend 5 min on an hour workout going hard. Elite college rowing programs do more than 90% of their rowing at this very low effort level, so do Olympic athletes. They also follow the max 2-3 days of hard workouts. It how training is done.

This is a good TED Talk about how to train. "How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes" https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_seile ... e_athletes

Weight loss is not the best measure for measuring improvement from rowing. Rowing builds up lean muscle pretty quickly on legs, core, back, shoulders and arms. Unlike running or cycling your will see more body composition changes than weight loss when you spend time rowing. Looking in the mirror is the best way to see your improvement, or pinching the fat layer in your waist -- it will get thinner at the same body weight. To see the future compare a photo of a rower your age to the photo of a runner or cyclist -- you will have a higher BMI at the same fitness level.

[JaapvanE]

As said before, increase your maximum distances with a certain restraint. I noticed that I get issues when my I prolong my distance: when I exceeded the 45 minutes, I started to feel my knees due to the repeated overcompression. Next, I had a sore butt for a couple trainings when exceeding the 1 hour mark. Currently, I developped an irritation under my arms when exceeding the 15K. So increasing your maximum slowly is key to keep such irritations tolerable and manageable (and allow you to fix them before moving on).

Mentally, you need to get accustomed to being on the machine for so long. Adding a few minutes to a known distance/time won't hurt you. Doubling it is a recipe for being bored out of your scull midway, knowing you have a lot of additional distance to cover. You'll hit a brick wall mentally. You mentally need to get in a mode where distances become familiar. For me, a 6K becomes a familiar distance, so I mentally know when I cross that 6K mark "the finish is around the corner, just like every training this week".

And don't underestimate cumulative training load: increasing some training will tire you and with insuficient recovery, you will hit a physical brick wall. Even when increasing distance on a single training, I am very keen for the tell-tale signs of underrecovery, for me it typically is fatigued knees when starting my next training or the trainings after that. I row 42K a week, with varying distances, and I need to trust my body when it tells me that it is tired, and I must listen to thise signs, so skipping a training is acceptable.

[Jerome]

Thanks for all the great reflections and advice.

To give a bit more background: I took up the challenge first as a personal test to see how much distance I could manage and adequately recover from.
I’m aware that the added volume probably did take a lot out of me, although I did take rest days and kept an eye on my sleep and training/ resting heart rate. Covid probably didn’t help, though.

My second goal was to see if the added volume would at least nudge toward a performance increase and break through a plateau, after years of feeling stuck.
Looking back, I’ve reached by best times around ’17. My yearly volume then was around 400 to 500k, with perhaps only a handful of 10k efforts.

After reading about all the benefits of longer and slower distance training, I’ve been steadily increasing my yearly volume over the years, to around 1.5M.
Some of which were/are on the bikerg, which detract from the rowing K’s, but also complemented with some running and cycling outside.

In short, though the volume went up, performance went down.

I’ve tried several things: rowed my self through the whole Harry Potter series on Maf-speeds, focused on L4-ish low rate power work (which led to a serious injuries), added again high intensity/speed work, but never again reached my old bests or training times.
Most notably I've lost my ability to sustain high ratings and find it hard to regain that.

I understand the importance focusing on the long term, patience, etc, but so far I've seen only regression, not progression.
It's highly unlikely that I'm some special snowflake that contradicts mainstream science, but somehow I'm doing something wrong.

And thus, I’m a bit lost on how to proceed.

End of rant

[Jerome]

You've described all the classic symptoms of not having enough recovery time. Google overreach to confirm (example: https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/ ... ertraining). Not a big deal for a month, but you don't want to continue this way.

Your volume is excellent. (200K)

Likely your results were from a sudden spike in workload volume, or by doing the volume at too intense a level. Check the recommendations below and see if its different than what you were doing. Aside: glad you did not hit back/arm or shoulder problems with your uptick in load.

To get good results from volume (more than 5 hours/week of exercise) you need to

1. Have one or two days each week of REST/RECOVERY. All exercise, no recovery --> very bad results. This rest must be from all your sports/activities, not just rowing. Taking a day off rowing to hike up a mountain is not rest/recovery.

2. Only do hard efforts 2 or 3 days a week. This seem odd, but the max of 2 or 3 hard workouts a week is supported by a ton of case studies over a number of sports (running, biking, rowing, swimming, etc) and is true for all ages and ability levels. You need recovery time after a hard effort to see gains. Doing more than 3 hard sessions/week is counter productive. At a guess you rowed strongly for 200K during the challenge, worked up a sweat too often and did not get enough recovery. Note the 2 or 3 hard days is across ALL of your sports and activities.

3. Add as much time as you can at low effort activity. For rowing low effort is rowing at a pace where you can speak conversationally. If you can't recite a paragraph without needing to breathe hard then you are in the hard zone not the low effort/easy zone. Rowing at this low effort level will feel strange -- seems way to easy. Do it for a few months and you will see results, especially if you mix the low effort with one to three days/week of harder efforts. If you have a heart rate monitor low effort is 70% of the highest heart rate you've seen while rowing. Anything above about 75% counts as a hard effort. Your body is binary on this -- a workout is hard even if you only spend 5 min on an hour workout going hard. Elite college rowing programs do more than 90% of their rowing at this very low effort level, so do Olympic athletes. They also follow the max 2-3 days of hard workouts. It how training is done.

This is a good TED Talk about how to train. "How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes" https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_seile ... e_athletes

Weight loss is not the best measure for measuring improvement from rowing. Rowing builds up lean muscle pretty quickly on legs, core, back, shoulders and arms. Unlike running or cycling your will see more body composition changes than weight loss when you spend time rowing. Looking in the mirror is the best way to see your improvement, or pinching the fat layer in your waist -- it will get thinner at the same body weight. To see the future compare a photo of a rower your age to the photo of a runner or cyclist -- you will have a higher BMI at the same fitness level.

Very informative, thank you!

Interesting fact about the dichotomy of a workout. I always thought that if the majority the training was a low effort, this wouldn’t be negated by a slight peak at the end, for example.

[JaapvanE]

1. Have one or two days each week of REST/RECOVERY. All exercise, no recovery --> very bad results. This rest must be from all your sports/activities, not just rowing. Taking a day off rowing to hike up a mountain is not rest/recovery.

3. Add as much time as you can at low effort activity. For rowing low effort is rowing at a pace where you can speak conversationally. If you can't recite a paragraph without needing to breathe hard then you are in the hard zone not the low effort/easy zone.
...
Your body is binary on this -- a workout is hard even if you only spend 5 min on an hour workout going hard.

You do take out the fun in all excercise, don't do it too often, and no sprint in the end

[Tsnor]

You do take out the fun in all excercise, don't do it too often, and no sprint in the end

Its those 2-3 days/week that you go wild. grin. Or just YOLO ... My OTW coach cranked out over 500K for the holiday challenge. Bet he's still feeling it, his splits and HR were definitely not long/slow.

[Tsnor]

... My yearly volume then was around 400 to 500k, with perhaps only a handful of 10k efforts.

After reading about all the benefits of longer and slower distance training, I’ve been steadily increasing my yearly volume over the years, to around 1.5M.
...
Most notably I've lost my ability to sustain high ratings and find it hard to regain that.

I understand the importance focusing on the long term, patience, etc, but so far I've seen only regression, not progression.
It's highly unlikely that I'm some special snowflake that contradicts mainstream science, but somehow I'm doing something wrong.

And thus, I’m a bit lost on how to proceed.

End of rant

Below 5 hours/week working out, to quote an earlier thread, "grip it and rip it". Just get a recovery day after each hard day. Long slow doesn't really help you much, and will hurt you if you keep hours (instead of load) constant when you replace HIIT and hard sessions with slow rows.

At 207 km in 24 days you were about 70K / week or about 6 hours/week ?? That's the point where you're likely to go too hard if you push every workout, and long/slow can help.

For your yearly total, At 1.5M / year = 30K per week on average = 2-3 hours /week you are well below the point where long/slow makes sense. If you replaced 2-3 hours a week of HIIT and max effort long rows with long/slow you will see your performance decline, not improve. EDIT: the weekly summary in the C2 log will show you a list of weeks and hours rowed each week. It's a simple way to see how much time you are actually rowing, and can help you decide if you need long/slow to avoid overreach/overtraining.

If you decide to keep working 5+ hours/week then a training plan will help. Here are some examples of a 6 hour and a 10 hour training plan. They are for cycling, but the presenter (an elite cyclist) explains the logic behind the plan so you can transpose it to rowing. https://youtu.be/H9SvLGv2c1E https://youtu.be/-Wk0f-Bsw3E

If you are likely to row 2 to 4 hours/week then suggest you fall back to one of the BPP, Wolverine plan, etc plans and mainly rely on hard workouts. A 2K is 80% aerobic, so don't skip long workouts, just do them strong, not slow.

NOTE: JaapvanE was not joking when he said that too much structure can take the fun out. Follow the plan that's most fun for you. For me, when volleyball season overlaps with OTW rowing I do 4 hard workouts a week knowing that it's bad. I even tried 5/week but that was so clearly bad I stopped it. Both Volleyball and the OTW rowing are done flat out, and I enjoy them too much to worry about impact to my training. Whatever plan you follow you are going to be in much better shape than a couch potato as long as you don't overdo too badly.

[Carl Watts]

The best I did in a monthly challenge was 425Km from memory.

All I remember is serious fatigue that peaked at about 2 weeks and stayed with me till the end.

Pace was 2:03 to 2:06 with a HM almost daily and not a single rest day. Do not intend to ever do it again.

[Mike Caviston]

But for me now, this raises the question of how to go forward.

You have received a lot of advice and will have to make some choices about how to proceed with your training. I don’t think you’ve said explicitly what your performance goals are, so I’m assuming at least one desired outcome is a faster 2K. Some of the things mentioned here I agree with: volume needs to be added gradually over several months, not suddenly; it takes time to see results accumulate (though done right, small improvement should occur quite soon); and some higher-intensity work (i.e., in and around 2K pace) should be included with all the steady state. Of course, the possible lingering effects of COVID can’t be ignored. Also, nutrition could be a factor. Is your carbohydrate intake adequate for that volume?

There are a few comments that I strongly disagree with.

You said the pace was "challenging but sustainable". "Steady State" is not physiologically challenging.

Actually, maybe I don’t disagree with this one, since there really isn’t a universally accepted definition of “steady state”. But an effective training pace should be physiologically challenging, or it won’t stimulate physiological adaptation. If there’s no challenge, there’s no reason to adapt. Note that “challenging” is not the same as “excruciating” or “exhausting”.

Have one or two days each week of REST/RECOVERY. All exercise, no recovery --> very bad results. This rest must be from all your sports/activities, not just rowing. Taking a day off rowing to hike up a mountain is not rest/recovery.

No recovery is bad. But the right exercise can be recovery; it can lead to faster and more complete recovery than no exercise. There is no need to take an entire day off with no physical activity and I think no activity is counter-productive. In the last ten years, I have recorded maybe 3-4 days total with no activity. You can row 7 days a week if you want, if you schedule it properly and build the workload properly. I’m not claiming you necessarily should row every day, unless you want to reach your absolute best performance. It does take time to properly build up to the right workload, and it’s best to be conservative and build too slowly than too quickly. Maybe the “rest day” workout at first is just a few calisthenics or a brief 15-20 minute bike ride. But the amount of work that can be done productively as recovery – not the main training – is large. I’ve discovered over the past 45 years how to balance and complement different workouts and different activities to be able to continually train hard and compete frequently without compromising performance. The right workout can practically erase the fatigue of a race (2K row; marathon run; Vertical Mile stair climb) so that I can get right back to my regular routine without missing a day. “Taking a day off rowing to hike up a mountain” is something I have done many times for rest/recovery.

Only do hard efforts 2 or 3 days a week. This seem odd, but the max of 2 or 3 hard workouts a week is supported by a ton of case studies over a number of sports (running, biking, rowing, swimming, etc) and is true for all ages and ability levels. You need recovery time after a hard effort to see gains. Doing more than 3 hard sessions/week is counter productive. At a guess you rowed strongly for 200K during the challenge, worked up a sweat too often and did not get enough recovery. Note the 2 or 3 hard days is across ALL of your sports and activities.

“Hard” is subjective. I suggest doing no more than two high intensity, race-pace or near race-pace workouts in a week (such as 8x500m or 4x1K, or 5x1500m or 4x2K), but if you are training for high performance then everything is going to be hard, just in different ways depending on the workout. If it’s easy, it ain’t training. (Where I used to work they had a saying, “The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday”) (If the goal is to not sweat then you really are wasting your time.) Just because I know I can do it, doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. Working “hard” doesn’t require working beyond the ability to recover. As I said above, you need recovery, but recovery does not mean the absence of all activity. Active recovery is a core concept for successful training.

Add as much time as you can at low effort activity. For rowing low effort is rowing at a pace where you can speak conversationally. If you can't recite a paragraph without needing to breathe hard then you are in the hard zone not the low effort/easy zone.

Lots of time at moderate effort is good, and paying attention to breathing is an excellent way to monitor intensity for activities such as running and cycling. Unfortunately, “conversationally” and “paragraph” are pretty subjective benchmarks. Think of a standardized verse such as the Pledge of Allegiance. If you can recite the whole pledge in a single breath, you aren’t working hard enough. If you can only gasp out “I pledge allegiance...” you are working at a level you won’t be able to sustain very long. If you can get to somewhere between “...to the flag” and “of the United States of America” before needing to breath again, that should be about right. The good thing about the Talk Test method is that as fitness improves, you can comfortably talk at a higher % of max effort. BUT unfortunately for rowing, and the mechanics of breathing in between strokes even at rates as low as 18-20spm, it is difficult to speak coherently at ANY effort level.

Rowing at this low effort level will feel strange -- seems way to easy. Do it for a few months and you will see results, especially if you mix the low effort with one to three days/week of harder efforts. If you have a heart rate monitor low effort is 70% of the highest heart rate you've seen while rowing. Anything above about 75% counts as a hard effort.

This reply is already too long to go into a detailed explanation of why HR is a poor measure of training intensity, but it is.

Your body is binary on this -- a workout is hard even if you only spend 5 min on an hour workout going hard.

I’m sure you have plenty of case studies and research to back this up.

Elite college rowing programs do more than 90% of their rowing at this very low effort level, so do Olympic athletes. They also follow the max 2-3 days of hard workouts. It how training is done.

Have you actually been immersed in the training of elite college rowing programs and Olympic athletes? I have, and I absolutely deny that “more than 90% of their rowing at this very low effort level” is “how training is done”.

And thus, I’m a bit lost on how to proceed.

I don’t envy you. There is a lot of conflicting information to wade through. All I can tell you is, I’ve done what you’re trying to do.

[Jerome]

But for me now, this raises the question of how to go forward.

All I can tell you is, I’ve done what you’re trying to do.

Thank you, Mike, for sharing your knowledge and experience.