Rowing - how many times a week?

[Romerat]

In a recent email, Rojabo.com writes the following:

"We have a thumb rule that you need minimum 4 training sessions a week to maintain your current state of fitness.
Squeezing in a 5th session, you will slowly begin to see a progression and a 6th session is already a good improvement."

Is it really necessary to row at least 5 times a week to see a progression?

In comparison, Shane Farmer states that rowing 2 times a week is enough to improve while rowing 3-4 times a week will give "huge gains" in a video on his YouTube-channel (Dark Horse Rowing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdLosuMwFbU

[Tsnor]

What is your current rowing fitness ?

Someone just starting out could row once a week and make great progress. That same person going directly from 'just starting' to '6 sessions/week' would likely do poorly compared to taking a more gradual increase in training load.

Not sure how anyone could conclude 6 sessions is best, and that 4 is minimum without knowing a lot about you and knowing the content of the sessions. Especially since elite rowers often do 10+ sessions/week stacking morning and afternoon rows.

If you give a 2K time, age, hours a week you want to work out likely someone can point you to a good training plan and give anecdotal evidence whether you can improve with 2 or 3 sessions a week.

Spoiler alert. https://www.rojabo.com/about/ is targeted at people who might be on the Danish National Team or contest medals at HOC. The warmup they want you to do before one of their workouts looks like "Warm-up is recommended to contain 2-3 km rowing with a pace 10%-20% below your target from your power guide. Do a pyramid, 10/10 + 20/20 + 30/30 + 20/20 + 10/10 stroke/stroke off at at spm 24/28/32/36/max – try hit the target from your power guide." 6 sessions may well be optimal for that target audience. That's not Shane Farmer's audience.

EDIT: Thanks for posting this. Very interesting to know this type of site exists. If you decide to take training there please post how you like it.

[Dangerscouse]

You can only train as hard as you can rest, so like lots of things to do with fitness, one person's appetite is another person's indigestion.

I usually row five times a week, as that works for me, and I include Pilates and weight training too, but I wouldn't advise anyone has to row five / six times a week, as I know of plenty of people that make great progress with three or four sessions a week. I'd say it's more about the quality of the session than the quantity.

[p_b82]

I'm still making big gains from 2-3 sessions a week (6month n00b) - so no you don't "need" to train that frequently to see gains. (but fewer sessions per week would result in slower gains over a longer time period)


When I swam, I made smaller, but steady gains from 1 session a week - but they were 100% effort each time. I had plateaued right at the end; after about 3 years; going from barely able to swim 150m to swimming for an hour, then swimming a mile, before finally focussing on 1500m in under 30mins.

[jamesg]

Is it really necessary to row at least 5 times a week to see a progression?

For rowing yes, since boats need a lot of time to get the crew together, especially if novice and after holidays. However a "session" may be 3x20 UT2 or 3x10' UT1 or even 3x45 seconds, according to the phase of training. So to just say "5 sessions" means only take two days a week off, which should avoid most problems. Coaches are not necessarily keen on working seven days a week anyway.

My erg work in the last week has been 21km in 95 minutes, so av 3.7m/s or 140W, rating 20-22 so 6 to 7W' Work, average boat travel 10.5m. This following the C2 WODs, which can be quite quick if we wish. It may have given me a little overtraining.

[MPx]

There's at least two sides to this "how often" thing.

There's the physiology which is what I think is the real aim of the question and lots of good advice on this already given. I think intuitively we all know that more is likely to lead to a better result than less - albeit with a nod to the danger of overtraining so a need to understand the training goal of each session - ie they're not all TTs.

However the other aspect is mental by which I mean finding a reason to do it and "enjoy" it. I've found it easist to just make it part of my life. I'm lucky enough to have a small gym at home and I've made going in there and doing a workout "what I do" before my dinner in the evening. Obviously we are out some days - so they become my rest days but generally if we're at home I do a session. This can mean a daily session for, say, three weeks on the trot is possible. It raises no overtraining issues for me as most sessions are steady state something @ r20 with just two hard sessions a week. Of course you can do much less and its still far better for you than doing nothing. But if you're not looking forward to each session, dont have a known plan of what you're going to do, and treat it entirely as an unpleasant means to an end rather than an end in itself, then I doubt that you'll be able to make it a long term commitment.