Common Rowing Strength Training Mistakes
5 things you might be able to improve in your own strength training
Another good workshop question got me thinking about the main mistakes I often help rowers correct when I start coaching them. Here are five things you might be able to improve in your own strength training for rowing.
#1: Is your strength training designed for a rower?
Strength training should build toward rowing/erging goals and take into account the 6-15+ hours per week of rowing/erging training time. These are important considerations for sport-specific performance factors and to reduce risk of common overuse injuries and overtraining. Programs for bodybuilders, powerlifters, Crossfitters, etc., are great for those sports and goals, but will always lack compared to a program designed for rowers also doing rowing and erging training.
If you are a recreational erger/rower focused on exercise benefits, then do what you want to do to achieve consistency and enjoyment from your physical activity and healthy lifestyle.
If you are a competitive erger/rower training to achieve a specific sport performance at a specific time, I recommend following resources intended for people trying to achieve those goals, designed by people who know how to achieve those goals. I often get questions from people asking my opinions about various Youtubers or popular fitness/strength training programs. If the author hasn’t designed the materials with our goals in mind or doesn’t seem to have experience working with those goals, then why would we follow their advice? This is a challenge in rowing/erging, because so many people now use “the rower” without actually training for goals in rowing/erging. Consider your sources of information and training advice.
A qualified strength coach or personal trainer who doesn’t know rowing, but is willing to learn about it, can still be a great resource. Friend and fellow rowing strength coach Blake Gourley and I co-wrote a three-part series for the “NSCA Coach” magazine in 2019-2020 to bring rowing to a strength coach audience. NSCA members can read for free and all others can purchase here.
#2: No Plan For Rest Times (or not sticking to the plan)
Rowers generally love circuit training and hate resting between sets. Strength training for strength, power, and muscle development is rarely cardiovascularly challenging for rowers, both due to the nature of strength training and the high fitness levels of rowers. Rowers often don’t feel like they “need” to rest between sets, because they’re used to cardiovascular exhaustion from rowing training. However, rest time is important for other reasons besides catching your breath!
As a general rule:
Maximal effort: 3-4 minutes of rest between working sets. We need the full recharge time between sets to be able to hit the high outputs that are the point of the max effort sets. This is usually for “main work” exercises like squats and deadlifts where we are working at max or near-max output for sets of 3-8 reps.
Muscular stimulus: 1-3 minutes of rest between working sets or between two-exercise supersets or three-or-four-exercise circuits. The force output isn’t as much the goal on these exercises, so we can accept some fatigue and performance decline in terms of weight/reps as long as we can still keep the technique solid and effort high. This is usually for “assistance work” exercises like rows, pulldowns, presses, single-limb exercises, etc. for sets of 6-15 reps.
Power: 1-3 minutes depending on exercise and set/rep scheme. My go-to power training design is 4-6 sets of 2-3 reps with 60-90 seconds of rest between each set on kettlebell swings, squat, and/or deadlift exercises.
#3: All Compound Lifts or All Minor/Isolation Exercises
A rowing strength training program needs to include both compound, free-weight exercises using multiple muscular areas together, like squats, deadlifts, and upper body pushing and pulling exercises, and also minor or isolation exercises using just one muscular area at a time, such as the hip, shoulder, and core. Single-limb exercises are important, too, and can go in either category depending on which you choose and how you train them.
I err on the side of compound, free-weight exercises more than isolation or machine-based lifts, because rowers need to learn how to coordinate multiple bodyparts to move through space efficiently and powerfully. However, I saw a rowing strength training program recently that was: barbell high pull, barbell back squat, barbell Romanian deadlift, barbell bench press, barbell bench pull, and weighted sit-up.
Over-focus on barbell compound exercises misses opportunities to develop muscles and movements outside of the bilateral, high-load, sagittal plane environment. This is lacking in physical development just as much as the “Nautilus circuit” or all-machine-based approach only training individual muscles in isolation.
#4: No “Indicator Sessions”
Some sort of regular testing every 4-6 weeks tells us if training is working and helps keep us accountable to making progress. Are we seeing the desired physical adaptations that we’re training to achieve? The erg provides a simplified version of rowing, and we might use the seven-stroke max test to evaluate max power application through the relevant movement pattern.
It can also be strength training. While I don’t like one-rep max testing, I will use three-rep max testing or other repeatable strength training workouts to see if reps or weight are increasing. The three-rep max gives us an “out” of ending the set at one rep or two reps if quality degrades.
It can also be a repeated training session, rather than a true test. I’ll often use a ramp-loading session on squat and deadlift main work like 10-8-6, 8-6-4, or 5-3-2 to assess improvement. We can see progress even without going to a maximum on any one set. We might look for improvement just on that final top set, or we aim to make small increases on multiple sets. For example, going from 100x10, 110x8, 120x6 to 105x10, 115x8, 125x6. Repeatability offers accountability to improve.
#5: Low Session Variety
I often see rowers strength training with the same exercises performed for the same or very similar sets and reps and loads for multiple weeks or months at a time. The all-barbell strength training program I mentioned earlier was also almost entirely done for 3-4 sets of 5 reps at 85%1RM. If you have a reason for doing this sort of training, then okay; at least it’s an ethos. If this is due to a lack of creativity or knowledge of different exercise options or session designs, then try to find ways to branch out a bit with other exercises, movement planes, set/rep ranges, and intensities.
I often use an alternating-week program design, especially in the off-season when variety should be highest, in which we use one set of exercises on Week A and another set of exercises on Week B. I most often write sets and reps in four-week or six-week waves. We’ll take a deload week in-between waves, repeat the wave to see progress (especially the Week 4 “indicator session”), and then adjust for the next wave.
Here’s a simple four-week design that gets out of the same old sets of five routine, without requiring too much mathletics:
Week 1: main work 4x8, assistance work 3x10
Week 2: main work 4x6, assistance work 3x12
Week 3: main work 5x5, assistance work 15-12-10
Week 4: main work 8-6-4, assistance work 4x10
The main work increases in intensity over the month, or how heavy or close to a one-rep max we’re training. Aim to increase the weight in small increments on each week as the reps decrease. The assistance work increases in volume, or how many total reps per exercise we’re doing. If we just hold the weight the same for all four weeks, we have gotten stronger going from 30 total reps to 40 total reps.
Happy training!
