Do you feel you have too much to do and your rowers are not improving or you don’t have time to coach them as much as you would like to? Do you think something needs to change?

There are few reasons I’m going to list that make Rowing a very complex sport. Rowing has lots of interesting facts that we take for granted that slow down the learning process and make it difficult for many to practice at all or some extra.

Why is DIFFICULT to be GOOD at ROWING?

What makes it difficult and complex?

1. You can only get better at rowing by rowing on the water, many cannot do extra they are part of a program.
2. You cannot get good training in very extreme weather conditions: really cold, big wind, big rain, very humid-hot… So you cannot get good practice every time you want, you depend on the weather.
3. It takes lots of time to get the boat on the water, out, clean it, in this time you are not getting faster. This time is time you don’t get extra repetitions of training or fitness development.
4. The equipment is very expensive and you need a place to store the boats, space to do land workout and motorboats. So you cannot do it when you want to or without supervision.
5. The rowing movement is a totally new movement and you have never done it until you sit in a boat. So the more you sit in a boat and the more good strokes you take the more chances you have to be a good rower.
6. We don’t have an objective way to rank our rowers. Everything is very subjective and hard to quantify. So it’s hard for the coach and the rowers to understand a clear path to select the team boats. Like soccer or basketball…
7. Because the sport is so expensive, we cannot have enough professional coaches to coach the high numbers of rowers.  At the end the coaches are managers, lifeguards and organizers. They have no time to really coach their Team much.
8. The rowing machine people row on and test is stationary and doesn’t simulate the dynamic movement of the water. So the results and practice you get from it doesn’t have a direct effect on how fast your crews will be. That is complex….
9. The words used on the water are new complex –  for safety, rowing commands and new words on how to describe the rowing stroke by the coach, the parts of the boat and how to handle the equipment is lots of new information. The new rowers are easily overwhelmed by how much complexity there is in this new sport.
10. The better the water to row on the more chances you’ll learn faster and better. You normally cannot choose where to row, you normally row where you live or want to go to college. This makes complex to understand that this will have an influence in your training or rowing program and there is not much you can do about it.

So if I’m in charge of a rowing program and I know that I need to deal with all of that complexity what I’m going to try to do is to focus on how I can make it more simple for everyone. So SIMPLICITY and CLARITY will help me to:

• Have a faster TEAM
• Make rowers fast earlier.
• Have more time to COACH ROWING.

tomorrow we’ll run through ten pieces of key advice to make the whole experience more simple for your rowers and for you and as a consequence of that, achieve better results:

A Guest post by Carlos Dinares

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