The more I learn about rowing beyond my personal experiences, the more I want to know and the more I love this sport.  There are a few things about rowing that we can all do better. A few old habits we need to work together to re-mold. The main goal I always have with anyone I work with is to foster a life long love of rowing!  This doesn’t always come from completing the expected training minutes or being able to speak about the various medals you have won. All those things are amazing, as long as the majority of the time getting there is still fun. Rowing is a sport that requires a lot of hard work, that teaches us a lot about how to approach difficult moments in life. But just life life, sometimes just doing more or working harder isn’t the answer. We have to learn to be smart in our approach so the long term outcome is what we are looking for.  

Rowing culture creates some amazing personal habits, a phenomenal work ethic, amazing friendships and connections even on a global scale. You go somewhere and find another rower and you immediately have a lot to talk about and you generally understand them as a person who works hard, works together and looks to find their best self, it’s amazing! What I have always struggled with as a rower and as a physio/physical therapist is the ruthlessness and poor communication of athlete health that is embedded in rowing culture in a counterproductive way. I personally have played this game poorly in the past. I have rowed until things hurt too much to continue, broken ribs, had shoulder, knee, or hip pain and not said anything until it was in need of some serious time out of the boat. In hind-sight and when I work with rowers now, the better strategy is to act early and quickly when something isn’t right. The faster you act, generally the less time missed form training. It gives you time to find the root of the cause before you’re so deep in the hole that it takes weeks or months to get back out. It takes trial and error for sure, I am still doing that myself. But I have experienced a huge shift in understanding how to train and row smarter and the result has been that I keep getting faster. It’s hard to bring things up to teammates or coaches or trainers when they don’t feel right, but this is a part of the change. 

Part of this change with just a shift in conversation at the boat house, is make it part of the routine to check in with each other, with your rowers as a coach, with your teammates to encourage everyone to listen and take care of their bodies so you all can “just keep rowing” in the long run. To be honest with yourself when something starts to get tweaky and find some help or guidance. This is hard to do. It’s embedded in our culture for a very long time that more is better or faster. What can keep you doing more to be fast or just keep you happily rowing is understanding the various aspects that go into keeping a healthy rowing body. Knowing the signs of overtraining, of underfunding, or knowing the signs of a bad/injury based pain.

So what do you do when things start to feel off or just not right? Does it mean you miss one practice to save yourself from missing three weeks or more down the line? Does it mean you modify your rigging or position in the boat? The challenge that rowing has that most sports do not is the shear numbers of athletes on a sweeps team, or the variety of ages and experience levels amount juniors or masters rowers. Building a training for athletes in so many different stages of learning to row means it’s not perfect for everyone. So knowing that you might just need to make small tweaks to keep yourself healthy and that a coach or trainer should help you find a balance if needed. It’s not always a matter of strength or who has the best splits, sometimes it’s that a rower has a huge pile of classwork stresses, family stresses, financial stress or can’t sleep enough or eat enough or just cannot spend the time they need to recover between workouts to avoid going down the spiral of over drawing energy reserves and making yourself susceptible to injury. It’s not easy to account for everything, but we can start with talking about it all more and learning more to know how to manage the many many aspects of training and gaining speed that go way beyond how far you rowed today. 

With Power House Physio my goal is to provide you knowledge to empower you to listen to your body, to read your athletes/rowers tolerance of a training plan, to know what questions to ask and when to seek help AND to help rowers understand that training into a hole, rowing in pain and opening the door to frequent overuse injury no longer needs to be a part of our sport. You will be a faster rower if you remain healthy. Progress comes from consistency of training and taking care of yourself as a whole and not just checking off boxes practice to practice.