Are we training enough? Are we training too much? What is everyone else doing?
All rowing coaches have asked themselves these questions at some point during their careers, perhaps as often as every day. Yet coaches remain siloed and silent for the most part, reluctant to discuss training practices with peers or ask them about theirs. As I talked to coaches for this feature, time and again I heard this refrain:
“I don’t know what other teams are doing,” Scott Frandsen, head men’s coach at Cal, told me.
“I don’t really know what other people are doing,” echoed Dave O’Neill, head coach of the NCAA-champion Texas women.
Aleksandar Radovic, head coach of the RowAmerica Rye back-to-back Youth National champion boys, took it a step further.
“We really don’t care what others are doing.”
So, if they’re not talking to each other, how are coaches making training decisions?
Personal experience, trial and error, a little science, and a dash of artistry.
Coaches begin coaching usually where they left off as athletes, continuing to pursue positive approaches or attempting to correct perceived wrongs. Which is exactly what Frandsen has done since taking over as head coach of the Cal men in 2019.
“It’s been a combination of all the different coaches and approaches I’ve had, picking the good things I liked and avoiding the bad.”
Frandsen is fortunate. The stable of coaches he’s been able to imitate and emulate is impressive: Tony Carr in high school; Craig Amerkhanian and Steve Gladstone at Cal; Sean Bowden at Oxford; Mike Spracklen and Terry Paul of the Canadian Olympic team. When Frandsen returned to Berkeley, he served as an assistant to U.S. Olympic coach Mike Teti before taking the reins himself.
Not all coaches have such a pedigreed background or choose to pull from it.
O’Neill, with 23 years of experience as a collegiate head coach, says “chefs can follow the same recipe, but it’s always going to taste different.”
He keeps abreast of training trends in other realms of athletic endeavor and tries to adapt them to rowing. At the beginning of the 2022-23 academic year, fresh off back-to-back NCAA championships, O’Neill was looking for ways to maximize aerobic capacity while limiting the physical and mental stresses of training at an elite level.
Accordingly, the Longhorns committed to exercise physiologist Steven Seiler’s 80/20 training method—80 percent low intensity, 20 percent high.
“Let’s put in as many minutes of aerobic training as we can,” O’Neill declared as he abolished all ranked and even recorded erg workouts.
By February, however, it became evident that it didn’t feel the way it had in previous years, the mental load was no lighter, and the team lacked power. They went on to finish a relatively disappointing fourth at NCAAs.
In a dramatic departure from that, O’Neill this year was influenced by Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the Norwegian runner and current world-record holder for the indoor 1,500 and 2,000 meters who does “a ton of stuff at threshold.”
Ingebrigtsen’s so-called “Norwegian Method,” which calls for lactate-guided meters and double-threshold training days, is challenging many long-held beliefs in elite endurance training.
Threshold training involves training at a pace where your body transitions from aerobic metabolism (getting fuel by burning carbohydrates and fats in the presence of oxygen) to anaerobic metabolism (getting fuel from stored sugars and producing lactic acid faster than it can be metabolized). This can be determined by measuring either oxygen consumption or lactate levels in the blood. A simpler way is the “talk test”—when during training you go from being able to speak full sentences to only short phrases and words.
This year, the Longhorns rowed many more meters at threshold. They raced. By his own admission, O’Neill integrated training philosophies into the larger context of Texas Rowing, “piecing together how the training fits into the team culture and how the training needs to have an effect on technique, even on how we want to race. We got back to looking at it from a holistic standpoint rather than just a training plan standpoint.”
Some coaches profess a combination of personal experience and training education, such as Radovic, who keeps up to date by attending coaching conferences and learning from the World Rowing website, in addition to building on his own athletic experience.
Radovic grew up in Serbia, where he competed on multiple junior, under-23, and senior national teams in the mid-2000s. Their training was adapted from the East German system, comprised almost exclusively of long, low steady state.
“Just row as much as you can,” he explained.
When Radovic came to the U.S. for college and rowed at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the training was “pretty much the total opposite,” with hard racing pieces almost every day.
In time, he saw the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches and combined them in a training plan suitable for high-school athletes. RowAmerica Rye trains once a day, six days a week, with Sundays always off.
“Some days we do steady state, some days we do pieces. One day a week is at threshold. One day a week is, depending on the season, either power strokes or higher-cadence speed work, and that’s about it.”
Many coaches, when asked to describe their approach to training, answered in terms that are similarly simplistic. Liz Trond, head coach of the Youth National champion Connecticut Boat Club women, summarized their training as “easy, hard, easy, hard, easy or hard, easy, easy, hard, easy, easy, hard.”
“Honestly, that’s the basics,” she quipped.
Such a description belies the sophisticated effort these coaches put into developing and, most important, adjusting a comprehensive training plan. Something that came up time and again in my conversations was the importance of reflecting honestly on past training and being open to feedback from trusted athletes.
“I like to read the room with our top guys,” Trond elaborated. “Are they still joking? Are they still coming to practice light and loose or are they dragging a little bit?”
This informs her adjustments to training–when to push the intensity or load, when to back off.
Similarly, Frandsen turns to trusted athletes to guide his training decisions.
“It’s about having the humility to talk to the guys that you trust,” he explained. “At the end of the day, you need to be able to take all that in and convey it in a way that shows this is what you believe, and this is what we’re doing, and everyone’s got to buy in.”
He learned the lesson the hard way in his first years as head coach at Cal, when the team did more of everything.
“We did more volume. We did more strength and conditioning. We did way more hard ergs.”
It was, by Frandsen’s own estimation, too much. By March, the team was exhausted. So he took a different approach, spoke with “a few guys that you trust, learn a little bit, self-reflect a little bit, and then we made some really good changes.”
A trend that emerged in conversations with coaches at both the junior and collegiate level is a move away from high-volume training.
“More volume is not the answer,” said Emily Gackowski, the newly named head coach of the Ohio State women. “We’ve reached the max that you can push volume-wise, with the rib injuries and mental hurdles that come with just doing more. There has to be something else.”
O’Neill agrees that there’s more to a successful training plan than simply training more.
“It’s not just about putting in minutes and volume,” he said. “People have to be happy about what they’re doing and happy where they are; otherwise, they’re not going to perform.”
Which is why, after experimenting with the higher-volume, lower-intensity 80/20 approach in ’22-23, the Longhorns this year focused on threshold-intensity work at prescribed paces and preparation at race speed. When they did put in the necessary aerobic work, it was largely through easy minutes on the bike.
O’Neill agrees with Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel, who never skated slower than race speed in training.
“You can’t do speed-skating slowly,” O’Neill said. So why row slowly?
A few years ago, moderating hard effort might have been dismissed as soft, but it’s hard to argue with the success of Texas and others taking this approach. Frandsen thought a lot about this after he took over at Cal. When developing the team’s training, he wondered, “How do you stretch the amount of progress you can make while limiting the stress and the injuries and the detriments of working too hard?
“How do you make as much progress as possible from September to February while teaching young people how to be tough and have those moments of adversity? They need those hard ergs, but how many do they really need to learn those lessons?”
That’s why, in 2022, as soon as he knew Cal had a fit and fast varsity eight, Frandsen did less training, not more. He credits his assistant coaches, Sam Baum and Brandan Shald, with encouraging this moderation in an attempt to keep the athletes healthy.
“We’ve got the speed,” Frandsen said, recalling his thinking. “Is doing those extra two hard workouts a week going to make everybody a little bit tougher? Maybe.”
But the potential drop-off in speed if just one guy got injured was a significant hazard.
“Just keep them healthy,” emphasized the coaches.
That crew did indeed stay healthy and went on to win the IRA national championship. The following year, depth was no longer a concern as the Golden Bears swept the IRAs, winning all four heavyweight men’s events.
The adoption of moderate training in a happy environment is not unique to college training and is even more important for junior rowers, who are still early in their athletic development.
“I don’t know what two by 90 minutes does for anybody, other than just taking a lot of boring strokes,” declared Trond. Like Frandsen, she questions how often athletes really need to go all out in order to perform their best on race day.
“How many times can you ask someone to go to that place?” she wondered.
Last fall, her youth women’s four hadn’t gone all out once before their race at the Head of the Charles. Trond’s charge to them before the race: “This is it. One moment, one time, you have to go as hard as you possibly can.”
The crew won the event by 14 seconds.
Many of the coaches I spoke to have been at this for many years and have the benefit of experience, the opportunity and security to experiment and to learn from trial and error. Until now, new coaches, especially new head coaches, have defaulted to adapting their own experiences to their current circumstances. As exercise science and the resources of college and junior athletics advance, however, new coaches have previously unavailable resources at their fingertips.
Gackowski took the helm of the Buckeye program in early July. When questioned shortly after about how she would be developing her team’s training program, she answered confidently, referencing a combination of programmatic history and on-campus resources. Gackowski has the last 10 years of training data, so, she explained, “I know how this team got to win a championship. I know how this team won eight Big 10 championships in a row, and that’s really helpful in starting to build my own training plan.”
Context matters, though, and Gackowski knows she can’t simply replicate the training that was done in the past. She intends to build a relationship with Ohio State’s sports science department to check what she knows along with the historical data on hand and to stay abreast of the latest trends in training. She will seek also to collaborate with the athletic training and strength and conditioning pros, since she and her staff, like most rowing coaches, lack degrees in kinesiology and sports science.
“I’m really trying to build relationships with all three of those parties to ensure that the training I want to do is scientifically what’s going to be moving the team in the right direction,” said Gackowski, one of a growing number of coaches, especially younger ones, who are looking outside of their own experiences and even beyond rowing to inform their approach to training.
The practical limitations of training a team, which can sometimes be as large as 50 or even 100 athletes, cannot be overlooked. RowAmerica Rye is home to 100 varsity boys and girls combined, along with another 50 novices, putting space at a premium in the boathouse.
When training on land, the four teams engage in an elaborate rotation among ergs, weights, bikes, and running throughout their two-hour practices, meaning time is limited in any one modality. One day a week in the winter, the boys are on the ergs for the full session while the girls lift the whole time. The next day, the teams swap.
Connecticut Boat Club also deals with training constraints.
“We have a finite block of time,” Trond said. “We have two and a half hours, which really means an hour and 45 minutes” with different arrival times, traffic on 95, time to change clothes, and have a quick meeting.
Logistical limitations are caused by the water as well. Radovic’s athletes row on Milton Harbor, which is tidal and has only 3,700 meters of protected water. Hence, opportunities for long uninterrupted strokes are in short supply.
These common limitations—shared facilities, less-than- ideal waterways—mean that coaches must tailor their training philosophies to the realities of their rowing environs.
Obviously, there’s more than one way to train a winning crew, which is why successful coaches and teams train in a wide variety of styles and why even the winningest crews adapt and change their approach over time.
O’Neill believes coaches occupy a continuum. On one end, “there’s the scientist coach, where it’s all about the training plan and millimeters of lactate and watts per kilo and the force curves and the Peach System and everything is down to the numbers.”
On the other end, “there’s the artist coach, where it’s about the feel, the flow, the beauty of rowing, the power of the human spirit, team culture.”
Though he remains curious about exercise science and willing to experiment with different training methods, O’Neill places himself firmly in the artistic camp.
Sensing when to push athletes, when to back off, and when to change things, whether innate or hard won, is crucial to a coach’s ability to train a crew effectively. Scientists have some answers for how to build a training plan, but some things are more metaphysical. That’s when art takes over.
As O’Neill revamped his team’s training in response to a disappointing ‘22-23 campaign, he returned to some time-honored classic workouts.
“We needed to do some workouts that might not make sense from an exercise science standpoint, but from a team culture, trust, confidence standpoint, we needed to do some things that are memorable.”
That’s what led the Longhorns to DKR–Texas Memorial Stadium on a Friday night in March after a long week of training. Under the lights, the rowers attacked repeats of the football-stadium steps with abandon, O’Neill urging them on.
It might not have made sense physiologically, but good coaches know that sometimes teams just need to suffer together to be able to stand atop the podium in June.
