LITTLE ROCK — When winter makes staying indoors safer than venturing out, the Arkansas Boathouse Club tucks away its oars and settles in for a long winter’s ... conditioning program.
What, you thought they take a nap? Silly you. Physical training never ends for central Arkansas’ river-rowing crew.
They keep up their team-building drills by rowing their small fleet of Concept2 indoor rowing machines, called ergometers. And they are the state’s foremost experts on how to use the devices they affectionately call “ergs.”
They’re also experts on the use of less sport-specific rowing machines, such as the WaterRowers and LifeCore machines common at health clubs. This crew’s winter fitness program is versatile enough to be used by anyone who has access to any sort of indoor rower.
Every winter for about five years, Steve Denne has supervised the club’s off-season training. For his day job, Denne is chief operating officer of Heifer International, which has its headquarters next to the Clinton Presidential Center just across the river from the boathouse. That proximity allows him to work out six days a week; he also enjoys planning three workouts a week for the crew mates.
Two of these weekly sessions are erg workouts combined with calisthenics done on the floor or against the walls of the little boathouse (a brick building with garage doors on the North Little Rock riverfront almost in the shadow of the Interstate 30 bridge).
For the two midweek workouts, because machine rowing can be “pretty mind-numbing,” Denne has developed “a whole set of different combinations of erg pieces.” These divide the machine time into pace and skill drills as well as cardiovascular-endurance-building longer pulls. And the plans change from day to day, much the way swimmers’ workout plans divvy up their time in the pool, with some laps devoted to easy swimming, others to each of the major strokes and still others to awkward drills that develop one ticky little aspect of a particular stroke.
Denne mixes these traditional calisthenics into typical weekday workouts (see accompanying photos):
- squats
- push-ups
- wall climbs
- wall sits
- crunches
- jumping jacks
- the plank
- the side plank
- jumpees
- Russian twist
For instance, Dec. 4, before hopping onto the club’s Concept2 ergs for a brisk cardiovascular workout, the boathouse crew did 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 90 seconds of the plank and 20jumpees.
Their erg work that day was a 15-minute pyramid with incremental increases in rowing intensity. The first five minutes, the pace was a relatively easy 20 strokes per minute. Then came four minutes at 22 strokes per minute, three minutes at 24 strokes per minute, two minutes at 26 strokes per minute and one minute at a fiery 28 strokes per minute.
Then they rested for three minutes.
And then, yes, they did the whole pyramid as another 15-minute set.
The workout ended with stretches.
That’s just one example of how their winter workouts roll.
“Sometimes there’s long erg pieces, sometimes many short pieces,” he says. The longer they sit and row on the ergometers, the less brisk their pace tends to be. “The idea is that if they’re only a minute long, you have to be really moving. If you’re going to do it for an hour, then it’s a little [easier] pace.”
WEEKEND CIRCUIT
The third session, on Saturday mornings, is a circuit workout.
“It’s nine stations,” Denne says. “Three of them are ergs.And then we do weights. The way it works is you have 45 seconds at each station and then 15 sections to switch.”
Here’s the bare-bones plan for a typical Saturday circuit:
- push-ups
- crunches
- row on the erg
- wall sit
- triceps dips
- erg
- scorpion
- dumbbell curls
- erg
Most of these are common exercises. (For the scorpion, you lie face down with your arms outstretched from your sides. Rotate your hips to kick one foot in the air in the general direction of the opposite hand. Alternate sides.)
Doing the circuit five times creates a 45-minute, nonstop workout that anyone who knows what a scorpion is could replicate using any rowing machine.
“It’s a fun way to make 45 minutes go fast,” he promises.
ROWING FORM
When they work out at gyms in central Arkansas, Boathouse crew members say, they notice the rowing machines. They spot the untrained users right away.
“They think it’s all upper body,” says crew member Amy Ballard. “It’s not. We row with our legs, too.”
Yates Phillips says, “They do doggy rowing” - twisting their wrists and pulling on the machine handle. “And they have the grip o’ death on that handle. I see them yanking it almost straight up at their noses when they slide backward.”
“People need to row ‘in a box’ rather than an oval,” says Jim Smith. “Imagine a tabletop between you and the place where the handle comes out of the machine. The handle moves back and forth along the tabletop in a line.”
The crew tapes 1 1/2-inch rectangles beside the hole where the handle emerges from the body of the erg, so they can see if the strap is angling too far up or down.
ROW LIKE A PRO
But much of their advice is about safeguarding good habits for rowing on the water,where the speed with which one mate glides back and forth on his saddle can actually slow the boat or even stall it. The club’s indoor rowing technique is specific to rowing on the water, so Denne won’t say that everybody else’s methods are wrong. They might not be all that wrong if you aren’t trying to be a helpful member of somebody’s rowing crew.
But, crew mates say, some pointers relate to preventing strain. It is possible to hurt yourself with sloppy rowingmachine technique.
Machine setup:
When you sit down, adjust the foot braces so when your legs are extended they will be parallel to the floor. When it’s possible to strap feet in place, the user ought to.
“There’s a straight bar that the seat glides on,” Denne notes. “I like to have the top of my ankles right about even with that. ... The force of pushing your legs goes horizontal. You don’t want to be pushing up into the air or down at the ground.”
Your arms just hold the handle; your legs provide the drive that pulls it back.
The boathouse uses a slightly different motion. To imitate what happens with the oar in the water, they pull the handle in a straight line, make a small hand movement, then let the handle make a straight line back, and make another small hand movement.
If you’re not training for the water, Denne says, just draw the handle straight out and then let it return to the front of the machine in a straight line.
“What I’ve seen people in the [Little Rock] Racquet Club do is what we call rowing on an oval. When they compress their legs, they drop their hands and their shoulders and their chin and go down, and when they push their legs off, they lift their hands up into a wide oval motion. What that does is waste force by going up and going down instead of going straight across.”
Keep your upper body alert and upright; hinge at your hips when you need to lean forward or back.
“It’s bad for your back if you’re hunched over or if you try to bend your arms before your legs are flat,” Denne says.
Good posture means “keeping your shoulders square and your chin up, the back flat.”
Never lean way back or far forward.
As you drive back with your legs and the handle reaches your chest, hinge at the hips so your upper body leans back a little, to 11 o’clock. This position is called “the finish,” and you hang in it briefly before beginning to slowly reverse your motion (see accompanying story) in “the recovery.”
Don’t drop your elbows as the handle reaches your chest.
“The elbows should be at the same level as the handle,” Phillips says. “And the handle’s at the bra line, if you’re a woman, or your lower ribs for a man.”
No doggy paws.
The wrists should remain level without twisting as you move backward with the handle held lightly in both hands.
“As with many sports the trick is to be both relaxed and focused,” Denne says. “When people get all tense it not only tends to translate into poor technique but it can mess you up physically as well.”
Drive with your legs while your arms essentially hang from the handle.
Let your movements be fluid,and relax so you can enjoy the effort.
“I think it’s been proven it’s more efficient” to follow the stroke guidelines used in real rowing, Denne says. “Even in indoor rowing competitions, people who have kind of a lumberjack technique where they’re moving like pistons back and forth - if you’re strong enough and you have great cardio you can do that - it’s not as efficient.”
Rowing efficiency is not about brute force, although “you can make that work on a rowing machine,” he concedes.
“But that doesn’t work on the water.” Concept2 has developed many videos that detail good form on rowing machines. They can be found at concept2.com under “Indoor rowers” and “technique.” More information about the Arkansas Boathouse Club is at ar-boathouse.org.
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 12/31/2012