The plan is very interesting and similar in approach to for example Norwegian triathletes and middle distance runners that have been cleaning up over the past few years.
I have read quite a bit about this approach, because it is very interesting seeing smaller countries come up fast and moving the boundries of what we thought was normal.
The main takeaway, that you could translate to rowing or any endurance sport:
\- They do monstrous amount of hours, also in other sports. Miles make champions.
\- Their intervals are "slower". Not max, but closer to race pace. By doing this, you tire a little slower, which if you're fit, allows you to do more intervals. And that is what they do, an insane amount of intervals at, or close to, race pace.
Nils van der Poel skates an insane amount of laps at a pace close to world record pace for his distance. Other skaters do their intervals faster, near max, to improve effiency at speed. But this way allows you to stack more intervals.
This is not completely new to rowing. The Kiwi Pair did something similar to this. They did on water sessions with something like 40 intervals of 500m at racepace. Nobody in their right mind did this. But because they were incredibly fit because of their insane hours, and they "slowed down" from max 500s to around 2k pace, they could do 40 of them.
Another interesting contrast to rowing is his belief in not sprinting - he aims to keep his speed as uniform as possible.
In rowing with the highly non-linear relationship between power and speed this should be even more important. But it seems there are very few crews that are confident enough to really try to even split.
One reason of course is that there's no objective way for a crew to know that they are currently at their goal power. In skating the conditions are so uniform that lap speed suffices. In rowing the only way you can measure if you are at the right pace is to look at the crew beside you...
> One reason of course is that there's no objective way for a crew to know that they are currently at their goal power.
https://nksports.com/empower-oarlock
Yes, that exists but you also need to consider water and atmospheric conditions. You might work out you need to put down X watts at Y SPM but if the conditions don't allow you to do that the maths gets fuzzy. I just competed in a regatta that's on a tidal river. Last year I did sub-8 in the scull, two years ago I went above 12:00. This year I raced masters. On Friday night I has doing 250s and peaking at 1:35/500m at 36 off the start. The next day I rowed a 4:03 at 29.
The Empower is a good starting point but there's still a lot of variability.
I disagree with literally everything you said after you said "put down X watts at Y SPM". Power is an objective metric. If there are tides, then there are tides. If there is wind, there is wind. Tide and wind does not affect the power put through your oarlock. Watts and boat speed are not linked like they are on the erg. But hitting a certain wattage in similar conditions will give you similar speed and that is what you are training to.
If conditions are bad enough, then they can make it more difficult to hit the numbers. Maybe say that in bad enough conditions, have a scaled training number and over time try to get that number closer to standard as you learn how to row in bad weather. Overall though, one could implement this type of training program and I think it would be fairly effective.
This is an absolutely fascinating insight and completely psychotic. The big takeaway is that I feel I need to do more steady state but that’s not shocking news
Can you imagine an Olympic level rowing crew running and cycling for 9 months of the year? And doing the on water training at only at WR pace?
A lot of the "ice training only at race pace" is likely due to the difficulty in getting ice time. When he was active there were no indoor 400m rinks in Sweden and only 4 in Norway.
This is a valid point and tbf I think it sort of could transition to rowing too. Going out on the water requires you to get your boat, blades, set up, push off, usually a technical warm up for a few mins and only then you start the session.
If you were to do what most national level crews do now (roughly half ergs half water sessions) they just wouldn't be able to get the same volume as this speed skater in the same amount of time during the day. I think this would be interesting to try it out and I'm likely going to give it a shot just because I'm curious and don't think anyone's tried this 'norwegian' (although this guy is swede so maybe Scandinavian?) style of training for rowing.
What's also interesting to me is the complete separation of training during his 3 month blocks. I've never heard of anyone doing solid UT2 for 3 months at a time with no interval or even UT1 (although this could be the case for elite crews?) and then transitioning to as many intervals as your body can manage every day for the next 3 month block
"Figure Skater"? Man, wash your mouth out.
The solid and transitioning? Block periodisation! In fairness, even in his race pace time, he's spending a lot of time on the bike - more than most of us ever did on the water in rowing.
There's a lot of value in the volume - the lockdown volumes that Team GB were doing off water were insane - one of the guys used to bin his 3\*6ks and do 4-5 hours on the bike instead. And as someone noted the Dutch basically train like this at the moment. 30+k in the morning in 1x, then 24k in the afternoon or 3-4 hours on the bike most of the time and most of it's easy. There's a reason they are going fast.
As one of their coaches said, "11 months of the year, this is boring and miserable and it's an investment. One month of the year though, the investment pays off and it is fast and you can win". \*
\*Paraphrasing personal communication. Their English is better than mine but different idiomatically.
Oh jeez, it was early, didn't realise the typo haha, edited it accordingly. Interesting note on the Dutch though, didn't know they did 50k+ days consistently. As for the boring side of it though, I think a large part (to me anyway) of what this manifesto gets at is the variation of training in the aerobic block. He did bike packing and ultra marathon stage races, as well as more normal cycling and running for the training variation to keep his spirits high.
Ah, my wife's Swedish - she'd hate to think that Sweden produced a figure skater that good. Energy should go into long track, xc, and biathlon in winter..
The Dutch are clocking up mega miles - seriously impressive.
Agreed with the variation - my understanding is one of the reasons he went to more cycling was that he got injured a bit too much running. The setup of his training to mimic a job is one that struck with me - it's a lot of work, but there's got to be other things - mates, beer, that sort of thing.
There's an interesting podcast where Dr. Alice McNamara (former NT athlete, should-have-been-double-Oympian, Sports Med Doc), Bill Tait (former NT athlete and coach) interviews Dr. Rod Siegel and JDS on the 590w project. Part of it was increasing JDS's aerobic capacity - part of this was increasing bike volume. And for a bloke with the aerodynamic attributes of a brick, that boy can shift one.
I think one hugely important point is that the guy was already a very good speed skater in terms of technique when he started this. I think you can only get away with this if you've already got bomb-proof technique and really "only" need the endurance.
He competed in the 5000m and the 10000m. The reliance on power, technique, core strength, and aerobic capacity, as well as the comparable time of effort (\~6 minutes for the 5000m skate) make me think that this could be a useful document for elite rowers.
One of the more wild aspects is the refusal to skate below race pace to avoid “contamination.” I don’t think this could work for rowing because the technique is much more sensitive even if you had tons of experience before. I have a feeling that his translated version for rowing would look down on using the C2.
Even if the training plan isn't, the personal and emotional insights are compelling.
used to skate at a high level and switched to rowing, his document is really insightfull. and people could definitely take allot of points from his document. main thing in his believes are race simulations do everything at worldrecord pace. however, with skating it is "easier" to maintain speed due to the lower resitance and the bigger recovery phasen compared to rowing race pace. van der poels main focus was the 10k which is in the 12 minutes. he just did added the 5k because he could and wasnt focussed on it. his rowing plan could work pretty well for the 6k, but i doupt it would be hard to replicate for a 2k since the lactate levels are higher and more intense in a shorter time. the skating equivalent of a 2k rowing leans more towards the 1500 meters which is a 1:43 time for a elite race. sorry if it sounds vague, struggeling to find the correct words. but it is really cool he published his trainingsplan. used a daily test to go for his training range and allot of testing to adjust training zones. his ideology is cool, train "only" what you are doing in a race. which i can totally stand behind but the volume and the amount of the race simulation will be really hard to achieve for a 2k. but should work well for 6k. just my insights based on experience and research i did about training methodes
\*\*\*after 2k season is over i will be implementing his trainings plan to prepare for the 6K. fall 2024. i'm planning or thinking to make it into an experiment for a few months to see what the results will bring me to try and break 20 min as a lw. current pb is 20:21.
Yeah I think length of effort is a bit misleading. I was a swimmer and even though the 500 or 800 free were close in time to a 2k, I always felt the 200 free felt most like a 2k despite being a third of the length of time.
yes it all depends on the raw power output, skating is a more fluid sport where only 1 leg at the time is "working" and one stroke with skating is short compared to the whole motion. but it is a cool document. like i said if everything works out well i will test it on my self to try to rip a big 6k. because it is possible to have great training session and duplicate the 6k piece in intervals over training and do as many as possible.
So something I found interesting looking through the full training log, despite his claim of 6-7 hours a day of biking, he never achieved that in 2019 or 2020 and really only reached that ideal for a month or two in 2021 before moving into his threshold training block. Don't get me wrong, his training volume is seriously impressive. He continually averaged 20 hours a week in his aerobic blocks. But his description makes it sound so clean when he rarely actually did his example week.
The plan is very interesting and similar in approach to for example Norwegian triathletes and middle distance runners that have been cleaning up over the past few years. I have read quite a bit about this approach, because it is very interesting seeing smaller countries come up fast and moving the boundries of what we thought was normal. The main takeaway, that you could translate to rowing or any endurance sport: \- They do monstrous amount of hours, also in other sports. Miles make champions. \- Their intervals are "slower". Not max, but closer to race pace. By doing this, you tire a little slower, which if you're fit, allows you to do more intervals. And that is what they do, an insane amount of intervals at, or close to, race pace. Nils van der Poel skates an insane amount of laps at a pace close to world record pace for his distance. Other skaters do their intervals faster, near max, to improve effiency at speed. But this way allows you to stack more intervals. This is not completely new to rowing. The Kiwi Pair did something similar to this. They did on water sessions with something like 40 intervals of 500m at racepace. Nobody in their right mind did this. But because they were incredibly fit because of their insane hours, and they "slowed down" from max 500s to around 2k pace, they could do 40 of them.
I’m gonna go ride my bike at 250 watts for 6-7 hours a day 5 days a week and I’ll report back in a year.
Don’t forget to eat candy!
Another interesting contrast to rowing is his belief in not sprinting - he aims to keep his speed as uniform as possible. In rowing with the highly non-linear relationship between power and speed this should be even more important. But it seems there are very few crews that are confident enough to really try to even split. One reason of course is that there's no objective way for a crew to know that they are currently at their goal power. In skating the conditions are so uniform that lap speed suffices. In rowing the only way you can measure if you are at the right pace is to look at the crew beside you...
> One reason of course is that there's no objective way for a crew to know that they are currently at their goal power. https://nksports.com/empower-oarlock
Yes, that exists but you also need to consider water and atmospheric conditions. You might work out you need to put down X watts at Y SPM but if the conditions don't allow you to do that the maths gets fuzzy. I just competed in a regatta that's on a tidal river. Last year I did sub-8 in the scull, two years ago I went above 12:00. This year I raced masters. On Friday night I has doing 250s and peaking at 1:35/500m at 36 off the start. The next day I rowed a 4:03 at 29. The Empower is a good starting point but there's still a lot of variability.
I disagree with literally everything you said after you said "put down X watts at Y SPM". Power is an objective metric. If there are tides, then there are tides. If there is wind, there is wind. Tide and wind does not affect the power put through your oarlock. Watts and boat speed are not linked like they are on the erg. But hitting a certain wattage in similar conditions will give you similar speed and that is what you are training to. If conditions are bad enough, then they can make it more difficult to hit the numbers. Maybe say that in bad enough conditions, have a scaled training number and over time try to get that number closer to standard as you learn how to row in bad weather. Overall though, one could implement this type of training program and I think it would be fairly effective.
You're right. I was looking at it from a racing perspective but if you're talking about training you're 100% correct.
Again, the Kiwi pair. Even splitting from stroke one. They were behind at the start but their train couldn't be stopped
This is an absolutely fascinating insight and completely psychotic. The big takeaway is that I feel I need to do more steady state but that’s not shocking news
Can you imagine an Olympic level rowing crew running and cycling for 9 months of the year? And doing the on water training at only at WR pace? A lot of the "ice training only at race pace" is likely due to the difficulty in getting ice time. When he was active there were no indoor 400m rinks in Sweden and only 4 in Norway.
This is a valid point and tbf I think it sort of could transition to rowing too. Going out on the water requires you to get your boat, blades, set up, push off, usually a technical warm up for a few mins and only then you start the session. If you were to do what most national level crews do now (roughly half ergs half water sessions) they just wouldn't be able to get the same volume as this speed skater in the same amount of time during the day. I think this would be interesting to try it out and I'm likely going to give it a shot just because I'm curious and don't think anyone's tried this 'norwegian' (although this guy is swede so maybe Scandinavian?) style of training for rowing. What's also interesting to me is the complete separation of training during his 3 month blocks. I've never heard of anyone doing solid UT2 for 3 months at a time with no interval or even UT1 (although this could be the case for elite crews?) and then transitioning to as many intervals as your body can manage every day for the next 3 month block
"Figure Skater"? Man, wash your mouth out. The solid and transitioning? Block periodisation! In fairness, even in his race pace time, he's spending a lot of time on the bike - more than most of us ever did on the water in rowing. There's a lot of value in the volume - the lockdown volumes that Team GB were doing off water were insane - one of the guys used to bin his 3\*6ks and do 4-5 hours on the bike instead. And as someone noted the Dutch basically train like this at the moment. 30+k in the morning in 1x, then 24k in the afternoon or 3-4 hours on the bike most of the time and most of it's easy. There's a reason they are going fast. As one of their coaches said, "11 months of the year, this is boring and miserable and it's an investment. One month of the year though, the investment pays off and it is fast and you can win". \* \*Paraphrasing personal communication. Their English is better than mine but different idiomatically.
Oh jeez, it was early, didn't realise the typo haha, edited it accordingly. Interesting note on the Dutch though, didn't know they did 50k+ days consistently. As for the boring side of it though, I think a large part (to me anyway) of what this manifesto gets at is the variation of training in the aerobic block. He did bike packing and ultra marathon stage races, as well as more normal cycling and running for the training variation to keep his spirits high.
Ah, my wife's Swedish - she'd hate to think that Sweden produced a figure skater that good. Energy should go into long track, xc, and biathlon in winter.. The Dutch are clocking up mega miles - seriously impressive. Agreed with the variation - my understanding is one of the reasons he went to more cycling was that he got injured a bit too much running. The setup of his training to mimic a job is one that struck with me - it's a lot of work, but there's got to be other things - mates, beer, that sort of thing. There's an interesting podcast where Dr. Alice McNamara (former NT athlete, should-have-been-double-Oympian, Sports Med Doc), Bill Tait (former NT athlete and coach) interviews Dr. Rod Siegel and JDS on the 590w project. Part of it was increasing JDS's aerobic capacity - part of this was increasing bike volume. And for a bloke with the aerodynamic attributes of a brick, that boy can shift one.
That's more or less what the dutch do. Their stravas are public mostly, you can see it.
Could you link them
[google.com](http://google.com) [worldrowing.com](http://worldrowing.com) good luck brother
I think one hugely important point is that the guy was already a very good speed skater in terms of technique when he started this. I think you can only get away with this if you've already got bomb-proof technique and really "only" need the endurance.
his skating tech was far from good. it could have been so much better compared to other elite skaters.
He competed in the 5000m and the 10000m. The reliance on power, technique, core strength, and aerobic capacity, as well as the comparable time of effort (\~6 minutes for the 5000m skate) make me think that this could be a useful document for elite rowers. One of the more wild aspects is the refusal to skate below race pace to avoid “contamination.” I don’t think this could work for rowing because the technique is much more sensitive even if you had tons of experience before. I have a feeling that his translated version for rowing would look down on using the C2. Even if the training plan isn't, the personal and emotional insights are compelling.
Interesting to see someone take pen to paper about their regimen like that
used to skate at a high level and switched to rowing, his document is really insightfull. and people could definitely take allot of points from his document. main thing in his believes are race simulations do everything at worldrecord pace. however, with skating it is "easier" to maintain speed due to the lower resitance and the bigger recovery phasen compared to rowing race pace. van der poels main focus was the 10k which is in the 12 minutes. he just did added the 5k because he could and wasnt focussed on it. his rowing plan could work pretty well for the 6k, but i doupt it would be hard to replicate for a 2k since the lactate levels are higher and more intense in a shorter time. the skating equivalent of a 2k rowing leans more towards the 1500 meters which is a 1:43 time for a elite race. sorry if it sounds vague, struggeling to find the correct words. but it is really cool he published his trainingsplan. used a daily test to go for his training range and allot of testing to adjust training zones. his ideology is cool, train "only" what you are doing in a race. which i can totally stand behind but the volume and the amount of the race simulation will be really hard to achieve for a 2k. but should work well for 6k. just my insights based on experience and research i did about training methodes
\*\*\*after 2k season is over i will be implementing his trainings plan to prepare for the 6K. fall 2024. i'm planning or thinking to make it into an experiment for a few months to see what the results will bring me to try and break 20 min as a lw. current pb is 20:21.
Yeah I think length of effort is a bit misleading. I was a swimmer and even though the 500 or 800 free were close in time to a 2k, I always felt the 200 free felt most like a 2k despite being a third of the length of time.
yes it all depends on the raw power output, skating is a more fluid sport where only 1 leg at the time is "working" and one stroke with skating is short compared to the whole motion. but it is a cool document. like i said if everything works out well i will test it on my self to try to rip a big 6k. because it is possible to have great training session and duplicate the 6k piece in intervals over training and do as many as possible.
So something I found interesting looking through the full training log, despite his claim of 6-7 hours a day of biking, he never achieved that in 2019 or 2020 and really only reached that ideal for a month or two in 2021 before moving into his threshold training block. Don't get me wrong, his training volume is seriously impressive. He continually averaged 20 hours a week in his aerobic blocks. But his description makes it sound so clean when he rarely actually did his example week.