Spicing it Up

I hope all of you saw the video Austin posted.  There are a lot of positives from watching video of yourself rowing.  Analyzing catches, body position, grip, oar angle, blade depth; the list goes on and on.  What I want to talk about is what we were doing on this video, SPICE!

When the 8 was selected about 2.5 weeks ago we hadn't really tested the speed of the boat at high rates.  We had done a lot of work, mostly seat racing, at Dan's beloved seat race stroke rate of 33.5.  33 is too low and 34 is a little too high, so 33.5 was the rate.  Anyway, Dan introduced us to spice rowing.  He talked about it coming from the Dutch, I believe.  It's a work out where you go 40 seconds full pressure and then 20 seconds off and repeat, many times.   The most we've done is 3 sets of 15 minutes.  That's 30 minutes of really hard, intense rowing!  The cool thing is that the human body doesn't start going nuts until after 40 seconds of hard rowing and 20 seconds of recovery is just enough to allow you to repeat.

The goal of the workout for me is to row hard, but efficiently.  That's something that we are trying to do as a unit.  If we can get to the 1000 meter mark at the same time as everyone else and use just 1 or 2% less energy to get there, then we can hang on the oar a little more and press a little harder in the 2nd half of the race and have that extra gear in the end.

1' pieces Wed evening

This is the 3rd or 4th time we've done spice and the workout is really starting to grow on me.  It's very helpful.  You can do many of them at base pace or at higher, sprint pace.  This morning we were working on the sprint portion and just testing what rates were most efficient.  Tomorrow we're going to do some longer race peaces.  Needless to say, Dan is preparing us well to drop the hammer when we see the green light in Bled.

Thanks for following and have a good night.
- Jimmy