Keeping easy rows genuinely easy

Recently, looking at the workouts people post online, I’ve found that a lot of people seem to be moving away from low intensity work. Not necessarily on purpose. The session is supposed to be easy, but you end up pushing harder, into that grey zone where you’re working harder without really getting the benefits of a higher intensity session.

You’re not getting much benefit from that extra energy you’re burning. Apart from extra fatigue.

Why people push harder

There are a few reasons people might do that. One is just a misunderstanding of the benefits you can get from low intensity training.

There’s also ego behind it. You want to prove to yourself that you can push hard, and seeing slow splits means that you are slow. Or that’s how you’re looking at it.

And there’s the idea that every session has to be hard. You have to push to the end and be breathing hard to get any benefit.

If you’re doing that, you’re pushing the training programme to its limits and beyond. You’re missing the benefit of low intensity training, but also the benefit of a full programme. That’s the cost of always pushing hard, even when the session is marked as easy.

Benefits of easy sessions and recovery

When there’s a variation of intensities, and the easy sessions actually are easy, you get plenty from them. Your body becomes more efficient. You learn mentally to sit on the rowing machine for a longer period of time.

Your technique can improve as well because you’ve actually got the mental capacity to work on it, rather than just hoping to survive.

You can do those sessions more often without burning yourself out. That means more consistent training and bigger benefits to your fitness over time. It also means you’re not burning extra energy that you need when the harder sessions come around.

Even myself, as an elite athlete training two to three times every day, there are sessions where I have to back off so I can attack the hard sessions. I can’t expect to recover for the next session if every session is hard.

It might feel good for a couple of weeks, maybe even a month or so. But at some point you’ll feel the effects of pushing too hard all the time.

That can show up as your splits stagnating. A lot of people talk about plateaus and how to push past them. In my experience, often it’s not that you can’t go any faster. You’re never getting a chance to recover, which means your body isn’t getting the chance to adapt to the training.

The work gives your body a stimulus. You still need the recovery to adapt to it. Pushing harder again doesn’t give you that chance.

What easy rowing feels like

I use heart rate because I’ve used it for over a decade. I know what mine does at low intensity and at high intensity. For me, low intensity sits between 60 and 75% of my maximum heart rate.

That doesn’t mean that range will work for you. There’s an individual zone to figure out, and heart rate training is a whole discussion of its own.

If you’re not keen on using heart rate, these are the things I’d look at:

You shouldn’t need to build yourself up for an easy row in the same way as a hard session. You can sit on the rowing machine or get on the water and just flow. You don’t have to find new parts of the pain cave to finish it.

That’s one of the reasons I recommend low intensity work. It’s repeatable.

I’m guilty of pushing it too hard as well. I certainly have relatively recently. You feel good and get excited, and the effort creeps up. Even then, most of the time I’m better off taking my foot off the gas on the easy sessions.