Episode 1606 - Rowing 101

Alan Fredendall // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete division leader Alan Fredendall discusses the Concept 2 rower, including each key component & how to perform basic maintenance on it. Alan also coaches rowing technique, including how to use the monitor to establish the ideal "drag factor" so that patients & athletes understand their optimal damper setting as well as strokes-per-minute (spm). Finally, Alan discusses how to improve rowing performance, including testing & retesting established benchmarks on the rower.

Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today's episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today's show notes to get your VersaLifts today.

ALAN FREDENDALL Hey, what's up? Good morning. Welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. I hope your morning is off to a great start. We're here early on Fitness Athlete Friday out in the garage to talk about rowing. Fitness Athlete Friday, if you're not sure, we talk all things related to CrossFit, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, running, biking, swimming, today, rowing, everything related to the recreational athlete, that patient or client who is getting after it on a daily basis. Before we get started today, let's talk about a couple of quick announcements. Courses coming your way from the fitness athlete division, we have no more courses that you can take in 2023 unfortunately. All of our live courses between now and the end of the year are either done or sold out and all of our online courses are finished or have already started towards the end of the year. Your next chance to catch us is going to be in January on the road for our live seminar Your next chance to catch us online is going to be January 29th for Fitness Athlete Essential Foundations, or February 5th. We also call that course Level 1 Online Now. Your next chance for our Level 2 Online course, previously called Advanced Concepts, will be on February 5th. What are those courses? Those three courses compose the Certification and the Clinical Management of the Fitness Athlete, or known as CERT CMFA. Our level one online course is all of the basics. It is a lecture-heavy course. It is a course heavy on clinical application, not only to the fitness athlete but also taking the principles that we teach, how to properly dose and prescribe load, how to increase the intensity of your physical therapy sessions, taking concepts, not only applying them to the fitness athlete but all of your populations, everybody that could potentially come into your physical therapy clinic. Our level two online course, previously called Advanced Concepts, gets a lot deeper into the weeds with a fitness athlete. So if you're looking to learn about advanced Olympic weightlifting, advanced gymnastics, such as those found at CrossFit, muscle ups, handstand walking, pistol squats, all that sort of stuff, and then a super incredible thorough deep dive into programming, then the level two online course is for you. That is for the person who is looking to regularly work with fitness athletes in the community and be the provider of choice in their region. And then our live seminar is focused almost entirely on moving, about understanding what it means to perform a one rep max or a sub max test to predict a one rep max, what that feels like for you to do it so that you better know how to apply that to your patient population, but also how to program based off of that, how to work different therapeutic exercises together to facilitate both intensity as well as recovery during physical therapy. So those three courses compose the CERT CMFA. So p10ice.com, click on our courses to find the next live or online courses coming your way. And I will say this morning ahead of an announcement that you're going to see via email and social media that our prices will be going up per ticket on January 1st. So you heard it here first. Our ticket price will be going from $650 for the majority of our courses live and online to $695 on January 1st. If you were looking to grab one of our courses in 2024, I would do it now. Save yourself the 50 bucks. So that's what's coming your way from the fitness athlete division. ROWING 101 Today we're talking about rowing. We're here with the rower. I love this piece of equipment. I think it's a very versatile piece of equipment. I've had the chance to spend a lot of time on the rower when I first began CrossFit. Was not really able to run. I was so overweight. Spent a lot of time on the assault bike, and a lot of time on the rower. I've done a lot of endurance stuff on the rower, a lot of different programming on the rower. I've rowed two full marathons. So I want to share today the very basics of a rowing machine, what it is, how it works, and how to take care of it. If you're really thorough with your maintenance, even a couple of minutes per month, this is a machine that could last you your entire career without really needing to purchase any repairs or even possibly replace it. And then we're also going to get into the basics of rowing technique and how to get a little bit better at rowing. COMPONENTS OF A ROWING MACHINE So let's start from the top. and describe the rowing machine and all of the different parts, and also some tips and tricks for maintenance. So first things first, the question that most people have about the rower is how does it work? It works with sensors in the damper, which is a flywheel, with a computer monitor here, and then calculations are performed by the computer every pull to give you outputs of a pace of meters or calories, some sort of output of your work. So there are sensors in the chain and sensors in the flywheel. Starting from the front of the rower and working our way out, we have the damper. This houses the flywheel. This is where the resistance from the rower comes from. This handle on the side toggles between 1 and 10. What that does, is the higher the setting, as you approach 10, you're allowing more and more and more air to flow into the damper and create resistance against the flywheel as you row. So you are in charge of a combination of letting more or less air into the damper and pulling the chain you kind of control how the rower feels. A lighter damper is going to feel like a smooth row on really smooth water and a high damper is going to feel like in a really aggressive row maybe through really rough water or something like that. Far and away the majority of people are going to want to row somewhere with a damper setting between four and six. Now you do get more work awarded for a higher damper setting. That being said, it is much more challenging and fatiguing to pull. So the higher the damper goes, you need to be a stronger human being in general, especially with your pulling capacity, and you need to be a more experienced rower. You'll see folks trying to break world records, row at a 10. That's not the majority of human beings who are using a rower. Most folks sitting down on the rower, especially a longer effort, are going to be somewhere between a four and a six. We can calculate the exact damper setting that is best for each individual using a setting on a monitor called the drag factor, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Taking care of the damper and the flywheel housing is really simple. Take a vacuum, suck the dust out, blow the dust out of there some way to clear the dust so that the flywheel does not get a bunch of gunk accumulated in there. Very easy to maintain the flywheel. Next is the chain. Pretty simple. When you are storing a rower, even if you're storing it horizontally, Always place the monitor down and release the chain. That takes tension off the chain. That's going to let your chain last a lot longer, and it's going to let the screws that hold your monitor upright last a lot longer as well. The chain is pretty simple. It's a handle attached to a metal chain that again pulls on the flywheel. So normally when we're using it in class, we have it out and racked in the handle, but when