Concept2 Forum

Hi

I want to improve my erg performance. At the moment I train three times a week, mixture of water and erg + gym sessions. I’ve got an erg at home and was wondering if I did say maybe 30 mins steady state / UT2 every day (apart from days I already train) it might be beneficial? I mainly want to get my erg scores down and while technique and harder sessions are covered in training, I was thinking if I rowed every day (or maybe 6 times a week) and light-ish, this might be good?

Also I would like to get more comfortable at sustaining higher rates for longer so if anyone’s got any tips, that could maybe be factored into rowing every day, that would great. If not don’t worry it’s only me trying to kill two birds with one stone.

Thanks in advance

Do a 500m test after warmup, train at low rates and 40-60% of your test Power for two months. 5 a week. Then start to shorten at higher ratings.

If you want a detailed plan, you can see 200 odd 2k plans here, to select as to your history and time available:

http://3.8.144.21/training/interactive

Yes adding SS rows will help you improve, the progress will be slow but noticeable over 6+ months. However you only get faster when you are resting, so don't over do it. I would recommend a day off a week. Also SS needs to be slow enough that it does not reduce the pace you can achieve on the hard days, for most people this seems ludicrously slow. Combine this with the slow improvement and it is all to common to accelerate the SS training, maybe far enough that the benefit is cancelled by the losses on the harder sessions.

Good luck!

This is just my opinion and I've seen many times that it is just that, and not definitive advice, as we are all different and we all react to different things in a myriad of different ways.

Three times a week isn't very much, so doing more should definitely help. I'd hesitate to recommend seven days a week, as you can only train as hard as you can rest, but you might be able to make it work. I personally find five rowing sessions, a weights session, a Pilates session and a rest day are about right for me.

Do you do any other training, and are you able to row for longer than 30 mins? When you say harder sessions are covered, what do they consist of? Sometimes the devil is in the detail.

Rowing at higher stroke rates and rowing every day are mutually exclusive as you need to try and maintain a stronger stroke with a higher stroke rate otherwise it will become a bigger issue for when you want to combine it with power.

It does take time to get used to higher stroke rates, and the best way to do it is to do intervals that combine medium spm with a slightly longer distance and higher spm with shorter distance. Admittedly, I find the latter isn't as helpful as it's over too quickly to get really used to it. You could also aim to increase the spm by one or two and row until you feel like you can't maintain it, then drop it down by circa two spm, and keep trying to beat that distance once or twice a week. It is hard work as your power per stroke will increase so your fitness will need to improve to allow the increase to feel manageable, especially if you're used to rowing at lower spms for everything, e.g. r18-r20