I’m a novice rower for my high school crew team (I’m in 9th). I weigh around 150 and am 5’4, should I lose weight? I know height is a huge part of rowing and I don’t have that yet (or ever maybe who knows) but I’ve always been curvy so I don’t know if losing weight is going to be easy. I’m also asking because there are only five girls on our novice team (including our one coxswain) so I want to do the best for my boat.
I wouldn’t focus so much on losing weight as I would gaining strength. For some reason there’s this misconception that losing weight will make one stronger/make one’s boat faster, when in reality, the only thing that will make you stronger/make your boat go faster is YOU building muscle mass, which translates into increased power output. (Obviously you want to be lean and not have a ton of excess weight that you can’t move but at the junior level this isn’t nearly as big of a focus as it is at the collegiate level.)
I would put my efforts into doing a decent amount of weight lifting, core, erging, and cross training (running, swimming, and biking) over the winter. This will help you build muscle, which like I said, will make you stronger in the end. You might lose a few pounds too. It’s more likely though that you will lose FAT but actually GAIN weight, since muscle is denser than fat. This is GOOD, so don’t freak out if you do the workouts and actually find the number increasing slightly.
