Warm Ups & Cool Downs for Competitive Rowing

Video Transcript

" Hi! It's Anna Marie and I am a Canadian Olympic rower. I am here on behalf of expertvillage.com. Now you figure out if you are going to be lightweight or heavyweight, what to wear, how to set your boat up and most of all, let's get down to training. All right, so you've got a training session coming up and you want to make sure that you are fully prepared for that training session. You got to make sure that every training session you do you get a really good warm up and you leave time at the end for a good cool down. Whether you are rowing in hot weather or very cold weather, it is very important to get a really good thorough warm up so that your muscles, your joints and everything is ready to give all you have to the work out portion of the session. So when you are warming up depending on the type of work out that you are going to be doing, if you are doing intervals during your work out, say you are doing one minute pieces and you are doing 15 of them. You want to make sure that before you start that first piece that your body is ready to go, ready to give everything for that piece. So you probably want to do maybe a minimum of 30 to 50 warm up strokes; anywhere up to a 100 warm up strokes. So building the pressure, building the rate until your body is really moving nice and easily at the rate that you are going to be doing your work out at. After you finished your work out, make sure that you have enough time. It could be anywhere between 2 and 4 kilometers to row out nice and easy to let your body cool down after your work out. This will really allow your muscles to recover a lot faster from the work out to be prepared for your next one which could be either later on that day or the next day. So whether you are on the erg, on the rowing machine, out on the water or you are doing some cross training, make sure that you are fully warmed up and you have taken the time to be fully cooled down. It will help you get the most out of yourself at each session."