Factors To Take Into Consideration When Designing a Programme

What Is The Goal?

Choosing the goal of your training is really important as it will dictate the type of training you emphasise in your training sessions. Training programmes will differ greatly based on the desired goal, if you want to be a very healthy and fit individual your training might be slightly different than someone who wants to row a 2K as fast as possible.

How Much Time Do You Have Available?

The amount of time you have available will also be crucial to the design of your training programme. If you have 5 hours available or 1 hour available in your week you will have a very different training programme.

How Much Experience Do You Have?

Finally, how much experience do you have on the rowing machine? If you are not technically competent you will need to perform drills to ensure that you are and you may not be able to spend a long time on the rower as you can not deal with the positional fatigue of being sat on a rower for an hour straight.

Sample Training Programme

Lets look at an in-depth example of a specific individual, their goal and a sample weekly protocol they can use on the rowing machine to achieve their goal.

Sample Individual

This individual has an athletic background and has also performed competitive rowing races at an amateur level. They have three hours a week to dedicate to rowing and two hours to resistance training. They have just moved to a city and no longer have access to a rowing club on the water but they want to stay in excellent physical condition for health but also because they love the endeavour of challenging rowing.

Weekly Outline

Session 1

Long Endurance Ride

60-90 minute zone 2 ride (60-75%)

Session 2

HIIT Intervals

10 minute warm up

4 x 4 minutes @VO2max pace (90-95%)

10 minute cool down

Session 3

Threshold Ride

10 minutes easy

2 x 10 @threshold pace (2 minutes easy between)

10 minutes easy

What Principles Can We Apply To All Rowing Programmes

Different Intensities Create Different Adaptation

Using different intensities in your training will create different physiological adaptations, this is why well designed cardiovascular training programmes will use differing intensities to achieve excellent results. Without diving to much into the details, different intensities of output create different physiological adaptations, all which come together to create progress on a specific task. This means that if you have the time to perform multiple sessions into your weekly schedule, you should be striving to perform different intensities within these sessions.

Progressive Overload

In this example I have only shown the first week of a training plan, this week would then be progressed to sessions that are slightly more challenging. This can be done through adding intensity (increasing the pace on the rowing machine) or adding volume (increasing the amount of time spent on the rowing machine). A specific example here would be increasing the threshold bouts on the tempo ride to 12 minutes instead of 10, therefore spending 4 extra minutes with a high heart rate and increasing the stimulus.

Make It Fun

Make sure you are making your sessions but fun and sustainable, don’t create a training plan that you find mundane and boring, or a training programme that is so hard that you dread your training sessions. Programme design is both an art and a science, have fun playing around with different style of sessions.