Using bands to better imitate the rowing stroke

Weights are an excellent way to help build your strength for your rowing. And although many weights exercises closely resemble the movements of the rowing stroke, the areas where the body is loaded up differ slightly between weights and rowing.

​In this video, Ken describes while Joel demonstrates how strength work can be transformed to more closely mimic the rowing stroke with the assistance of bands. 

Video Transcript

​In the rowing stroke particularly in a smaller boat like a single scull or a pair the load at the catch is less than the load at the finish but most weight exercises we do are the opposite if you look at this bit of rowing here you can see that the initial part of the catch is is fairly gentle and the athlete accelerates through to the finish so they start off picking up the load then they accelerate the legs then the body and the legs and then the body and the arms to finish off more powerful towards the end of the stroke than they are at the beginning of the stroke if you think about what happens in the gym when we're trying to strengthen our weights if you have a look at this squat exercise then you can see that the majority of the hardest part of the work is actually the first bit which if you think about it is more akin to the catch than it is towards the finish and then as you in the squat as the your body straightens up then you'll find that the majority of the or the easiest part of the work is actually at the end whereas in the rowing stroke that's perhaps where we want to have the most power on so here's a few ideas on how you might be able to change what you do in the gym to improve what goes on in the rowing boat all you need in the gym really is some some of these resistance bands you can get all sorts of different sizes and and strength of them and then i suggest use them in the gym as you can see in this series of exercises you can use them in a squat for example if you have a little bit less weight than you would normally have so it starts off relatively easy off the ground and then as the bands get tighter and tighter and tighter towards the end of the of the squat you'll find that it gets heavier and heavier or the sensation is that it's getting heavier so what you're doing there is you're in fact increasing the load the further through the squat you go you can do the same with an arm pull exercise and the same with pretty much any other sort of exercise you can think of in the gym pushing on an incline pretty much anything just think about when you want the power maximum power in the rowing stroke and see how that compares to what the gym weight lifting exercise that you're doing at the time and you may be able to make a few tweaks simply by using resistance bands depending on your apparatus you may find you need to tie the bands on in different ways you can have them use a smaller band or a thicker band or you can indeed make them tighter so that they start to take more load earlier simply by shortening the band and so depending on how your equipment fits then just see what's the best way to put it together as you can see here we've got a range of different ways of applying the band to your apparatus but essentially what we're trying to do is we're trying to change the weight lifting drill exercise so that you've got a little bit less power needed at the part of the rowing stroke where less power is needed and more power needed at the part of the rowing stroke where there's more power needed so just a different way of looking at your gym work and maybe a good way to mix up the routine particularly if you're working with crew boats and teams just to make it more interesting work in the gym and perhaps more applicable to the rowing stroke bear in mind an ergo is different particularly a fixed ergo a fixed ergo when you apply the power is quite different from what you do in a boat so the methodology we're talking about here that i'd like you to try isn't necessarily applicable to an ergo but for rowing in a boat particularly a smaller boat i think it's really valid way to think about how you do your exercises in order to get the best outcome for the boat