Better Training Zones for Rowing

Heart Rate Zones and Power Zones derived from FTP (Functional Threshold Pace), as used by cyclists and triathletes, are adaptable to Rowing. And there is also the UT1, UT2, AT, TR, AN system calculated from 2k race pace commonly used in Rowing. As well there is RPE or Rate of Perceived Exertion that can be subjectively estimated by the athlete.

Internal and External Load
RPE and Heart Rate are internal measures of workload or, more accurately, of its effect on the athlete. 500m Split Pace or the Average Power registered by your Ergometer Monitor are external measures of mechanical work actually performed.

However, RPE can be a remarkably reliable estimate of external workload when used by athletes that can be honest with themselves and have considerable experience at comparing RPE with other measures. Heart Rate, while internally valid is less externally reliable because of the phenomenon of Cardiac Drift, a steady climb of heartrate over the duration of a workout, and also because of the influence on it of emotional mood as well as of extrinsic conditions such as temperature and humidity. This makes it less useful for setting the intensity of a workout but nonetheless useful for gauging how well you actually coped with an intensity. A comparison of internal load to external load is clearly useful.

Power and Pace
Power is interchangeable with Pace as a measure of intensity on an Erg. And Power or Pace Zones can be calculated either from FTP determined by a 60-20minute all out piece using percentages of critical pace, or from a 2k Race time using a power profile derived from Jensen’s Golden Standard.

Your 2k pace can also be approximately extrapolated from your FTP and vice versa (again according to a standard power profile). Your individual power profile may vary from this, but if you have measured one of these, you can make a fair approximation of the other. A beginner not ready to perform a time trial could even use Rate of Perceived Exertion to establish approximate temporary training zones by extrapolating MAP and FTP from their Easy (conversational) Pace.

Comparing P Zones with H Zones
To make the comparison of a Heart Rate Zone with a Power or Pace Zone meaningful, you need to base your power zones not on average 2k race pace but on vVo2 max, the maximum velocity you require to reach maximum oxygen uptake. vVO2max can also be expressed as Maximum Aerobic Power (MAP).

Because your average 2k Pace also incorporates an anaerobic component, vVO2max is slightly, perhaps 5%, slower than 2k pace. Again, this depends on your power profile. If you are predominantly a ‘sprinter’ i.e. anaerobically dominant, your vVO2max might be 75% of 2k Pace. Alternatively if you are a ‘stayer’ with a high level of aerobic capacity it may be 96% of 2k Pace.

What makes a comparison of MAP to HR possible is a correspondence between percentage of MAP and percentage of Heart Rate Reserve, the number of heartbeats per minute your Maximum Heart Rate is above your Minimum Resting Heart Rate.

If you have no access to a laboratory test of vO2max but have a 2k Personal Best Time, make a rough estimate of your sprinter/stayer percentage as a starting point, and experiment to see how much it needs to be adjusted to correspond with heart rate and how you feel at various paces.

While Maximum Aerobic Pace, or P5, after five or six minutes should push your heart rate to H5 or near maximum, 45% of MAP and of HRR+Minimum HR would be designated Easy Pace or P1 H1 which should be able to be maintained and remain more or less stable for a very long time. Using conditional formatting to colour code cells in a spreadsheet makes it easy to see any 'decoupling' or change in correspondence between P Zones and H Zones or between external performance and internal stress.

However, using P Zones and H Zones still lacks one parameter that is crucial for Rowing, and that is Work per Stroke.

Rowing is a strength endurance sport in which Strength and Muscular Endurance play as important a role as Cardiovascular Endurance.

Work Zones
So we need to introduce W Zones that correspond to various percentages of the average Work Per Stroke exerted within a personal best 2k test or race.

Thus W1 could be Light Pressure, or 45%-55% of Race Pressure. W5 or Hard Pressure could be from 95% to 105% of Race Pressure, while 85%-95% could be W4 or Firm Pressure,75%-85% W3 or Substantial Pressure, and 55%-75% W2 or Moderate Pressure. W6 would be Very Hard, or considerably harder than the average 2k race pressure, and W7 would be around Peak Power or the absolute maximum you can produce for seven to ten strokes.

Counting the strokes rowed at each pressure within a workout enables you to compare the muscular load of a session to its metabolic load and to estimate the relative muscular stress on different days. There may be days when you need to let the muscular system recover, yet want to continue exercising the cardiovascular system or vice versa.

What provides additional flexibility to regulating work per stroke or Muscular Load in relation to Cardiovascular Load is that you can exert greater work per stroke at a given pace by rowing at a lower stroke rate. Thus, if your 2k Race average stroke rate is 33, rowing at P2 Easy Pace and rating 16 would result in W5 the same number of Jules per stroke as in the race. And a P2 pace at 20spm would result in Firm Work or W4.

A spreadsheet log entry comparing the three zones would look like this:

Competing Indoors

Competing in Indoor Rowing is very unlike competing in on-the-water Rowing. 

First, your competitors are largely irrelevant. You are competing mainly with yourself. And you are supremely aware of your own physical state at every second of your race. If your preparation has been thorough, your finishing time is more or less predetermined - if only you can hang on to that split time at which you have been doing your interval training!

Nor does it seem necessary to enter many competitions because you compete with yourself in training anyway and the peak contest is just a convenient device to incentivise and organise your training.  So you can be a  competitive trainer without entering a single contest. Indoor Rowing races are  more an annual benchmark than a Sport.

However, contests can still bring out extraordinary performance simply by being a spectacle. It is not so much the competitors nor even the audience but just the general atmosphere. 

For example, at BRIC (the British Rowing Indoor Championship), competitors are assembled in cohorts at the bowels of the Colosseum-like London Velodrome or at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and released in stages like gladiators onto a central arena in which at any one time there are literally hundreds of people competing. Music blares loudly, National Team members are paraded, and, although there is an electronic board with sporadic results, no one competitor is actually being observed. 

A very different alternative is the remote competition from your own home which became instituted during the COVID epidemic. Here,  you are observed individually in digital form, perhaps all over the world, but there is no noise or crowd.  And the only external stress is the fear your technology will fail to record the most painful and courageous effort of your whole life.

But there is something more appealing to me in the smaller competitions such as at the Pan Pacific Masters Games or in regional competitions where a dozen or two competitors in one age group line up together with their supporters only several meters away, and friends can meet up in peace and quiet to share tales of how well or badly they have managed to forestall the deterioration of old age.

Ergs don’t float. So shouldn’t they be rowed differently?

I have noticed that my indoor competition technique is a far cry from classical rowing practice. Am I just rowing badly? Or am I instinctively adapting to the demands of the static ergometer?


At the finish on an Erg, you do not have an oar planted in the water on which to suspend your weight. Instead, the flywheel leaves a much lighter load for the hands which, instead of drawing through firmly have to flick upwards in order to impart maximum acceleration to an already very fast flywheel. Moreover, you do not have to draw horizontally as you do in the boat. An upward motion, provided your chain doesn’t brush the barriers, moves the sprocket just as well. I’m sure I’ve even noticed Eric Murray give a little wrist flick at the end on the indoor rower!

New Zealander Eric Murray, twice Olympic Gold Medalist, and Indoor World Record holder over 10k.


And, because you are not pulling scull handles round in an arc, you do not need to lift your elbows but instead can draw them through closer to the body thus making more use of the stronger latissimus muscles.

Eric Murray, primarily a sweep rower, keeps his elbows down, but on the Erg he appears to rely on wrists and forearms for that last faster stage of the stroke.


However, something different happens with the Lightweight Men’s World Indoor 2k record holder Danish sculler Henrik Stephansen. Stephansen raises his elbows high using mainly the rear deltoids to complete the stroke.

Both athletes swing back to extend the length of the stroke considerably.

Henrik Stephansen in 2013 setting men’s lightweight World Indoor Record for 2k, 5:56.7

What Eric and Henrik have in common is the use of smaller muscles right at the end of the stroke when the flywheel is fastest and the resistance is least. This is somewhat different from what happens at the end of a stroke on the water where you are still trying to suspend your weight off the end of the oar,

Additionally, in a rowing boat, the momentum of your body to the finish is transferred to the hull of the boat. In days past, single scullers would even insert ‘back chocks’ for the back wheels of the seat to touch at the end of the slide to make sure no momentum was lost. This is not the case with an erg. Your body momentum is absorbed, not by the flywheel measuring your progress, but by an inert structure firmly planted on the ground. So perhaps it is ok to have loose knees at the end of the stroke in order to commence the recovery sooner when lifting the rating for that final sprint.

Meanwhile, at the catch, you no longer have to worry about stopping the boat by hitting the stretcher. So instead of creeping up slowly, is it better to rebound from the front and use that elastic compression energy? Henrik Stephanson’s blistering 45 stroke per minute sprint home would not be possible without it.

This all suggests that the optimum indoor rowing technique has to be somewhat different from what we were taught in the boat, but also that there is more than one way to ‘skin a cat’.

Low Stroke Rate Training

Long duration training at low stroke rates was popularised by the East German rowers in the 1970s. But what pressure should it be performed at, and is it always superior to rowing for long durations at faster rates?

Possibly the advantage of low stroke rate training is that you can get the same neuro-muscular stimulus as you would get from rowing at race pace while not stressing the cardio-vascular system to the same extent. This would suggest that you should work at the pace that, at a lower stroke rate, say 16spm, would produce the same work per stroke as occurs during racing at, say, 32spm.  I estimate that travelling at ‘Easy’ Pace and Stroke Rate 24 results in medium pressure per stroke. At 20spm the same Pace or boat speed results in Firm pressure - 80% of that in a race, and at 16spm the same pace requires  Hard pressure  - 100% of the average work per stroke of a 2k race.

But what about other components of fitness? Some research has indicated that rowing for long durations at faster stroke rates has a greater effect on the development of Maximum Oxygen Uptake. So maybe we need to do both.

Strength and Endurance in Rowing

It seems to me that there is not as clear a distinction between strength and endurance in Rowing as in other sports. The same power in Rowing can be produced by different proportions of speed, force, length of drive, or stroke rate.

When I was much younger, I once reasoned that to generate maximum power over a 2000 meter race I would just have to perform 240 repetitions at higher force. So I set out to build my strength over 200 barbell squats. 

I did this by first working up to a respectable maximum weight for five reps - which turned out to be 330lbs. Then each week I would take off a tiny amount of weight and perform more reps. I trained at home, but, while on vacation, I turned up at a gym and proceeded to do my workout.  By the time I had reached a hundred reps with 200lbs on my back everyone in the gym had stopped training to gaze on in amazement.

To use this capacity in the boat, I ordered oars with extraordinarily large blades. This was before the inception of Cleavers and the spoons were also still as long as standard blades. And also I had not thought to alter the inboard-outboard gearing. I did however row at a very low stroke rate. 

Needless to say, the experiment was not a great success. I competed at an interstate regatta with this rig and came third or fourth. But the surprising thing was that, even without an extensive cardio-vascular preparation, I was not a miserable last. So, perhaps with more extensive and scientific experimentation, the principle could have been applied successfully.