Time to be more creative with your rowing machine workouts?
Technology is opening up new opportunities for rowing coaches to look outside of rowing for inspiration and prescribe more engaging indoor rowing workouts to their athletes…
Time for new rowing machine workouts
I’ve been a competitive rower for most of my adult life (some times more competitive than others) but during the pandemic I’ve been doing more and more cycling, both on Zwift and in real life – I even joined a club with no regrets, it’s much more enjoyable to ride as a group!
One of the fun aspects of Zwift in particular is the variety of workouts that you can do. Variable intervals at variable power and variable cadences… and it made me wonder why rowing workouts aren’t anywhere near as interesting… is it, in part, because of the sheer complexity/tedium of trying to input a complex workout structure into a Concept2 PM monitor? Or any rowing machine for that matter!
Figure 1 – Some sample workouts from the Zwift online cycling platform & The infamous Mat Hayman Paris-Roubaix workout from the Zwift online cycling platform.
A lot of the focus here at Ludum is on making coaches’ lives easier, but when we developed C2 connectivity within the app it takes all the pain of setting up the PM5 monitors away from the athletes. The coach can create a session as simple or as complex as they like and all the athletes have to do is open the app, connect to the erg and the Ludum app will program the session into the monitor for them – no more up down arrows, no more mistakes and having to go back to the beginning etc.
Whether it’s a simple 2000m piece, or a complex mixture of intervals, it’s really simple for athletes. But in addition to getting the training data instantly delivered directly to them in detailed reports, it also gives coaches a really good opportunity to be more creative with their indoor rowing workouts. Using variable times and distances coaches can give their athletes something a bit more interesting to do whilst also knowing that they won’t need a PhD to program the monitor correctly!
There’s no excuse now, get creative!
This blog post has been adapted from a post originating on LinkedIn, why not join the discussion.
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