Tonight I attended a seminar at Rowing Queensland on Injury Prevention for Rowers
These are my notes. We were given hand outs:
1. Dynamic Warm Ups and 2. Flexibility Exercises.
If I can find links to PDFs then they can go here.
There are laminated copies on the fence at the side of the RQ gym.
1. FOUNDATION
This might be written as "Live your life for Rowing". In tonights context this was get your posture right all day. Don't slouch all day and then expect to sit up with correct posture in the boat for an hour or so. In other contexts this would extend to diet, exercise, team work, attitude etc. (That's why I would like to get coffee & red wine into the boat so I don't have to cut it out at home)
The correct posture is back straight, hips rocked forward.
To get it:
1. Over emphasise - sit up straight straight hips rocked forward. (you know like when you tried to impress the teacher)
2. Slouch down. Backed curved. Hips back. Relaxed. You know thats the way you always sit these days.
3. Find a point half way between those extremes and try to maintain that whenever you are sitting. Even in boring work meetings or through a long sermon.
The correct posture is good because:
a) It transmits the force most efficiently from the leg drive to the hands holding the oar. (If you back is slouched some of the energy will be absorbed => Less efficient) This makes you go faster.
b) Less force trying to push spine discs out -> less chance of injury.
2. FITNESS & STRENGTH
His emphasis was on Athletic endurance rather than raw strength. As I understood it the message was that you may be able to bench press a gazillion kilos but in a 2k race you need to repeat the action 250 times. So in the gym this idea translates to do more reps with less weight.
Personally I suspect that for most of us doing anything is a good place to start.
The next part of this seemed to be to do exercises that mimic part of the stroke and strengthen for that. For example, do step ups. As you get better use a higher and higher step until the step is high and your knee is against your chest. That mimics the catch and build the relevant muscles. (No cheating by jumping off the other leg)
Another example was squat jumps - mimic the drive.
ROWING ROUTINE
Warm up -> Row -> Stretch
WARM UP
We should warm up (rather than stretch) BEFORE we row.
We should enter the boat warm. The on water "Warm up" that we use should be considered a technical drill. The idea is that if you are cold you will row bad. And that it takes 10 good reps to counteract 1 bad muscle memory. So if we do 100 cold less than perfect strokes in a on water "warm up" then we need a 1000 good strokes to fix the muscle memory.
He favored warm up being not on the ergo because sitting puts pressure on cold spinal discs and that is apparently bad.
Warm up #1 first preference was a 5 minute jog.
Then various other ones - leg swings, a thing called "Arabesque" to warm up the hammies.
Even Star Jumps - I can just see us geriatrics doing star jumps at 515am.
Dynamic warm up in one of the hand outs.
ROW
Well we do that but remember focus, correct posture and to always keep the boat level.
STRETCH
Apparently we should stretch when we are WARM and that means AFTER rowing and after exercise. (I tend to stretch before rowing and then after rowing its off to coffee as fast as possible).
So while we have the post row chat (debrief) we should stretch.
Hold each stretch for 20 seconds. Count it out as 20 seconds is a long time. Apparently the muscles fight against the stretch for the first 10 seconds so the benefit only starts toward the 15-20 second mark.
Stretches in one of the handouts.
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