Continuing working on blade clearance during the recovery phase.
Day 1: Rowing - Technical session:
Pause drills: During the session, work on three different pause drills. As an example, you can combine the drills in the following way: warm up for 2km, then alternate 1k of doing a drill (1 , 2 or 3) followed by 1k of a regular row and so on. example: 1k of drill # 1, then 1k of a regular row, then again 1k of drill # 2 followed by 1k of a regular row and again 1k of a drill # 3 followed by 1k of regular row and so on.
1) Pause at the finish position (position #1). - Pause for only 2-3 seconds. During the pause, keep the blade/s feathered, off the water. It is important to check if the handles are at the right height and evenly spread out (as an example, in sculling, it happens quite often that during the pause at the finish one handle is higher or further than the other one. so by doing a pause drill, it allows you to check the body and handle position). Another pointer is that you should be focused on supporting the finish position by engaging core and quads.
2) Pause with handles at the mid-shin, upper body is set to a catch angle (pause position #3). At this position, you can have knees slightly bent.
Main pointers for this position:
1: Sit tall, no hunching. Think of making a longer distance between the sternum and belly button.
2: If posture allows, keep shoulders slightly in front of the hips
3: Check the position of your wrists during the pause. Make sure they are not bent or pulling the handles downwards. Keep the hands and wrists straight applying controlled pressure from the top of the handles so that the blades are staying off of the water during the pause.
3) Pause with handles over the toes (position #4).
For this drill, you can either do it on feather but if you want to challenge yourself a bit more then do it on square.
During this phase, keep the shoulders relaxed, avoid tension, sit tall.
Again, for all three pause drills, keep the blades off of the water.
Day 2: Rowing - Technical session:
Sustain consistent height of the blades off of the water. The more clearance you achieve with the blade extraction, the better chance you can sustain the blade height above the water.
Day 3: Cross training
Optional erg session: Warm up for 25min. rest 3 min
1 x 11 min pressure pyramid. (11min = 3minR20, 2min R22, 1min R24, 2min R22, 3min R20. Keep firm pressure for all the rate changes). Try to concentrate on consistency of the splits during transitions.
