Rowing Training Programs that Work
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In this video, In this video, Ken shows us how to put together a training program that works. This presentation is from our Decent Rowing conference and is 21 minutes long.
Training Programs |
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Video Transcript
what i'd like to talk about is a way that i think that we can deal with better programming and better use of resources that most schools and clubs have so as i put up here how to deal with a lack of time and a lack of coaches and a bit of training design implementation there's a great resource that most schools in particular and a lot of clubs have and that's the parents and the masters and indeed the senior roles often we find that in my experience in the school system they say well these roles aren't these parents aren't coaches and so they tend not to want to coach generally what it is in my experience is that they don't mind coaching their own kids because that's a parent's job and if they get it wrong well that's just how it works but they don't like coaching other people's children unless they know what they're doing and so what happens in a lot of situations because of the everyone's focus on safety which is absolutely correct and we should have a lot of focus on safety is we end up seeing a lot of parents and supporters out driving tinnies around on the river just making sure if someone falls in there's enough adults around to drag them out i think there's a better way of using people like that using perhaps the wrong word better way of getting them involved as i say they're not keen to coach other people's kids because they're afraid they're going to get it wrong and they don't feel comfortable in in that role but if they've got the appropriate resources then they can and i've seen this work fairly well on a school system where if you can educate the parents and the masters and the senior roles to do the job then they can do it really quite well i'll go the other way
is rowing complex now it depends who you talk to if you want to row at a really elite level that's as complex johnny would probably say that it's um it's pretty simple really it's just one fluid movement why do we complicate it so much and we do but so it depends on the level but like any skill if you break it up into small segments then it's quite easy to learn it's not difficult to talk about posture on the ergo and just for the record jess has been on that ergo with that device once before today and she's been on the water in a single skull twice and so she's clearly not an experienced rower but as johnny did there on the ergo if you break up what's required into small bits then it's easy for jess to learn also at the same time it's easy for a parent or a masters or someone who knows nothing about rowing to learn you'll find often with parents that have children that row at schools and clubs they used to be rollers themselves and that's always an issue because when they rode it was different the technique was different and so we really need to educate the old rollers as well what was john's comment about masters yeah so it's easy to break it up into smaller segments and make sure it's logical and sequential and it makes sense to people and it's fairly easy for people to learn as i say don't complicate it it's not that hard to teach people from the beginning if you get it right and i'd my biggest bug bear really is teaching people to ride before they get on the water if you can teach them to grow their posture particularly their posture and how they this body sequence movements if you can do that on an ergo it's so much easier than doing it on the water because you've got real control over them if you've got an old boat like a boat that's not used anymore a quad for example you can sit it on tyres in the behind the shed and you can teach people how to row in that quite effectively if you're going to do that i suggest put it on a grassy area that's got grass about yay long because then john's technique of lazy feather works really well because there's enough grass there to catch the edge of the blade and there's enough to hold it when you push it away so so it's really important to get those things right i'd use quads jess has only been out twice and it's been in a single and it's pretty scary isn't it jess and so if you put him in a quad it's a lot easier and you can have one experienced person in the cox to in the bow seat rather to balance it out and there's a lot of resources available the reason why i think it's so important for us to do this right and i'll give you a couple of examples and i'm sure john would have more than you could count is that uh blair tanovich for example he still bends his arm he's been a world royal for what 10 years 15 and when he takes a catch he still bends his arm i've known senior athletes that have rode for australia for a while that can't grow a skull anymore because they used to do this movement with their wrist all the time and they've damaged their tendons in there so they can't rub properly anymore and where those things came from is under 13 that's where they learned it and if you if you do the same thing for a long time you get the same get real problems out of it another thing that's really important for beginners if they can row well and they're fit then they'll go fast how many times have we seen crews out there rowing and there's a crew that's riding half the speed of the other ones and they're in front and the reason they're in front is because they know how to row it doesn't mean they're necessarily bigger or stronger particularly in that younger age bracket and so
i'd suggest strongly suggest on the water with beginners teach them how to row but don't try and do any work if you try and do a lot of work in that early stage then they'll get the technique wrong they'll try to pull it they'll try to stress it they'll get tense so just teach them how to row and if they want to get them fit make them go for a run ride a bike go for swim do some circuit training those sorts of things i don't i don't think i've seen any under 13 under 14 kids that have got a concentration span that'll last anywhere near that and uh and if they can't if they're not concentrating on what they're doing then they're probably going to get it wrong sure they'll have breaks so you go out on the water you're not ideally back on the parents and masters gig if you can have one crew one coach that's ideal and in fact my experience has been with coaching beginners and indeed coaching seniors when i was coaching siona who's now at the ntc a couple of years ago i was coaching ciana just by myself so it was one coach one boat myself and sienna in a single and then all of a sudden i inherited somehow another athlete and i was four times as useless it was just ridiculous because they had different speeds i couldn't concentrate on it and you get best outcomes if you have one coach one boat and so that's why i say parents are a really useful resource for that and i'd say better to row well for a short session and then go for a run then arrive well for a short session and then row badly for the rest of it and what tends to happen back to your question there david if you've got people that you take them out then sure it's not going to be a 20 minute session on the water generally we get longer than that but they're not going to be really concentrating hard and working for 20 minutes because you stop talk to them educate them it's really important that they understand what they're trying to do and why they're doing it and if it looks like they're losing concentration then i'd get them off the water and do something different so you really got to depends how their concentration span works i think how do you get bad technique forever like what i was talking about with those couple of senior athletes just keep doing something bad until it's unchangeable and it happens all the time and if you think about when you go out for a row it's a lot of repetitive the same type of movement all the time and once they've got it wrong they keep it for pretty much forever and in coaching senior athletes and i've coached a few over the over the years to get them to change is really difficult and johnny alluded to that earlier on if they get it right from the start we get much better outcomes these are the categories that i think are the worst ones in the first couple of years feathering i think if we don't get them to feather right before they start rowing before they actually get into the boat then i think we've lost half the battle because they start off like this and it's really hard to to teach them out of that i find the best way to do it is to get a grip like a just an all grip without an oar just a croaker grip and if you're teaching beginners you'd want to have pink ores and so i'd suggest use a yellow grip because if it's not on an or it's about the same size as the pink give them a grip and say take it home and practice feathering and give them one each because what they can do with that is it's got has no shaft in it so if they squash it if they grip it too tight it'll just flatten so they've got to hang on to it loose and they can learn that technique just sit in front of the telly both hands and just learn how to how to feather properly i think that's absolutely vital arm break what jess was doing on the yogo a great way to stop them getting arm break because once they've got the once they've got the concept that they've got to break their arms and again it's really hard to get rid of and opening early is a bit related to arm break the issue with opening early is that it's it's related to that how they take the catch they want to take it with their legs if they open early they don't they won't get it right so they're the three particularly those first two i'd say they're the best areas for us to focus on in the early years
most important with kids is that they won't do more than one thing at a time i don't know if anyone's ever coached their own children i have i've coached both of them lachlan and emma my daughter and they're usually more brutal on their parents than they would be on a coach and as soon as i tried to tell my daughter emma who can be fairly um and she'll tell me what she thinks uh is that as soon as i gave more than two things to think about you'd yell out and tell me to stop because any more than two and she can't pay attention to it but it wasn't about that it was really about saying i want to get one thing right one thing right and then i'll do another thing and i'll get it right so don't over complicate it which makes it really easy to use parents because and others because you can teach the parent to coach one thing and then say now go out on the water and coach that one thing and if you see something else real temptation for coaches i've done it myself so often you have a crew go out there and you're focusing on posture and you see someone who's doing something really weird with their hand and you can't resist but tell them to concentrate on that and all of a sudden you've lost half the effectiveness better to take that put it somewhere else rating as john said earlier on when kids get into a race they want to race and so what you've got to try to do if you can is convince them that rowing at rate 20 is going to be faster than doing right 20 well growing at 26 badly is going to be slower and it takes a while for them to understand that but from a coach perspective there's this temptation because they want to race and say you want to give them that that feedback what i suggest you do is try and keep it so that they do a lower rating when they get that rating right take it up two points and they get that right take it up another two points and so on keep them short ergos real bug bear of mine this one unsupervised ergos for beginners the ergo's the easiest place to learn a bad habit because you can do it anywhere without anyone watching it and i don't know how many of you have seen people rowing in a in a gym like a public gym the technique's just amazing which really says to me that rowing is not a natural way of movement otherwise the people in the gym would be doing it just fine so strongly suggest if you're going to have the children particularly the younger ones do ergos make them supervised and again parents are great for that here's a bit of a book that we wrote earlier on and one end has got how to row indoor rowing in five sessions and on the on the back where you look at it is how to roll on the ergo i'm sorry on the water for 13 sessions the how i suggest you use it and again you can download it it's just there for everybody is that i have here just the ergo session on posture just two pages i just printed it out off there if you give that to a parent so if we go for the solution perhaps here if you end up with i don't know 25 kids 24 pick an easy number there 25 will do 25 kids in the turn up for rowing and you're gonna take out five quads which is sort of usual five quads yeah five quads then what i suggest you do if you can do that if you can try this and see how it goes one thing i'd really like too if you wouldn't mind is i'd like feedback so if people have ideas on how we can do this better i want to tell everyone how to do it better so please let us know i don't mean now particularly i mean anytime in the future so i'd suggest send the rails for a run or something maybe with someone to supervise them if need be so turn them off to do some exercise 15 minutes 20 minutes the new coaches which are essentially what i'm calling there as parents masters senior roles show them a video of what we're going to do today like posture on an ergo so we're doing posture on ergo show them how to do it give them one of these sheets each or something similar because it's got each of the positions just the same as jess was there on the ergo and then they understand it hopefully then give them a group of athletes to coach now i can't imagine there'll be many parents out there that given that short bit of instruction like that can't coach just that and the next time you can say right this time we're going to do the catch until we do the same thing with the catch and so on same when we get to one water sessions so and then the next session you just do another one now i think if you try and use your resource like that we'll get better outcomes i asked a couple of kids that were rowing at the school that i was helping with last year one of the schools i was helping with last year about what their experience was in under 13. and they said well there were just uh so many people out there so much running around and they left their own devices a lot of the time it's not really a criticism it's just how the world seems to work for coaching beginners and so the issue for them this is the athletes 13 year old girls is to say well they didn't i really know what they were doing and so they wanted to be want to understand and so it's important they understand
and we give them people to watch them with the equipment what johnny said before absolutely critical uh make sure you've got all of the gear right i'd add one perhaps thing difference that i would think sometimes you end up with one or two athletes in a group that are just so much taller than everyone else particularly in under 13 under 14. and so what i'd suggest if you want to work around that is carry some seat pads because that makes it very easy to adjust johnny knows i'm a fan of seat pads i think i'm his biggest customer of seat pads and but i'd rig one seat in the quad that caters for a tall athlete somewhere in the middle two or three something like that so then you've got a spot where you can put that large athlete without having to re-rig stuff a lot less down time makes it better what's a program program's really just a result of a planning process and i'd start off with the entire season so you understand where all the regattas are where the school trips are where the items that don't fit in the program are so you can work around it i break it down into four blocks different coaches do different levels of blocks i tend to make it four blocks and just call it roughly a month if you're going to increase strength and fitness and this isn't really for the real beginners this is more for the under 15 16 opens then you need to rest now you probably all understand a fair bit about how to get fit and you're not going to get fit if you go out and slaughter yourself every day day after day your body only improves its strength when you have the rest so you've got to make sure you factor rest in within each week and within each block and usually what happens is the the level of work increases over the over the season but don't do it too quickly there'll be more talk about it tomorrow when leah and annabelle are talking about load but the worst thing you can do is is overload people too early generally with less experience it's all about technical stuff and fitness a little bit when you get to the more experience then there's more workload in a program but it's reasonably logical most injuries occur because of the load too quickly one of the classic things we see every year in tasmania is they have this moratorium over christmas and so we have this three weeks month off and then what seems to happen is most of the schools come back and start with the camp and so and we understand the students meant to go away and do lots of diligent exercise over the summer break and all that i've never been able to get that to work properly but if you can great but when they come back then we put them into a camp and what we do is we push them up and we go to lake barrington for example we go up and down the lake every day twice a day or more and that's where a lot of our injuries for the season start because we've just taken them from minimal load to pretty much over maximum load because they're training more than they do when they're back at school and they break very quickly so what i suggest you do is when you go to the those camps like here i'd say it's a great opportunity for technique you've got plenty of time you don't need to get back in a hurry so you can spend a lot of time on technique and not so much time on grinding up and down the course trying to kill them also different modality of exercise gives you greater loads so if you're going to say we're going to go rowing and that's all we're going to do then yes you're going to injure someone if you do it and ramp them up too quickly if they go for a run instead for one of the sessions well that's going to be loading up different muscles so you're less likely to get breakages if you've got bikes you can do that you can go swimming there's all sorts of different modalities you can use and i'd suggest the worst thing that happened the worst thing i see at schools is people breaking because they do too much too quickly the idea of a program is to gradually increase the load and allow the body to go with you under 13 under 14 under 15 generally it's about technique and enjoyment if they enjoy it they'll stay in the sport and they'll do well they don't enjoy it doesn't help anybody not much periodisation by that i mean not much rest versus load periods because they can't row well enough to do that if you could do it off water fine
i'd argue it's almost impossible to get fit rowing if you can't row well because you're just not going to get good outcomes no matter how you look at it variability is important because otherwise if they get bored then it won't work i think education is vital often we teach athletes and i found this particularly relevant at the more senior level when i was often we tell them what to do but we don't tell them why we don't get them to understand if you can get them to understand why they're doing what they're doing i think you'll get much better outcomes i'm sure when i was coaching siona a couple of years ago the difference in her performance was mostly because she actually wanted to understand why we were doing this and why we did it and we spent a lot of time talking about it and you'd think while we were talking we're not getting fit we're not rowing up and down the river we've got a lot more value out of understanding than we did out of out of fitness
videos are easy and clearly you understand as well enough to know that videos are we've got lots of videos there's 500 and something on the website now and a lot of them available to everybody you don't have to be a member short videos are an easy way to educate athletes long videos they won't watch in fact most adults i know won't watch a long video but two minute video four minute that tends to work pretty well as i say if they understand why it's important they'll do it better and as i said before two items maximum and if they can't roll the rate they're at don't don't take it up with the under 15 16 opens i'd suggest that you still need technique and enjoyment because otherwise it doesn't work more periodisation because they've got to have that recovery level if you keep working them they won't get fitter and i'd again i'd still use the off-water stuff because it's pretty easy to do variability same deal regattas don't taper for regattas pick one two regattas a year that you're going to take before and the rest of them just treat them with speed work i've got to do speed work somewhere and if you tape it before a regatta and then they're too exhausted after the regatta then you lose a week every time if you have a regatta every two or three weeks then you've lost 30 your program thanks very much
is rowing complex now it depends who you talk to if you want to row at a really elite level that's as complex johnny would probably say that it's um it's pretty simple really it's just one fluid movement why do we complicate it so much and we do but so it depends on the level but like any skill if you break it up into small segments then it's quite easy to learn it's not difficult to talk about posture on the ergo and just for the record jess has been on that ergo with that device once before today and she's been on the water in a single skull twice and so she's clearly not an experienced rower but as johnny did there on the ergo if you break up what's required into small bits then it's easy for jess to learn also at the same time it's easy for a parent or a masters or someone who knows nothing about rowing to learn you'll find often with parents that have children that row at schools and clubs they used to be rollers themselves and that's always an issue because when they rode it was different the technique was different and so we really need to educate the old rollers as well what was john's comment about masters yeah so it's easy to break it up into smaller segments and make sure it's logical and sequential and it makes sense to people and it's fairly easy for people to learn as i say don't complicate it it's not that hard to teach people from the beginning if you get it right and i'd my biggest bug bear really is teaching people to ride before they get on the water if you can teach them to grow their posture particularly their posture and how they this body sequence movements if you can do that on an ergo it's so much easier than doing it on the water because you've got real control over them if you've got an old boat like a boat that's not used anymore a quad for example you can sit it on tyres in the behind the shed and you can teach people how to row in that quite effectively if you're going to do that i suggest put it on a grassy area that's got grass about yay long because then john's technique of lazy feather works really well because there's enough grass there to catch the edge of the blade and there's enough to hold it when you push it away so so it's really important to get those things right i'd use quads jess has only been out twice and it's been in a single and it's pretty scary isn't it jess and so if you put him in a quad it's a lot easier and you can have one experienced person in the cox to in the bow seat rather to balance it out and there's a lot of resources available the reason why i think it's so important for us to do this right and i'll give you a couple of examples and i'm sure john would have more than you could count is that uh blair tanovich for example he still bends his arm he's been a world royal for what 10 years 15 and when he takes a catch he still bends his arm i've known senior athletes that have rode for australia for a while that can't grow a skull anymore because they used to do this movement with their wrist all the time and they've damaged their tendons in there so they can't rub properly anymore and where those things came from is under 13 that's where they learned it and if you if you do the same thing for a long time you get the same get real problems out of it another thing that's really important for beginners if they can row well and they're fit then they'll go fast how many times have we seen crews out there rowing and there's a crew that's riding half the speed of the other ones and they're in front and the reason they're in front is because they know how to row it doesn't mean they're necessarily bigger or stronger particularly in that younger age bracket and so
i'd suggest strongly suggest on the water with beginners teach them how to row but don't try and do any work if you try and do a lot of work in that early stage then they'll get the technique wrong they'll try to pull it they'll try to stress it they'll get tense so just teach them how to row and if they want to get them fit make them go for a run ride a bike go for swim do some circuit training those sorts of things i don't i don't think i've seen any under 13 under 14 kids that have got a concentration span that'll last anywhere near that and uh and if they can't if they're not concentrating on what they're doing then they're probably going to get it wrong sure they'll have breaks so you go out on the water you're not ideally back on the parents and masters gig if you can have one crew one coach that's ideal and in fact my experience has been with coaching beginners and indeed coaching seniors when i was coaching siona who's now at the ntc a couple of years ago i was coaching ciana just by myself so it was one coach one boat myself and sienna in a single and then all of a sudden i inherited somehow another athlete and i was four times as useless it was just ridiculous because they had different speeds i couldn't concentrate on it and you get best outcomes if you have one coach one boat and so that's why i say parents are a really useful resource for that and i'd say better to row well for a short session and then go for a run then arrive well for a short session and then row badly for the rest of it and what tends to happen back to your question there david if you've got people that you take them out then sure it's not going to be a 20 minute session on the water generally we get longer than that but they're not going to be really concentrating hard and working for 20 minutes because you stop talk to them educate them it's really important that they understand what they're trying to do and why they're doing it and if it looks like they're losing concentration then i'd get them off the water and do something different so you really got to depends how their concentration span works i think how do you get bad technique forever like what i was talking about with those couple of senior athletes just keep doing something bad until it's unchangeable and it happens all the time and if you think about when you go out for a row it's a lot of repetitive the same type of movement all the time and once they've got it wrong they keep it for pretty much forever and in coaching senior athletes and i've coached a few over the over the years to get them to change is really difficult and johnny alluded to that earlier on if they get it right from the start we get much better outcomes these are the categories that i think are the worst ones in the first couple of years feathering i think if we don't get them to feather right before they start rowing before they actually get into the boat then i think we've lost half the battle because they start off like this and it's really hard to to teach them out of that i find the best way to do it is to get a grip like a just an all grip without an oar just a croaker grip and if you're teaching beginners you'd want to have pink ores and so i'd suggest use a yellow grip because if it's not on an or it's about the same size as the pink give them a grip and say take it home and practice feathering and give them one each because what they can do with that is it's got has no shaft in it so if they squash it if they grip it too tight it'll just flatten so they've got to hang on to it loose and they can learn that technique just sit in front of the telly both hands and just learn how to how to feather properly i think that's absolutely vital arm break what jess was doing on the yogo a great way to stop them getting arm break because once they've got the once they've got the concept that they've got to break their arms and again it's really hard to get rid of and opening early is a bit related to arm break the issue with opening early is that it's it's related to that how they take the catch they want to take it with their legs if they open early they don't they won't get it right so they're the three particularly those first two i'd say they're the best areas for us to focus on in the early years
most important with kids is that they won't do more than one thing at a time i don't know if anyone's ever coached their own children i have i've coached both of them lachlan and emma my daughter and they're usually more brutal on their parents than they would be on a coach and as soon as i tried to tell my daughter emma who can be fairly um and she'll tell me what she thinks uh is that as soon as i gave more than two things to think about you'd yell out and tell me to stop because any more than two and she can't pay attention to it but it wasn't about that it was really about saying i want to get one thing right one thing right and then i'll do another thing and i'll get it right so don't over complicate it which makes it really easy to use parents because and others because you can teach the parent to coach one thing and then say now go out on the water and coach that one thing and if you see something else real temptation for coaches i've done it myself so often you have a crew go out there and you're focusing on posture and you see someone who's doing something really weird with their hand and you can't resist but tell them to concentrate on that and all of a sudden you've lost half the effectiveness better to take that put it somewhere else rating as john said earlier on when kids get into a race they want to race and so what you've got to try to do if you can is convince them that rowing at rate 20 is going to be faster than doing right 20 well growing at 26 badly is going to be slower and it takes a while for them to understand that but from a coach perspective there's this temptation because they want to race and say you want to give them that that feedback what i suggest you do is try and keep it so that they do a lower rating when they get that rating right take it up two points and they get that right take it up another two points and so on keep them short ergos real bug bear of mine this one unsupervised ergos for beginners the ergo's the easiest place to learn a bad habit because you can do it anywhere without anyone watching it and i don't know how many of you have seen people rowing in a in a gym like a public gym the technique's just amazing which really says to me that rowing is not a natural way of movement otherwise the people in the gym would be doing it just fine so strongly suggest if you're going to have the children particularly the younger ones do ergos make them supervised and again parents are great for that here's a bit of a book that we wrote earlier on and one end has got how to row indoor rowing in five sessions and on the on the back where you look at it is how to roll on the ergo i'm sorry on the water for 13 sessions the how i suggest you use it and again you can download it it's just there for everybody is that i have here just the ergo session on posture just two pages i just printed it out off there if you give that to a parent so if we go for the solution perhaps here if you end up with i don't know 25 kids 24 pick an easy number there 25 will do 25 kids in the turn up for rowing and you're gonna take out five quads which is sort of usual five quads yeah five quads then what i suggest you do if you can do that if you can try this and see how it goes one thing i'd really like too if you wouldn't mind is i'd like feedback so if people have ideas on how we can do this better i want to tell everyone how to do it better so please let us know i don't mean now particularly i mean anytime in the future so i'd suggest send the rails for a run or something maybe with someone to supervise them if need be so turn them off to do some exercise 15 minutes 20 minutes the new coaches which are essentially what i'm calling there as parents masters senior roles show them a video of what we're going to do today like posture on an ergo so we're doing posture on ergo show them how to do it give them one of these sheets each or something similar because it's got each of the positions just the same as jess was there on the ergo and then they understand it hopefully then give them a group of athletes to coach now i can't imagine there'll be many parents out there that given that short bit of instruction like that can't coach just that and the next time you can say right this time we're going to do the catch until we do the same thing with the catch and so on same when we get to one water sessions so and then the next session you just do another one now i think if you try and use your resource like that we'll get better outcomes i asked a couple of kids that were rowing at the school that i was helping with last year one of the schools i was helping with last year about what their experience was in under 13. and they said well there were just uh so many people out there so much running around and they left their own devices a lot of the time it's not really a criticism it's just how the world seems to work for coaching beginners and so the issue for them this is the athletes 13 year old girls is to say well they didn't i really know what they were doing and so they wanted to be want to understand and so it's important they understand
and we give them people to watch them with the equipment what johnny said before absolutely critical uh make sure you've got all of the gear right i'd add one perhaps thing difference that i would think sometimes you end up with one or two athletes in a group that are just so much taller than everyone else particularly in under 13 under 14. and so what i'd suggest if you want to work around that is carry some seat pads because that makes it very easy to adjust johnny knows i'm a fan of seat pads i think i'm his biggest customer of seat pads and but i'd rig one seat in the quad that caters for a tall athlete somewhere in the middle two or three something like that so then you've got a spot where you can put that large athlete without having to re-rig stuff a lot less down time makes it better what's a program program's really just a result of a planning process and i'd start off with the entire season so you understand where all the regattas are where the school trips are where the items that don't fit in the program are so you can work around it i break it down into four blocks different coaches do different levels of blocks i tend to make it four blocks and just call it roughly a month if you're going to increase strength and fitness and this isn't really for the real beginners this is more for the under 15 16 opens then you need to rest now you probably all understand a fair bit about how to get fit and you're not going to get fit if you go out and slaughter yourself every day day after day your body only improves its strength when you have the rest so you've got to make sure you factor rest in within each week and within each block and usually what happens is the the level of work increases over the over the season but don't do it too quickly there'll be more talk about it tomorrow when leah and annabelle are talking about load but the worst thing you can do is is overload people too early generally with less experience it's all about technical stuff and fitness a little bit when you get to the more experience then there's more workload in a program but it's reasonably logical most injuries occur because of the load too quickly one of the classic things we see every year in tasmania is they have this moratorium over christmas and so we have this three weeks month off and then what seems to happen is most of the schools come back and start with the camp and so and we understand the students meant to go away and do lots of diligent exercise over the summer break and all that i've never been able to get that to work properly but if you can great but when they come back then we put them into a camp and what we do is we push them up and we go to lake barrington for example we go up and down the lake every day twice a day or more and that's where a lot of our injuries for the season start because we've just taken them from minimal load to pretty much over maximum load because they're training more than they do when they're back at school and they break very quickly so what i suggest you do is when you go to the those camps like here i'd say it's a great opportunity for technique you've got plenty of time you don't need to get back in a hurry so you can spend a lot of time on technique and not so much time on grinding up and down the course trying to kill them also different modality of exercise gives you greater loads so if you're going to say we're going to go rowing and that's all we're going to do then yes you're going to injure someone if you do it and ramp them up too quickly if they go for a run instead for one of the sessions well that's going to be loading up different muscles so you're less likely to get breakages if you've got bikes you can do that you can go swimming there's all sorts of different modalities you can use and i'd suggest the worst thing that happened the worst thing i see at schools is people breaking because they do too much too quickly the idea of a program is to gradually increase the load and allow the body to go with you under 13 under 14 under 15 generally it's about technique and enjoyment if they enjoy it they'll stay in the sport and they'll do well they don't enjoy it doesn't help anybody not much periodisation by that i mean not much rest versus load periods because they can't row well enough to do that if you could do it off water fine
i'd argue it's almost impossible to get fit rowing if you can't row well because you're just not going to get good outcomes no matter how you look at it variability is important because otherwise if they get bored then it won't work i think education is vital often we teach athletes and i found this particularly relevant at the more senior level when i was often we tell them what to do but we don't tell them why we don't get them to understand if you can get them to understand why they're doing what they're doing i think you'll get much better outcomes i'm sure when i was coaching siona a couple of years ago the difference in her performance was mostly because she actually wanted to understand why we were doing this and why we did it and we spent a lot of time talking about it and you'd think while we were talking we're not getting fit we're not rowing up and down the river we've got a lot more value out of understanding than we did out of out of fitness
videos are easy and clearly you understand as well enough to know that videos are we've got lots of videos there's 500 and something on the website now and a lot of them available to everybody you don't have to be a member short videos are an easy way to educate athletes long videos they won't watch in fact most adults i know won't watch a long video but two minute video four minute that tends to work pretty well as i say if they understand why it's important they'll do it better and as i said before two items maximum and if they can't roll the rate they're at don't don't take it up with the under 15 16 opens i'd suggest that you still need technique and enjoyment because otherwise it doesn't work more periodisation because they've got to have that recovery level if you keep working them they won't get fitter and i'd again i'd still use the off-water stuff because it's pretty easy to do variability same deal regattas don't taper for regattas pick one two regattas a year that you're going to take before and the rest of them just treat them with speed work i've got to do speed work somewhere and if you tape it before a regatta and then they're too exhausted after the regatta then you lose a week every time if you have a regatta every two or three weeks then you've lost 30 your program thanks very much