Rowing is the best cardio training for rugby

HOW TO ROW

Getting Started

We’ve all been that person on the ergo at the gym. We feel and probably look ridiculous. It’s Monday afternoon and all the bikes and ellipticals are taken. We don’t want to run because we’re self-conscious of ‘jiggling’ and so we find ourselves at the rower, trembling and scanning for another option. So you’ve sat yourself down. Now what? The best thing I can say is, don’t try and copy anyone you’ve seen before. They’re almost all doing it wrong.

Rowing is a full body exercise, which means you need to engage multiple muscle groups during both the push and the recovery. Please note, in rowing and in the programs described below ‘Recovery’ is different from ‘Rest’. If we break down the basic rowing technique into sections, the Recovery is all the time spent not at work. In other words, the time you spend sliding back towards the little display unit in front of you.

Basic Technique

The sections of the rowing stroke are as follows: Catch, Pull, Finish and Recovery. The Recovery is actually broken down even further into a process, but we’ll get to that later. For now let’s start at the beginning of the stroke and work through chronologically.

The Catch

This is the very start of the stroke. You’re as close to the display as you can get, the oar is wayyyyy back in the water, your head is up and you’re ready to start the pull. Positioning your body correctly at the catch is incredibly important in real rowing. This is the moment your oar dips into the water and any technical fault will be exacerbated at this point. The Catch on an Ergo is less critical because there’s little (although not zero) chance you’ll fall out of the boat if you mess up.

At the catch your hands should be as far forward as possible as if you were trying to literally touch the display in front of you. The trick is to get forward without your knees pushing apart. Maintain alignment in your legs so that your push will be powerful. Don’t sacrifice push position for distance forward. As your hamstrings and lower back become more flexible, you’ll be able to get further forward and increase your stroke length in the process.

The Pull

Think of the pull as the first half of the stroke where your legs are doing the vast majority of the work. At the catch you’ve engaged your quads and your back to begin the stroke. As you straighten your legs, there’s an inclination to start using your hands. Try not to do this. Your hands will be useful in the next step when we get to The Finish, but for now, you want your arms straight, your lower back engaged and your quads driving. During the pull, your upper body will remain at about 11:00 O’Clock. Your upper body should remain forward or neutral through most of the Pull. Don’t start laying back too early or you’ll lose the power in your legs.

The Finish

In this article, we’re focusing on a long stroke as per surf boat rowing. This stroke requires several changes in the position of your upper body relative to your legs. We will try to go from a forward position at the catch, to a neutral position through the pull and then we complete the stroke at a slight laying position for the finish. This is the same as in flat water rowing, except that we will be working with a greater range of motion both forward at the catch and back at the finish. If someone comes over to you in the gym and tells you you’re doing it wrong, just politely explain that they don’t know what they’re talking about and continue beating up on their split times.

The Finish for our stroke requires us to lay back at the end of the stroke. This may feel awkward at first but there is method to the madness. By laying back, you’re extending your stroke length, accelerating the boat through the water and then staying forward in the boat to let it run. This requires us to actively engage our entire core. We finish the stroke with our hands up and into our chest, try to hit yourself in the nipples while laying back at about a 30 degree angle.

The Recovery

This is where things get tricky for most amateurs who haven’t been shown how to row correctly. They can Pull fine, but their clumsy recovery puts them in a bad position for the next Catch. Your recovery goes in 3 stages. Say them with me here: Hands, Body, Knees.

• Step 1, Hands. If you’ve finished your stroke correctly, your body should be back slightly and your hands should be up and into your chest. At this point, you need to get the oar out of the water and back to the start as quickly as possible without losing boat speed. The way to do this is release your hands quickly without a change in your body or leg position. Literally smack yourself in the chest and push your hands back out as if they were bouncing off a rubber wall. Once you’ve released your hands, you’ll need to actively engage your core to bring your body up.
• Step 2, Body. With STRAIGHT legs, pull your torso up past horizontal and almost into your original Catch position. Again, this will feel awkward at first but there is a reason for doing it in this way. We want the oar to be well past our knees before we ‘break’ them. In real rowing, if you break your knees too early, they’ll hit your hands, the oar will go in the water and you might end up ‘Crabbing’ (losing the oar over your head because of the boat speed). On the Ergo, breaking your knees too early will again mean that they hit your hands and cause the cable to bounce.
• Step 3, Knees. Now that you’ve extended your hands beyond your knees, you can start to move forward on your seat. As your knees break, keep them in alignment, don’t let them ‘fall out’ to the sides and away from your strong narrow squat position. This step shouldn’t be fast. You’re not racing down the seat to get into the Catch position. The fast part of the recovery should already have been completed by your hands and body. As your knees break, this is the time to relax, exhale and prepare to tense your body for the Catch.

Leg Drive

One of the biggest pitfalls for amateur rowers is that they hear ‘Rowing is a full body exercise’ and start to think this means both your upper and lower body take an equal share of the workload. This is not accurate. While your upper body is engaged through the Catch and Pull, your legs are doing the lions share of the work to accelerate the boat through the water. Your traps and upper back will be finishing the stroke and at the end of a session your lats might even be wrecked. But this is misleading. Focusing on Leg Drive is a sure,

Stroke Length

In surf boats, we row long. Before the catch we come as far forward as possible, reaching until our whole bodies are coiled like a spring. Before the recovery we lay as far back as possible with our hands up and into our chests, backs almost flat. This technique is different to flat water rowing which has a shorter stroke length at both ends. The shorter stroke used in the olympics allows for a higher stroke rate with less recovery time.

I suggest that rugby players should try to use a long stroke like surf boat rowing for a few reasons; the range of motion is good for your flexibility, reaching forward during recovery and laying back before it will stretch your hamstrings and activate your core, this forces your abdominals and lower back to help your larger muscle groups. Long strokes will hurt the first time but you’ll see rapid improvements in functional core strength as a result.

Stroke Rate

Most rowers take too many strokes because each individual stroke is too short. As you make your stroke longer by laying back and coming all the way forward, your stroke rate should naturally decrease as a result. But don’t confuse Stroke Rate with Boat Speed. Its not only possible, but preferable to try and maintain your Boat Speed (measured in time / 500m) while reducing your Stroke Rate (measured in Strokes / min). In the programs below you’ll see a range of Stroke Rates outlined.

If you’ve tried rowing before reading this article and ultimately didn’t enjoy it, I would guess that this is because your Stroke Rate was too high and your Stroke Length was too low.

Taking longer strokes while maintaining your Boat Speed will require a more powerful Pull. That’s your goal in rowing. Make your Pull as strong and long as possible. That’s why we Catch early, Finish back and Pull up high and Leg Drive to the max. Put it altogether and you have a powerful stroke that drives your boat through the water.

Recovery Speed

We’ve talked about Recovery Technique, now let’s very quickly cover Recovery Speed. If you’ve broken down the steps correctly, you should find that your recovery feels quite slow but is actually quite fast. Why does it feels slow? Because only Step #3 in the process (remember; Hands, Body, Knees) involves moving on the Ergo seat. If your stroke is long, it will feel like your recovery takes a long time to get going because most of it is your Hands and Body.

This is normal, try to maintain that feeling. If you find your recovery starts to FEEL faster, this is probably because your stroke is getting shorter. At all times your recovery should be fluid and smooth. Don’t jerk up to your sitting position or race down the seat to the Catch. Staying calm and controlled with your movements and breathing will make your next stroke better.

Watch The Cable

Before you sit down on an ergo, I suggest creepily observing someone else on it from a distance. Don’t film them or anything, that’d be too weird. But keep a careful eye on the cable of the ergo.The easiest way to tell a newbie from a seasoned rower is to watch for up and down movement in the cable. Whether your stroke is long or short, if its working, the cable shouldn’t bounce vertically at all. You’d be remiss for thinking this is all a function of your hands. It seems obvious that this would be the case since you’re holding onto a handle connected to the cable. But in fact, this is a function of recovering too fast with the legs before the hands have had time to release.

You’ll usually see and hear a bouncing cable from someone who hasn’t been shown how to recover through their stroke correctly, but its also a function of fatigue for seasoned rowers. As we get tired, we want to get to that next stroke faster and avoid all that difficult core work during the start of the recovery. This results in us forgetting to recover our hands before our legs. The knees come up too quickly and your hands need to rise in turn to get over them. When you’re fresh, keeping a horizontal cable is easy. When you get tired, your tendency will be to start bouncing it. Stop cheating. Slow your stroke down. Focus on recovering fully with your hands first and you’ll straighten out that cable in turn.