Hi! I am a High School senior lightweight rower who recently got back from injury and I 2k-tested a couple of days ago in which I pulled a 6:50 (my pr is 6:48) and I am really looking forward to lowering my 2k. I heard doing a lot of ss is good but my question is when is a lot of ss is not good? Because I don’t want to overtrain my body. I am also planning in doing ss everyday so I would like to know what type of workouts would work?
Check out both of the posts linked below, they should answer your question and give you some ideas on different kinds of pieces to do.
To summarize both of those, 45-60 minutes is roughly what you should be aiming for. If you wanna mix it up and bike instead of erg then you can do a 75-90 min bike (broken up into chunks, like 3×25, 2×30, or something like that) at 75%-ish of your max HR. (I don’t often see our guys when they’re on the bike but this is the range that I think most people shoot for). How often you do it depends on your team’s training schedule – you can definitely overdo it if you’re trying to do that much extra work on top of two practices a day but since you’re in high school you probably won’t have to worry about that.
Related: What are some good erg workouts that you find particularly helpful to lower 2k times?
We practice primarily in the morning for two hours and will eventually add in one afternoon technical row each week but outside of that in the afternoons/evenings the guys have two lifts per week and on the other days they have captains practices where they erg, bike, or row in the tanks. If you practice in the afternoon then you might want to do your workout in the morning before school (yea it means waking up earlier and that’s never fun but you do what you gotta do). I wouldn’t do a steady state workout every day though – maybe 3x a week at most right now.
Related: How to prepare for a 2k test
Issues with overtraining tend to arise when you fail to give your body an adequate amount of recovery time. Give yourself a few hours between when your team is practicing and when you’re doing your own workouts (the minimum that I’ve heard several coaches say is four hours), make sure you’re taking at least one full day off per week (this is necessary for your muscles to recover and get stronger), and make sure you’re fueling yourself properly (which I talked about in the post linked above).
