Training Advice for the Indoor Rowing Season

If you need a winter training goal, perhaps you should think about training for a 2000 metre race on the Concept2 Indoor Rower. There are races all over the globe and you don’t have to be an elite athlete to participate. Find a race near you or in a place that you’ve always wanted to visit!

To help you prepare for racing—or to help you spice up your workouts even if you don’t plan to race—we’re bringing back some ageless training advice from our archives. In this article, former C2 in-house coach Larry Gluckman offers his five favorite workouts—all of which should be part of your training diet.

The Coach's Favorite Five

Written by Larry Gluckman, C2 Coach-in-Residence, Fall 1995

Your preparation for the 2k should fall predominately into the aerobic area and should be focused on distance, measured both in time and in metres. With this in mind, I would like to offer my five favorite types of workouts as a guide for your winter preparation. Good luck and good racing.

1. Endurance: Rows of 30–45 minutes or 7500–10,000 metres. This workout category includes:
   • 30 minute time trials for the World Ranking.
   • A continuous 4 x 2500m with decreasing splits in terms of pace each 2500m.
   • "Swing" rows at 20–30 seconds above race pace. (A swing row is a steady moderately paced row, not so fast that you can't keep up a conversation the whole time.)
   • And the old favorite 5–8 x (3 min., 2 min., and 1 min.) continuously varying stroke rate and intensity as you move through each timed segment.
2. Overdistance: Rows of longer than the race distance, such as: 2 x 6000 metres with 5 minutes rest between keeping the pace steady but trying to improve your overall time for both pieces periodically.
3. Repetitions: Moderate intensity work intervals alternated with short rests, such as: 15 x 1 minute and 40 seconds working at 4–6 seconds slower than race pace, with 20 seconds rest.
4. Long Intervals: 3–5 x 1500m at 3–5 seconds slower than race pace, with 3–5 minutes rest between pieces.
5. Intervals: High intensity work intervals with rest for 1–3 times the work duration, such as: 2–3 sets of 3 x 500m at 3–6 seconds faster than race pace, with 3 min. rest between 500m pieces and 6–8 minutes between sets.

Assuming that training goes well and you decide to race, we also suggest this article: Finding Your Pace for the 2k, a time-tested process for zeroing in on the 2k pace that will give you the best performance.