It's not just the training

Three hours per day, six days a week. It's a grind. Of those three hours, perhaps 80 minutes average are devoted to working out. The rest is sucked up in travel, locker room stuff and a coaching staff that doesn't know when to shut up.

It's a very seducing formula: training for X amount of time at Y intensity will yield Z results. Wouldn't everything be great if training was so simple? Too bad it isn't. That's where everyone is getting tripped up. What is done in the erg room is an important part of training, but not the ONLY part of training.

Exercise breaks down the human body on a daily basis. After the workout ends, recovery begins. The system recovers to a higher level of fitness than before the work began, and that (put very simply) is how exercise increases fitness and capacity. The variable in this setup is the rate of recovery and how much "higher" the systems recover to. Does that make any sense? No? Example:

Two athletes, pulling identical 6k erg times, begin winter training in November. Both attend all their practices and complete the same training. At the beginning of March, a 6k is administered again. Athlete A beats athlete B by a huge margin. They have both greatly improved, but why the margin between them?

Yes, there could be genetic reasons involved. Possibly, genetics have a ton to do with all this. However.....

What if athlete B was getting three hours less sleep per night than athlete A? Add in athlete B's well-known weakness for the Original Hot Dog Shop, procrastinate-cram study schedule and the fact (s)he knows the bartenders at every club on the south side. Do the results make a little more sense now?

When athletes' nutrition is unbalanced, their lives are over-complicated or they aren't getting proper rest, the rate of recovery from exercise is slower. The body systems don't increase as much after every workout. The athlete has hamstrung her(him)self.

The lesson of all this, not so subtly, is that athletes don't train in a vacuum. The erg room doesn't equalize anyone; you bring all your stressors, nutritional fouls and sleepless nights in with you. How you live your life the other 21 hours of the day directly affects your body's recovery after exercise and thus the effectiveness of that exercise. No workout program ever invented can make anybody faster than somebody who's getting 8 hours per night when you are getting 5.

Now, I'm not saying that an Olympic-potential heavyweight will be beaten by a 45-year old lightweight if that club rower is getting more sleep. What I want to emphasize is that athletes have control over the other 21 hours of the day, and coaches do not. If my readers are as serious as they all claim to be about this sport, about going fast and winning races, they need to examine their lives outside of the erg room. Now, I'm not commanding everyone to suddenly become saints.

However, aren't we all just chasing that little extra 1% to put us over the top, to get that medal and win that race? Are you truly doing everything you can to pick up that 1%?

Categories: Motivational, Training, Fitness, Rowing