Indoor Sport Services Training Guide

After being approached at the World Indoor Rowing Championship in Boston in 1990 by Concept 2 Ltd's Managing Director Ian Wilson, Jurgen Grobler moved from his native GDR to Britain in 1991 to be head coach at Leander Club, Henley-on-Thames. He was appointed chief coach for men by the ARA after the 1992 Olympic Games and has held that position ever since.

Jurgen is arguably the most successful rowing coach of all time with numerous Olympic and world championship medals to his name. He was recognised by the international rowing federation (FISA) with the award of "Coach of the Year" 2000 and was elected to the FISA executive committee and competitive rowing commission. Most notably he has coached Matthew Pinsent and Steve Redgrave to four world championship gold medals and two Olympic golds between 1991 and 1996. Since then he has been a coach for the men's coxless four and has taken them to three world championship gold medals and Olympic glory at Sydney 2000.

If you asked ten top chefs to prepare a meal, although the recipe may be the same the results would be different. A good chef would rely on his feelings as to what is needed rather than what is written down. It is similar to a coach who, although he might have a training programme to follow, will have a feel as to whether the athletes have to back off or push on.

A successful athlete/coach partnership must be coach driven but the coach cannot function without good feedback from the athletes. So an important part of the coach's job is to listen, but first he has to establish this partnership with the athlete. Like all good partnerships, it has to be based on trust.

When I started coaching as a young man I was very lucky in the fact that I was surrounded by outstanding coaches. In particular I owe a lot to Theo Corner who was my mentor. I believe a good education in your sport, so that you know it inside out, is vital to be successful. This doesn't mean that you have to have rowed at a high level; many top coaches were not international oarsman. Although I never rowed at the highest level I learned enough at my level to know how tough it is and how hard you need to train to reach the top.

High performance coaching is not like working on a production line where the parts appear at one end and a car comes out at the other. A coach has to have a vision of what an athlete needs to look like to be a winner. Every athlete is unique and requires special attention and so a coach faces constantly changing challenges to progress from where the athlete is today to where he needs to be to match the coach's vision. This is both stimulating and exhausting but is worth it when your crews are successful.

Our training can be divided into three main areas; land training, water training and cross-training. Land training involves the rowing machine, weights and running. Once a week we have a 30 minute row on the machine at rate 20. This is to develop strength per stroke and the top rowers cover 9,000m. We also use the machine for anaerobic alactate work, which involves short bursts of up to 20 strokes at maximum intensity. Of course we use the rowing machine for all out testing but I am a big believer in the benefits of training on the rowing machine and it plays a big part in our preparation. We also use weights in our land training two to three times a week. We include both strength and strength endurance circuits.

We mainly use the water work for low intensity training where we can develop the necessary technique to row powerful strokes. From the 12 to 14 sessions a week that we carry out, I only do two to three sessions where we accumulate lactate. One of these is either on the water, or the Indoor Rower, where we row 3 x 2,000m at stepped rate from 24 to 28 strokes a minute.

The third area is cross-training. We mainly do this at training camps where we take part in different activities from cross-country skiing to cycling. The training camps play a vital role in two ways: it breaks up the tedium of the daily routine, and training in different surroundings in itself is stimulating. More important however, is the need to develop athletic qualities in the rowers. Many rowers come into the sport because they lack the skills and dexterity for ball games. They tend to be big and ungainly but with tremendous physiological characteristics. However, to be fully able to exploit these, rowers must be able to develop athleticism. Tables 7.4 and 7.5 show examples of the strength/core stability and strength/endurance weights circuits that we use.

Table 7.4

Notes:
Percentages are given of one repetition maximums

Table 5.5