Training for different boat events.
Should there be different curves for different boats?

We know that the slowest boat is the 1x. After that we have the 2-, 2x and 4- and finally the 4x and the 8+. If we check the drive times of these different events at race pace we can see that the slowest has the longest drive time and the fastest boat the shortest drive time.

This is a data that we can take to the Rowperfect3.

If we are racing in a 1x we know that we will have a longer drive time, that means that we will have a higher drag factor. If we race in an 8+ we are going to have a lighter drag factor. Also we know that the lighter the drag factor is and the shorter the drive time the harder is to keep your body weight suspended all the way through the drive.

Because of that the harder it is make the curve peak later in the stroke. Also we know that the faster the boat the more effect there is of a front loaded drive and this also makes the peak force position move closer to the start of the curve.

To give some clear ideas here what I’m saying is that the curve will look different as you play with the drive time, stroke rate and drag factor. The curve needs to always go out [to be fat - convex not concave]. Depending on how you are built and where you find strength in your body will also have some effect on the shape of your curve. [Do you have a proportionately stronger upper or lower body?]

When should we peak the power curve?
I like everybody to start with a heavy drag, a low rate and trying to peak at 50% of the way through each stroke.

When they are able to produce a perfect curve like that peaking at 50%, then I start increasing the challenge by setting a lighter load and increasing the stroke rate. Also increasing the intensity makes it hard to sustain good coordination and mistakes on the power curve show up much more easily.

Do you think the power curve through the water and on the Rowperfect should be different based on whether you are sweeping or sculling? For example, if you are in an 8 should your peak power be earlier compared to if you are in a single, double or quad? And do you think that there should be a difference in that power curve between men and women?
The answer is I would do the same for everyone at the beginning of the season. As if everyone were rowing a 1x. Low rate, heavy drag factor and peaking at 50%.

As the season moves on, I will start reducing the drag on some workouts and increasing the rate. I will match the drive time in the water for the boat I’m going to race to the one on the Rowperfect3. The drive time is a field that the software gives and you can set to display on your computer screen.

Yes if you are doing pieces at race pace with the drive time of an 8+ you will be peaking at 35% to 38% of your power curve. If you are in a 1x it will be 45% to 50%.
The other events are on the middle numbers between 35% to 50%.

So what about curves for women versus men?
Power curves for women normally show less power in the second part of the stroke.

Women have proportionally more power in their legs and glutes than in their upper body. This will be clear from the power curve. Women are more front loaded and peak earlier in general than men. It is a question of power and strength.

Lifting weights and rowing are a fascinating unknown field. Nobody can assure you that lifting heavyweights will make you faster on the water. Erg test results don’t compare to water speed. To row on the water fast you need to be able to move a boat and to do that you need to be efficient. Bigger muscles go against muscle efficiency and coordination but they are needed to gain power. So how you gain this power and grow these muscles without losing coordination will be a key element of your training.

There is only one thing that is true. Whatever you do that makes you increase water speed is good. If you improve your lifting power, your erg score but don’t increase water speed, you are not really doing it right. If your erg score or how much you can lift had a direct relationship with how fast you can go at 38 strokes a minute during 2000 meters our sport will be too simple, it’s not.
When I coach athletes I like to develop their power using these 4 points listed:
1) Rowing at low rate with maximum power per stroke. I use the small boats and the Rowperfect3.
2) Rowing at low rates with a boungee cord on the water and a heavy drag on the Rowperfect3.
3) Doing lifting with multiple repetitions with very low weight doing parts of the rowing motion like jumpies, bar circuits and body circuits.
4) Doing sets of few strokes at multiple strokes rates with varaiation of drag on boat and Rowperfect3.

With that I achieve huge amounts of rowing efficient coordinated power. With that the athletes I coach can lead the race from the start and low at control rates with plenty of speed.

In this article listed under you can read that lifting lighter weights for a longer time stimulates muscle protein synthesis a lot. This is what i use instead of lifting heavy weights that make the rower to have a bigger chance to injure and destroy their body.

Bigger weights may not beget bigger muscles: evidence from acute muscle protein synthetic responses after resistance exercise

Nicholas A. Burd, Cameron J. Mitchell, Tyler A. Churchward-Venne, and Stuart M. Phillips

Abstract: It is often recommended that heavier training intensities (∼70%–80% of maximal strength) be lifted to maximize muscle growth. However, we have reported that intensities as low as 30% of maximum strength, when lifted to volitional fa- tigue, are equally effective at stimulating muscle protein synthesis rates during resistance exercise recovery. This paper dis- cusses the idea that high-intensity contractions are not the exclusive driver of resistance exercise-induced changes in muscle protein synthesis rates.

The contraction stimulus driving MPS
There are a myriad of resistance exercise variables, beyond intensity, which can be manipulated to produce diverse training mediated hypertrophy; these variables can include volume, muscle action, muscle time under tension, lifting cadence, contraction mode, and inter-set rest interval (American Col- lege of Sports Medicine 2009). Indeed, for each of these variables to have independent effects on muscle protein turnover, and thus hypertrophic adaptation, the skeletal muscle must be able to “gauge” these variables as distinct mechanical stimuli, such as interacting with the metabolic and hormonal milieu, that can subsequently be transformed into intramuscular signals that leads to the stimulation of MPS. Theoretically, each variable would elicit a specific muscle phenotypic response. However, such evidence is, at least in our view, lacking. From a systems perspective, the input into a skeletal motor unit–muscle fibre to lift a weight would come from the neural signals it received, and these signals would determine whether to fire or not fire and at what frequency. The surrounding nutrient milieu would then dictate (to a variable degree) the response of the fibre in terms of MPS (Biolo et al. 1997), which would ulti- mately sum to yield hypertrophy over time. When viewed from this perspective, there is an underlying commonality between many RT variables such that application of any variable in such a way to induce muscle activation ulti- mately serves to activate the same intramuscular signaling pathways necessary to stimulate MPS and potentially training- induced hypertrophy. Indeed, many will argue that the phe- notype of ultimate importance with any program of RT is both strength and hypertrophy and we do not disagree with this. However, a common link between these variables is hypertrophy, and thus we focus on gains in muscle protein mass in this review. Strength gains are, however, a product of neuromuscular and muscular adaptations as reviewed elsewhere (Sale 1988).
Resistance exercise intensities of ∼70%–80% of 1 repeti- tion maximum (1RM) for 8–12 repetitions are the classically prescribed protocols to use to maximize training-induced muscle hypertrophy (American College of Sports Medicine 2009).

What is so intrinsically unique about high-intensity re- sistance exercise in terms of promoting exercise-induced MPS? It may be related to the existence of a positive relationship between greater force development and increased muscle electromyographic activity (Alkner et al. 2000). Accordingly, a greater recruitment of muscle fibres at high exercise intensities may occur to stimulate a robust MPS response. Kumar and colleagues (2009) provide support for the concept of a dose–response relationship between external work-equated exercise intensities and MPS. From this work it appears the relationship reaches a plateau between intensities of ∼60–90% of 1RM (Kumar et al. 2009).

This outcome, we propose, is likely a product of maximal, or at least near max- imal, muscle fibre recruitment at contraction intensities be- yond 60% of 1RM. Thus, there would be little reason to expect a large difference in MPS unless the muscle fibre had an intricately sensitive mechanism to detect a difference be- tween 60% and 90% of 1RM, a concept that appears, at least according to all available data, highly unlikely. It is generally accepted that motor units are recruited in accordance with the size principle during voluntary muscle contraction (Henne- man et al. 1965).

Against this background, it would seem reasonable to assume that lower intensities performed to volitional fatigue (i.e., task failure) could achieve a similar degree of muscle fibre activation to that of high-intensity resistance exercise regimes performed to task failure, and presumably a similar stimulation of MPS during recovery.
Certainly, such a thesis would be dependent on the notion that maximal fibre activation occurs at the moment of fatigue, which is an idea that has support.

Our laboratory has recently tested the thesis that eliciting failure during high- or low-intensity resistance exercise leads to maximal muscle fibre activation, and thus a similar stimu- lation of MPS. It was demonstrated, in resistance-trained young men, that lower intensity (30% of 1RM) and higher volume (24 ± 3 repetitions, means ± SD) resistance exercise performed until failure was equally effective in stimulating myofibrillar protein synthesis rates during 0–4 h recovery as heavy intensity (90% of 1RM) and lower volume (5 ± 1 rep- etitions) resistance exercise (Burd et al. 2010b).

Interestingly, exercise performed at 30% of 1RM induced a longer-lasting effect on MPS at 21–24 h of exercise recovery (Burd et al. 2010b). The observation of a sustained elevation in myofibrillar protein synthesis rates after the low-intensity–higher volume regime corroborates recent data demonstrating that exercise volume is an integral factor for sustaining the myofibrillar protein synthetic response during exercise recovery (Burd et al. 2010a).

Thus, an additional benefit of low-intensity resistance exercise is that it allows for higher total number of repetitions to be performed, which is an important variable to sustain the response, and still eventually results in full motor unit recruitment.

For clarity, the performance of dynamic knee extension exercise at 30% of 1RM to failure, as we did previously (Burd et al. 2010b), induces fatigue in the contracting leg within 24 repetitions. This number of repetitions effectively minimizes the time that loaded muscle is under tension and likely prevents a shift toward the synthesis of non-contractile proteins (Burd et al. 2012). Also, leg extension exercise, even at low intensities, is effective at inducing temporary occlusion of blood flow (Wernbom et al. 2009).

Thus, other types of resistance exercises (e.g., leg press) would require more repetitions to induce fatigue with an intensity at 30% of 1RM (Hoeger et al. 1990). An argument that is commonly put forward is the sustained elevation in postabsorptive MPS observed after the low-intensity–higher volume condition, such as in our previous study (Burd et al. 2010b), simply represents a state of increased muscle protein turnover as compared with the high-intensity condition.

We cannot completely dismiss such an argument as invalid. It is clear the substrates to support MPS, in the fasting state, are the amino acids released from muscle protein breakdown (Phil- lips et al. 1997). However, examining the 24-h responses after feeding 15 g of high-quality protein, and thus decreas- ing muscle protein breakdown (Biolo et al. 1997), demon- strates that myofibrillar protein accretion is occurring in similar magnitude to the high-intensity condition (Burd et al. 2011). Thus, we speculate that low-intensity training would result in a similar amount of training-induced muscle mass as high-intensity resistance training.

Training in rowing is a long process. In order to become good at rowing you need to change behaviors and generate new ones that help you to become a better rower and create real habits of those good behaviors. There is no other way. You cannot be competitive at rowing if you are not taking seriously this list of actions:

1) Train everyday. A day off is a way to let the body rest because of good and long hard training or a day that you don’t have time to train.
2) Train always with a purpose. Take every stroke or do every repetition with a purpose. Don’t row without thinking about your rowing.
3) Eat well.
4) Sleep as much as you can.
5) Reduce daily stress.
6) Follow a training plan that you believe on.
7) Get good coaching to help you create good habits on your rowing stroke and help you to know what you need to do or improve.
a) Commit to real changes.
9) See what you don’t do that well as opportunities to get faster.. Positive attitude!
10) Have short and long terms goals with targets and tests down the process. Row for life!

Watch this video!

In this video you can see a group of athletes getting ready for the Olympics who follow many of the points listed above if not all! You can have the same approach, you don’t need to be an Olympian!!
You only need to have your own goals and make them a priority in your daily life to improve your rowing and be better at what you want. It takes to want to and to write your path to your vision of who you want to be and become.

Top-ranked Washington rowers dominate 26th Windermere Cup
On a cool, calm morning on Montlake Cut, Washington boats put on another dominant Windermere Cup performance, winning all but one of the key races by healthy margins.

BETTINA HANSEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

The Washington men’s crew crushes its competition, from left, Virginia, Argentina and Oregon State to win the Windermere Cup on Saturday.

At Saturday’s 26th annual Windermere Cup, Virginia men’s rowing coach Frank Biller got eyewitness confirmation of what he already knew: No. 1 Washington has one formidable crew.

“UW is just way ahead,” Biller said after placing third in the men’s varsity eight Windermere Cup race, a split second behind Argentina (a boat rowed by national-team members) and nearly 15 seconds behind the Huskies. “Maybe Cal (ranked No. 3) and Harvard (No. 2) following.

“They’re just a spectacular program.”

On a cool, calm, partly cloudy morning on Montlake Cut, Washington boats put on what have become typically dominant Windermere Cup performances, winning all but one of the key races by healthy margins.

The lone upset: The University of Victoria won the women’s freshman eight race, topping the UW-1 boat by nearly nine seconds.

The Washington men’s varsity eight, the defending Intercollegiate Rowing Association champion, won in 5 minutes, 45 seconds, followed by Argentina (5:59.8), 20th-ranked Virginia (5:59.9) and No. 19 Oregon State (6:03.6).

The sixth-ranked UW women won the women’s Windermere Cup in 6:35.9, far ahead of Gonzaga (6:53.6) and Argentina (7:03.5). UW’s men and women have now won six straight Cups.

UW’s second-varsity boats both won Erickson Cascade Cup races: the men (5:48.5) by 27 seconds over Oregon State and the women (6:44.3) by 3.5 over Otago, one of New Zealand’s top collegiate women’s crews. The UW men’s freshman eight won in 5:45.7, almost matching the varsity’s time. UW boats finished 1-2 in both varsity four races.

Rob Munn, a Redmond grad, rowed his final race on the Cut in the V8 boat.

“We ripped off a pretty good start and set the pace all the way down the course,” he said. “We made sure we were really locked in from the first stroke to the last stroke.”

“It wasn’t as fast as I expected,” he said. UW rowed a 5:30 while defeating Cal on April 21.

The Cup’s course record is 5:31.75, set by the Croatian Olympic team in 2001. Was he aiming for that time?

“Always,” Callahan said with a smile. “We had a couple of targets early on that we missed. That’s a goal for our guys.”

Next up: the Pac-12 championships next Sunday and the IRAs at the end of the month.

“Even when you have positive results, how do you keep the urgency in the crew going?” Callahan said. “That’s a key for us.

“We have to talk about it, the guys have to manufacture it and we have to get better.”

Notes

• Argentina veered into Oregon State’s lane midway through the men’s V8 race, and oars clashed.

“It was interesting having four boats on the race course,” Callahan said. “We don’t have lane markers, so it became a heated battle out there.

“We would call it ‘getting out of their station,’ impeding on another boat, so it was pretty hard-fought in the middle. The referees tried to split the boats multiple times, and they did, but they kept coming back to each other. I think it was unintentional. It’s so loud here, you can’t hear the referee telling you to move over. It’s unfortunate; you want clean runs down the course. But some paint chips came off, let’s put it that way.”

• The OSU coach is Steve Todd, a 1999 UW grad and past rower who was wearing his ring from UW’s 1997 championship season.

“It got rough out there,” he said. “Argentina kind of wandered over into our water, and our guys had a few seats at the time, sitting on a lead. We didn’t assert ourselves into the lead after we clashed. We kind of faltered in our rhythm after that. It was a big distraction in the middle of the race, and we kind of fell apart. That’s part of racing, though.”

• UW’s freshman men’s eight had some crazy prerace moments.

“One of our guests took our oars,” Callahan said, adding that UW customarily loans gear during the Cup. “So we had to scramble, and it felt like we were in a NASCAR pit crew. We had changed links and gearing on the oars, so someone had to come in here (the Conibear Shellhouse), change another set of oars and drive them back out to the boat. It’s a calamity on the water, trying to take the oars out on the water, because the boat might flip. So they’re tossing oars in and out of the water, trying to get ready for the race. It was pretty funny. I wish we had a video of it.”

• The Huskies rowed a new shell named after William Peter Allen, a Puyallup rower who died at age 21 while scrambling on a mountainside with some teammates near Snoqualmie Pass last September. Rowers also wore patches in honor of Allen.

“We kept our eyes open and really enjoyed the moment.”

• UW women’s coach Bob Ernst was pleased with the varsity-eight performance.

“For the part that I could see, the first 1,000 meters, I thought it looked pretty solid,” he said.

• Virginia boatman Roger Payne rowed for UW as a lightweight in 1974 and is a former Oregon State women’s coach. After seeing Cal and Harvard, he’s most impressed by UW.

“They’re a dominant crew,” he said. “I would not be surprised if they won the IRAs by open water.”

Great video of rower from the M2- from New Zealand with a great chance to win Gold medal in London 2012.

The video has great steady state rowing at low rate and with plenty of power per stroke. The New Zealand pair trains a lot long rows of 20km no stop at low rate and maximal effort to build good coordination and power x stroke. I really believe this training works and their speed is another example of it. They are talented, believe on their system and coach and work really hard day after day. They do quality day after day for years. They do it again and again!

The Rower – Our Waikato 100 from Waikato Times on Vimeo.

If you ask me if a rower needs to lift or not, and when, what and how much, this is the answer I will give you:

It is different for each person and I use this list to decide what I do:

1) Male or female.
2) Age.
3) Lightweight or heavyweight rower.
4) Goal (Head race, 2000 race or 1000 meter race or just rowing for the pleasure of it).
5) Body of the rower (each rower has a different body, some have more natural power than others and some have more important imbalances on their body parts than others).
6) Situation of the rower development. How long he or she has been training and where the rower is on its development process.

So the reality is that there is no a direct answer to weight lifting yes or no… or to how much, what and when. It depends of the rower and a good rowing coach will develop a training program adapted to the needs of the rower he is coaching.

We know that rowing needs rhythm, and rhythm comes over good drive on the water. We know that a good drive requires good coordinated power and we know that good coordinated power requires power. How you develop that power and when will be the key to achieve rhythm. You can develop an athlete over years so developments of power that go against coordination can be detrimental to the rowing motion at the moment of doing it but really useful down the road. What we know for sure is that to move a boat fast we need coordinated power and the more the better.

Here is a good article from the New York Times: By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 28, 2008

MIKE PERRY, a 31-year-old rower, trained by himself in Ann Arbor, Mich., for six years while his wife attended medical school. Now he is a member of the United States rowing team and hopes to be selected in a couple of months to compete in the Summer Olympic Games.

These days, he works with a coach and a team, and for the first time he is also going to a gym twice a week and lifting free weights for his upper and lower body, and doing a lot of core exercises, he said. His coach insists upon it. Mr. Perry, though, said he cannot tell whether weight lifting is helping his performance.

His 29-year-old teammate, Mark Flickinger, thinks weight lifting has helped him. He said it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of training by rowing on the water and weight lifting at the gym.

But, he added, after three years of working with weights — including lifting to failure, the point at which he cannot do another repetition — he has become a better athlete. The training “improved my P.B.’s by a substantial margin,” he said, referring to personal bests, his best performances.

As it turns out, the question of whether weight training matters to serious endurance athletes is a matter of debate.

Researchers who study weight lifting, or resistance training as it often is called, are adamant. It definitely helps, they say. But other experts in the field are not so sure.

Gary R. Hunter, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a believer. He cites, for example, a recent study involving middle-distance runners. Three months of resistance training, he said, improved their leg strength and running efficiency, a measure of how much effort it took to run.

And, he said, it is not just runners who become more efficient.

“There is no doubt that an appropriate weight-training program would improve efficiency in pretty much any athlete,” Dr. Hunter said.

William J. Kraemer, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said lifting weights also can increase endurance and reduce the risk of injury, especially to connective tissue.

And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said.

“The fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said. Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr. Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are not going to have big muscles.”

But other researchers, like Patrick O’Connor, an exercise scientist at the University of Georgia, are not convinced.

Dr. O’Connor points out that the weight-lifting studies, as is typical in exercise science, are small. And each seems to examine a different regimen, to measure outcome differently and to study different subjects — trained athletes, sedentary people, recreational athletes. It becomes almost impossible to draw conclusions, he said.

That may be one reason why different athletes end up doing different weight-lifting exercises. Chris Martin, a 31-year-old chemical engineer who has an elite racing license from USA Triathlon, the governing body for the sport, works on his entire body. But for his legs, he does exercises like leg extensions using one leg at a time, to correct any muscle imbalances or weaknesses. Mr. Martin, who lives in Lawrenceville, N.J., said he got the idea from coaches and from his own reading.

“Cycling and running are one-leg-at-a-time activities,” he explained. And one-legged exercises “recruit more muscles that help the hips.”

Steve Spence, who won a bronze medal in the marathon at the 1991 track and field world championships in Tokyo, is also a proponent of one-legged exercises. Now 45 years old and the head cross-country coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, Mr. Spence enters local 5-kilometer races and typically finishes in about 15 ½ minutes.

“I feel that every major breakthrough with my running has come after a period of strength training,” he said. He attributes this to the emphasis he puts on leg exercises, but he also believes that working his upper body and abdomen helped.

Other athletes concentrate on exercises that require them to jump or leap to develop explosive power.

And many top athletes spend lots of time in gyms lifting weights, and many trainers and coaches swear by it.

For example, the distance runners who are part of Team Running USA do resistance training for 30 to 60 minutes six days a week, said Terrence Mahon, a coach for the team. This group includes marathon stars Deena Kastor and Ryan Hall, the winner of the Olympic marathon trials last November.

“We do it all,” Mr. Mahon said. “We do upper body, core and lower body. The stronger the athlete is in a total body perspective, the more efficient they become as a runner.”

The Team USA runners do five to six exercises per session, he said. For example, upper body exercises may include pull-ups, the overhead press, bench press, rowing and exercises for the biceps and triceps. Lower body exercises include step-ups, squats, single leg squats, snatches and the leg press.

The main problem with weight lifting is that many people do it all wrong, said Kent Adams, the director of the exercise physiology laboratory at California State University at Monterey Bay. They don’t have a program or a goal. Technique may be sloppy. Or, Dr. Adams said, they use weights that are too light. Muscles need to be stressed if they are to respond, he said.

Dr. Kraemer is on the same page. One study, he said, found that women tend to lift half or less of what they could lift. And this happened even when women were working with personal trainers, he said.

“There is so much misinformation,” Dr. Kraemer said. “It’s a quagmire out there.” He recommends trainers certified by the National Strength and Conditioning Association, which also supplies educational information. Dr. Kraemer is a past president of the organization.

The right trainer, these researchers say, can be helpful when people are learning to lift weights. Not only can trainers teach proper technique, but they also can help people develop programs that meet their goals.

“I hate to say that a trainer is required for everybody,” Dr. Adams said. “But I think it is an excellent way to learn.”

That said, though, the evidence that weight lifting can improve performance is equivocal enough to leave plenty of room for the skeptics. And not every successful athlete spends serious time lifting weights.

DR. O’CONNOR, for example, lifts weights for health, for enjoyment and for vanity’s sake (he does not want an emaciated upper body, he said), but stops lifting when he is training to run a marathon. Those muscles, he said, “are just dead weight you have to carry around.” He adds that a sport like rowing, swimming or running requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns that may best be developed by actually doing the sport.

“If your goal is to improve running performance, then weight training should probably mimic the running pattern,” he said. “If you do leg extensions, you can get stronger, but people don’t run like that.”

That’s pretty much what Cathy O’Brien, a 40-year-old distance runner, thinks. She started racing when she was 12 and ran the marathon in the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games.

“As far as resistance training, I have always been a minimalist,” she said. She does push-ups, pull-ups and dips for her upper body, and abdominal exercises, but does not work her legs.

“I think that running is the best thing for running results, ” Ms. O’Brien said.

Kevin Hanson, a coach for the Hansons-Brooks team of distance runners, is of like mind.

“We do some weight training,” he said. But other than some abdominal exercises, “everything we do is for the upper body.”

He has a ready answer for runners who ask about doing exercises for their legs.

“You let me know if you think we are not working your legs enough,” Mr. Hanson said. “There’s a lot more we can do to beat you up. But you don’t have to lift weights.”

I’m in Amsterdam and had the chance to spend the evening with Frans Göbel and his family. Finally after many years i got the chance to seat on a table with him and talk about rowing, what an evening!
I remember Frans back in 1990 in the Banyoles lake next to Barcelona training with the Dutch team. He was at the time the former World rowing champion in the LM 1x. I remember him leaving the rowing dock every morning at rate 26 with his clean and powerful rowing.

Last night we had this amazing rowing conversation for few hours.

We talked about everything from feel to power per stroke, catch, timing, blade shape, training, balance, release, coordination, starts, racing strategy and more and more. What a rower! It was fascinating to listen to Frans and at all his experiences and be able to ask him directly about feel and rhythm.

Of all the things we talked Frans really got me with ” Don’t disturb the water” and he was right. He wanted me to understand how important is to coach rowers to catch the speed of the boat with the right timing and with a clean puddle, not just disturbing the water and not locking on. How right Frans is and how hard is to coach that right and to execute it! I’m so excited to go back to my single and start rowing with more focus on my clean and perfect stroke as Frans urged me to do!

Thank you very much Frans Göbel!