Jack Burns - Edge Rowing

Rate 18 doesn’t make it UT2.
Half of you are doing a threshold session and calling it steady state.
UT2 is set by how hard your body is working, and the stroke rate has nothing to do with it. Low intensity sits around 1.5 mmol of lactate, proper high intensity at 8 to 12.
Drop the rate to 18, but keep working hard and you’re sat in between: hard enough to stop you recovering, nowhere near hard enough to count as a hard session.
Rowers get told to make every session count, and that’s true, but it gets misinterpreted as every session needs to feel like work.
Most of your week should be UT2, so if it’s slightly too hard, every session starts to feel lethargic and eventually you burn out.
You should finish a UT2 session feeling like you could have done more. If every steady session leaves you flattened, your zones are wrong, no matter what the rate says.
And over 40 there’s a second trap: your max heart rate falls with age but your low intensity zones don’t fall at the same rate, so the standard formulas put your easy pace in the wrong place.
Comment “over 40” and I’ll send you our free tool that gives you the exact range your UT2 should sit in.

Jason took 8 seconds off all of his splits almost straight away, before he’d had time to get any fitter.

He’s 47, he runs a business, manages a team and has a big family, and he’d been following a generic programme at his club.

In his words, he had no one to tell him if he was doing something wrong.

The changes we gave him were small, and they’re the kind you don’t find by feel.

A lot of the changes that make you faster feel worse when you first make them.

Square your blades earlier and it might feel like you are tensing up.

Stay relaxed as the load picks up in the first half of the drive, and you may feel like you’re doing less work.

Place the blade on the way forward like you should, and it’ll feel like you’re stopping the boat at the catch.

So if you row by feel, you keep doing a stroke that feels powerful, is often the reason you are not improving.

We naturally do what feels comfortable, change is often the opposite of that.

Film yourself from the side this week, and trust the video and the split over the feeling.

The video only shows you what you’re doing. Working out which fault is costing you the most is the hard part, and that’s the part Jason needed us for.

Four weeks in, his 2k had gone from 7:13 to 7:01.

Like this video if you found it useful, so that I know whether or not to make more of them.

You have done all the hard work and now you are 7 days out from a race - yet - you throw away those months of solid prep by screwing up your taper week

Tapering is the easiest thing to get right, you just have to get over some counter intuitive concepts.

Stop taking extra days off.

Stop being afraid of work.

To get your taper week right so that you can capitalise on every once of energy you put into your training block and row to your full potential - do this:

Start dropping the length of your steady state sessions from about 7-10 days out.

Dont immediately drop it, gradually nudge down the length of your sessions, this is where the majority of the tapering happens.

Then make sure you keep in some intensity.

I like to start sprinkling in bursts every day in the lead up to the race.

And 2-3 days out, i like to programme a couple reps of some longer intervals at race pace.
DO NOT take a day or two off before your race.

Dropping training completely will result in your blood volume dropping, which makes it harder to pump around your volume.

Getting your taper week right is like getting your warm up right, if you feel like you have done too much, its probably perfect.

You have probably been told to accelerate the boat on the drive, but when you do that, you just feel like you are working harder and the splits stay the same

And it’s a shame because you are stopping yourself from using the muscles you should use.

And it’s why you will look at fast people with bad blade work, posture and sequencing…

That still drop you in the middle of the race.

Here is how you can fix it so that you can create boat speed at a relatively low cost.

To accelerate, you need to press through your feet.

To use your feet, you need to be able to engage your quads, glutes, core and lats.

But when you try to accelerate, you increase upper body tension.

This sends force into your fore arms, biceps and traps.

Which is why you FEEL like you are working - but you are not using the muscles you need to.

So, instead - you need to make sure that you are relaxed AS you drive, not just on the recovery.

When you are relaxed as you drive, your shoulders drop, and the force passes through the lower body muscles.

Meaning you get more acceleration for less effort.

This is what elite rowers get right about square blade rowing, that you’re getting wrong. And this is why you get frustrated at one of the generally best technical drills out there. Now there are two main things that you need to change. Firstly, coaches are not giving proper guidance. A drill does not have to feel good to be good. A drill is meant to challenge you and challenge sometimes feels bad. Drills are good if it makes your rowing good after the drill, not during it. And if you do a drill and it feels bad and you think that that is a bad thing, you’ve put yourself in a negative mindset and you’re pretty much always going to row poorly after it. When you flip the script and know that frustration is the feeling of progress, you are changing your mind’s perspective. You set yourself up to get the benefit from a hard drill like square blade rowing. But more specifically to square blade rowing, the other massive mistake I see rowers making is what they do when their blade clips the water. As soon as they feel their spoon hit the water, they tense up and panic. The trick is that when your blade inevitably hits the water, you stay loose in your wrists and you stay loose in your shoulders. Roll through it and don’t force your blade to stay square. Get your reps in and remember that you have to leave your technical comfort zone daily to properly tap into your full potential. You don’t get to an elite technical level then be able to do square blade rowing. You do drills like square blade rowing to get to an elite technique. And if you want more tips on how to get to an elite technique, follow my account for more technical videos just like this one.

Steve was finishing every session exhausted, he’d been stuck for four years, and at 40 he’d decided his faster days were behind him.

Three months later his 2k split had gone from 1:38 to 1:33, and he’d won at Canadian Henley.

The first thing we did was get him to train less.

Steve had limited time and a variable work schedule, so he poured everything into every session, thinking that would work.

Rowers get told to train hard, and that’s true, but it gets misinterpreted as every session needs to be hard.

Around 80% of your training should be low intensity, UT2, and Steve was doing his UT2 way too hard.

Get your UT2 too hard and you stop recovering, every session starts to feel lethargic, and eventually you burn out.

Now here’s the part people get wrong.

Knowing you should go easier doesn’t tell you how easy.

Steve’s zones were way off, and that’s common over 40, because your low intensity zones don’t fall at the same rate as your max heart rate, so the standard formulas put your easy pace in the wrong place.

We only found where his should sit by analysing his data.

His mood and energy improved first, and his splits followed shortly after.

When you’ve been going too hard for months, the right pace feels way too slow.

If every steady session leaves you flattened, your zones are wrong, no matter what the plan says.

Follow for more on getting faster without training more.

If you’re over 40 and all you do is row, you’re getting weaker every single year, and no amount of UT2 is going to stop it.

Here’s why.

From your 30s onwards you lose somewhere between 3 and 8 percent of your muscle every decade, and it speeds up after 60.

Muscle only stays if your body gets a reason to keep it, and that reason is heavy load on your skeleton.

A rowing stroke is high rep and low force. It builds your engine, but it does nothing to tell your body to hold onto muscle.

So you train harder, your splits drift, and you assume that’s just what 50 looks like.

Cathy was 61, rowed her whole life, never touched a weight, and had accepted she was on the way down.

She started lifting. Twelve months later her 2k went from 8:36 to 8:08 and she finished top 20 at Head of the Charles.

I rebuilt my own rowing from an 18 month back injury the same way.

You don’t need a gym membership and a personal trainer. Two sessions a week, a few big lifts done safely, proper rest between sets, and add weight gradually.

Your fastest days are not behind you. Your strongest ones aren’t either.

Comment STRENGTH and I’ll send you our free strength guide with programmes for beginners, intermediates and experienced lifters.

You are screwing up the most important part of the stroke.

And it downs to bad guidance from coaches that dont understand what they are saying.

Its the catch, and the idea of having a “fast catch”

You have, through no fault of your own, misconstrued what a “fast catch” means.

So if you want to have a proper catch, Use the 3-step Edge Rowing Catch Method:

Part 1: the approach

Part 2: the timing of when you lift

Part 3: how long you take to move the blade from fully above the water to full submerged.

And when people think about a fast catch…

They rush the approach

They are slow with the timing

They then rush and muscle the lift.

You want the apposite ratio:

You are controlled for the approach.

You initiate the lift as soon as you are at full slide with no delay.

You then take time to let the blade become full submerged by letting gravity suck the blade in.

So when you see elite crews with fast catches, the speed comes from their timing of placement, not their speed into the catch, or speed to ram the blade in.