OK regarding the coxswains working out, I’m a coxswain who typically does abs and stuff on my own at home to stay fit and this season I started doing the ab circuits with the team but I have very strong abs (I used to be a swimmer) so I tend to do all of the stuff correctly without slacking and some of the rowers started giving me dirty looks because it makes them look bad to the coach. What should I do? They feel insulted that I’m doing something better than them. Should I slack a little?

Oh come on. Like, just because the coxswain is the smallest athlete in the boat that automatically means that they should be sub-par at everything just so the “real” athletes can look fitter, stronger, etc? Absolutely not. I played softball for 10 years before I started coxing, in addition to a few other sports here and there. I was in pretty good shape in high school and was frequently able to do the exercises as well as the majority of the rowers and better than some. (By some I mean like, 5 or 6 at most out of 50.) Not once did anyone give me shit for it. Our coach would make good-natured remarks here and there like “guys, are you really going to let a 90lb coxswain do more pushups than you?” and that would end up motivating them to try to do more pushups than me or two of the other coxswains who were also multi-sport athletes. That’s exactly what would happen too – we would essentially challenge them to “get on our level” and they would do it. I can’t speak for the other coxswains but for me, I saw it as just another one of my responsibilities as their coxswain to challenge them just as hard off the water as I did on it. I’m a viciously competitive person but this was never about one-upping them or trying to make them look bad to our coach – all it was was me trying to push them to do better.

Does it make the rowers look bad in the eyes of the coach if someone whose physical fitness contributes nothing towards generating power in the boat is performing better than them at certain exercises? I can’t speak for every coach but for me, it doesn’t necessarily make you look bad but it does make me raise an eyebrow, especially if it’s obvious that you should be performing better than them. There’s no excuse when it comes to doing exercises correctly. I literally cannot comprehend, no matter how hard I try, how some people don’t understand how to properly do a pushup or a crunch or a plank or one of the many other ridiculously simple exercises that we do. If you’re performing them incorrectly after you’ve been show the right way to do them, yea, you can bet your ass I’m judging you for it. This has absolutely nothing with how well the coxswain or anyone else is doing it. If you can’t even do a pushup right, do you honestly think that makes me confident in your abilities to move an oar through the water? No, it doesn’t.

Circling back around to your question, no, you shouldn’t “slack a little” just to make your teammates feel better about themselves. Just writing that pisses me off. The looks they give you are the looks I’m giving them right now. Seriously, if they put half as much effort into doing the circuits correctly and pushing themselves a bit as they do getting pissed at you for doing just that they wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not the coach was comparing them to you because there would be no comparison.

The bottom line is they need to step up and so do you. If I was talking to you as a group I’d be pretty damn stern with the rowers and tell them to either grow the fuck up or leave. I have no patience for stuff like this. With you, I would say that as much as I (as a coach and fellow coxswain) appreciate seeing you workout with the team, in this case I would rather see you standing up at the front of the room leading the workouts and ensuring everyone is doing them correctly and not half-assing anything. That means calling people out when they’re doing something incorrectly or when they’re slacking and pushing them to be at the level your coach (and/or you) expects them to be at. Instead of brushing it off when they give you dirty looks, assert yourself. Be a leader and lead your team instead of blending in with the crowd and letting them settle for anything less than excellence.