New sport, new goals, and need help...(long)

[puny_ectomorph]

Evening all,

Well, I've spent 2 years working on a bulk, made good progress (about 40 lbs), added a tad too much to the waist but that's life. However, the times, they are a-changin'.

I joined the university rowing team this year. It's an endurance-based sport, not exactly tailor-made for enormous folks (although there have been 220 pound rowers in the sport's history), but also requires a lot of power in the back and legs. Sort of a trade-off between strength and aerobic capacity.

As such, I've been switching my goals and routine around...I've been told to maintain my current 190 lb bodyweight, but continue to work on raw strength and power in my legs and back. We're still training the stroke at the moment, and haven't gotten into any serious conditioning program as of yet, so we're pretty much on our own for conditioning for the time being.

I've managed to narrow down rowing specific exercises to the squat (of course), the seated cable pull (mimics the upper body portion of the rowing motion fairly well), maybe deadlifts (I'm not sure on this one, I don't really want to give them up) and high pulls.

However, as I've trained for simple bulk in the past two years, I'm not entirely sure how to train sport-specific. Does anybody have any suggestions or ideas as far as set/rep schemes and percentage estimates for this kind of thing?

Thanks,
-p-

[Petey1]

hi there.

although very different sports i am from a boxing background.
i was just over the heavyweight (lower) limit and so was fighting guys bigger than me a lot of the time.

so i faced the dilemna of having to put on some decent size and strength, whils maintaining a very high level of conditioning.
i found this very difficult as any muscle gains my body wanted to shrivel them up to support my running mileage each week.
i kept up the conditioning and strength training and just increase my weights and did more compound exercises (deadlifts etc..) and found that the pure anabolic nature of this gave me both size and great strength gains, and with no detriment to my endurance.

altho you must up the protein intake to keep recovery good.
like i say different sports / different needs but there are ways .

[MixmasterNash]

I've managed to narrow down rowing specific exercises to the squat (of course), the seated cable pull (mimics the upper body portion of the rowing motion fairly well), maybe deadlifts (I'm not sure on this one, I don't really want to give them up) and high pulls.

However, as I've trained for simple bulk in the past two years, I'm not entirely sure how to train sport-specific. Does anybody have any suggestions or ideas as far as set/rep schemes and percentage estimates for this kind of thing?

Rowing is great for conditioning and pretty good for strength.

But you will get tons of conditioning from the rowing itself, and there is zero need to do any high rep endurance work outside of that. Focus on strength and power with low reps and heavy weight. You also don't need to exactly mimic the rowing motion, but it does just so happen that any posterior chain extension work -- squats, deadlifts of all sorts, olympic lifts, goodmornings, you name it -- is functionally quite similar to rowing and will have excellent carry over.

What are your rowing times? 500? 1k, 2k? Where are you weak? If you can't pull a 1:30 but can knock out dozens of 1:45 splits in a row, you need to work on strength. If you can easily pull a 1:30 500 but gas after that, you need endurance.

[JConrad]

The greatest oarsman that ever lived weighed over 225 lbs.