Follow our 12 days of Christmas workout with Clare, our Go Row Indoor instructor. It’s a great way to pre-burn your calories before your festive lunch!

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Aiming to sharpen your indoor rowing technique? Well, U23 double world champion Matt Haywood is on hand to help. Read on for his top five killer tips.

Find out more about the World Class Start athletes taking on the Blue Peter Train Your Way to Tokyo challenge here.

1- Smash the sequence!

Learn how to properly sequence your stroke and before you start your session do some practice to make sure that you are warmed up to row correctly.

Key muscles to warm up are legs, glutes, trunk and lats. To start sequencing on a rowing machine, try beginning at the front of the stroke (fully compressed). The first quarter should focus on your pick-up – the press of the feet into the footplate. This will require tension in the trunk and glutes to allow the legs to press against them.

Once you have this, slowly lengthen to half slide then three-quarters and then legs only; this progression will help isolate your leg drive.

The next stage is to add in the hips and, then lastly, the arms. The drive should feel like a continuous push against the footplate. This is continued when the hips are open – keep squeezing your glutes, even when the handle comes in towards you!

Key muscles to warm up are legs, glutes, trunk and lats

2 – Practise straight arms

If you find yourself using your arms too much during your session, then it would be a good idea to spend some time rowing with straight arms. It’s a very simple, but effective, exercise that will help you drill in the idea of not using the arms until the last moments of the stroke. You should always remember that the arms make up a very small proportion of your power – 60% of the power in your stroke comes from the legs, 30% from the trunk and 10% from the arms.

This is also a good exercise to optimise your hip drive. Try to keep your split the same during this exercise. You can achieve this by using the legs and hips for longer. If the arms break at the front end, think about reacting with your feet before trying to pull the handle. The arms will be trying to do what the feet/legs should be doing.

3 – Check your posture

While rowing, you want to make sure your posture doesn’t change under load. When you are driving your legs into the footplate, your hips/spine and shoulders should not move off the line of the drive. You may not always feel this, but it may be happening.

To transfer the work from your feet to the handle effectively, the path between footplate and handle should be as stable as possible. This means your joints should travel in straight lines and not wiggle or shift during the stroke. If you do, you will compensate with other areas which may cause injury.

While rowing, you want to make sure your posture doesn’t change under load

To help with this, it is always a good idea to have someone watch you while you row. They may not know what they are looking for, but you can ask them to look at specific outcomes. If this is not possible, then setting yourself up next to a mirror will do the job just as well.

It is not uncommon for somebody else to see if there is something wrong with your technique or set-up, so listen to their advice and try to make changes. If using a mirror, then you will be able to see things that you perhaps cannot feel. I know that this has helped me out many times when I’m a long way into a session and not as perceptive as at the start.

4 – Pace yourself

Don’t be stupid when starting a session – set yourself a plan and then stick to it. You don’t have to set out for a personal best every time; it is okay just sit on the same numbers for a couple of weeks as you will still be improving fitness.

If you want to try for a personal best then this is where your plan comes in. Work out before starting how you want to do the session, and what the outcome is going to be. For example, with a 2km you might decide the splits you want for each 500m, so stick to this plan and you will get the outcome you want.

Set yourself a plan and then stick to it

5 – Go for it!

Don’t be afraid of trying hard – this goes alongside my last pointer. There is a fine line between pacing yourself and being afraid of the numbers. If you feel good when you start to row, then don’t be afraid of the numbers you are seeing on the screen. It is no bad thing if – all of a sudden – you get a lot quicker. This just means that your training is working, and it is highly likely that this will happen at some point.

Finally, do not overlook the importance of core and trunk work. This may not be a huge force producer, but it will make you more robust and help to reduce injury!

and visit British Rowing’s indoor rowing hub for more tips and advice.

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Racing over 2,000m requires maximal effort – but you already knew that!

Several studies have attempted to compartmentalise rowing performance by energy system contribution. Although there is a general trend of ~70 per cent aerobic and ~30 per cent anaerobic*, there are also differences, associated with gender, performance level as well as the individual characteristics in physiology due to genetic predisposition and training. This basic explanation of rowing fails to highlight the extreme physiological demands of the various segments within a race. How you fulfil the requirements can be individual, and can change during the performance.

In a 2km or 5km race, the early portion is dominated by anaerobic pathways as the aerobic system requires time to initiate. As its contribution increases, the limited non-aerobic contribution declines. Maximal aerobic effort is generally reached towards the end of the second minute.

Additional power is provided by non-aerobic pathways until the final push where, depending on pacing, aerobic metabolism is maintained – or reduced – and anaerobic metabolism spends its remaining pennies.

You can take the highway or the backroads [to success]

The actual percentages have been left deliberately vague as individual contributions will vary, although the overall pattern will generally remain the same.

Probably the main differences between rowers will be in the speed of aerobic increase during the first 250m, and the degree of anaerobic contribution during the middle 1,000m.

Energy supply can change due to the different demands placed on athletes during a race. Endurance capacity and its influence cannot, however, be underestimated.

All successful rowers have impressive aerobic engines, and individual differences are relatively small – unlike the physiological difference between Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, for example.

In order to train for this distribution of effort, many elite programmes favour high volume and (mostly) low intensity work. This is due to the dominant contribution from the aerobic pathway that this model of training targets, while it is also a reliable method and provides continued rewards throughout an athlete’s career. Spending too much time developing the less dominant, ultimately more limited anaerobic systems, may provide short-term success at the expense of long-term improvement.

All successful rowers have impressive aerobic engines

From personal experience, it is clear that those who have (1) the ability to get the most out of a (2) large and (3) economical aerobic system have featured heavily within the GB squad, with subtle differences between these three components.

However, as a very successful GB chief coach once said to me: “You can take the highway or the backroads [to success],” suggesting that those without all of the ‘big three’ can still be successful by maximising the ones they have, and combining them with other attributes, be they physiological or technical.

* Shephard, RJ (1998) . Journal of Sports Sciences, 16, 603-620

This article was written by Dr Mark Homer, former Sport Scientist – Physiology at British Rowing

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With so many wearable devices available, it’s easy to get bogged down with all the data.

In sport, technology has long been utilised in the attempt to push the limits of human performance, win gold medals and break world records. As a result, coaches and sport scientists alike have had to get to grips with where technology is most appropriate and how best to interpret the data produced. Recent technological developments have focused on the machinery that is being ‘driven’ rather than the human driving it.

For the average club rower or weekend warrior, wearable technology may help to achieve your goals. It is estimated (1) that sales of smart wearable devices could be worth nearly $30 billion by 2023. Relating specifically to the rower, these are appealing as they are lightweight and affordable, while they detect, analyse and transmit information about various internal and external variables.

A typical watch starting between £100-£150 can quantify your training load (with GPS), training intensity (with heart rate), sleep duration and quality (through movement analysis) and activity levels (through step count).

Some watches will also tell you how hard the training session was and therefore how much time you need to recover. Unfortunately, some of this guidance is calculated through algorithms that have yet to be validated or accelerometers that are not accurate enough to draw conclusions.

Take, for example, assessing heart rate using a chest strap versus a wrist-based optical sensor. A study (2) presented at the 2017 American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting found that, in general, a wrist sensor underestimates average heart rate by approximately six beats per minute compared with the chest strap. Caution should be taken when live monitoring, prescribing and evaluating training sessions with a wrist-based optical sensor.

You shouldn’t ignore the power of listening to your body and thinking about how you feel

When considering using any wearable device there is a risk of getting bogged down in the almost endless amount of data.

Halson (2016) (3) has recommended asking the following:

• Will the device cause any harm?

• Does the device answer the performance-based question that has been defined?

• Has the device been scientifically examined for its validity and reliability?

• What are the implications of the data that is being collected?

In most cases wearables can be effective in providing objective data (measurable data) to guide training or monitor health status. Performance questions such as ‘Why isn’t my 2km ergo improving?’ or ‘Why am I missing so much training through illness?’ can be understood better with metrics collected with wearables.
But you shouldn’t ignore the power of listening to your body and thinking about how you feel.

Another review (4) found that subjective questions (mood, stress and recovery) were more sensitive to changes in acute and chronic training loads compared with objective measurements.

Ultimately, it was recommended that athletes should report their well-being on a regular basis alongside physiological training data.

If you are looking for a detailed analysis on all the specifications of latest wearable tech and gadgets then check out DC Rainmaker at www.dcrainmaker.com.

However, athletes, coaches and sport scientists should first be assessing the need for the device before losing sight of the face-to-face interaction with their athletes and the context in which they are training.

Take it further – the references

1 CCS Insight forecast –

2 Willoughby CA, Snyder NC & Smith BK (2017) . ACSM Annual Meeting: Session E-33

3 Halson S, Peake JM & Sullivan JP (2016) International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 11(6): pp705–706

4 Saw AE, Main LC & Gastin PB (2015) . British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(5): pp281-91

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is inspiring people to keep moving during the coronavirus (COVID19) lockdown with their ‘Join the Movement’ campaign, launched last week.

The aim is to give people fun ideas on how to get active at home – while keeping to the restrictions of the national lockdown – and also to encourage everyone to share their own experiences online using the hashtag #StayInWorkOut.

Tim Hollingsworth, Sport England’s CEO, said: “What matters more than anything right now is that people stay home, save lives and protect the NHS. What that can’t and mustn’t mean is we stop being active, which we believe is now more important than ever.

“It’s not just a means of maintaining physical health but also to support mental well-being and helping people to deal with the anxiety that this period will inevitably bring.

What matters more than anything right now is that people stay home, save lives and protect the NHS

“Despite this time of great uncertainty, we are already seeing people find fun and creative new ways to get moving and come together, even while staying apart. This campaign seeks to help bring together the best of that and encourages people to share what they are doing using #StayInWorkOut.”

Sport England’s campaign also features a making it easy for people to access a range of different home workout options. This includes free exercise content from organisations such as the NHS, and workouts from popular fitness brands and influencers such as and and the . Many are offering free content and extended trials to help people maximise their home exercise.

Sport England wants the public to not only stay active at this challenging time but to share images of the creative ways they’re taking part. Many of these will then be chosen and used in campaign advertising over the coming weeks.

You can access the Sport England online hub .

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