Up your intensity

Ways to improve speed of the oar through the water. Keep the stroke rate the same and increase the speed. Timestamps 00:45 This is a long term project. Less experienced rowers push the oar less hard than the more experienced and you need to train this. Time through the water at stroke rate of 20 is approximately 3 seconds per stroke. Pushing the oar through the water on the power phase takes 1.2 to 1.5 seconds and yet we row with a ratio of at least 2:1 at low rates. Experienced rowers get more rest every stroke. They push the oar with high intensity through the water and so they have more time with the oar out of the water. 03:30 Same rate more speed How to row at the same stroke rate and deliver more force into the boat hull. The key to training this on the erg was to start with a focus point once every 5 minutes for 10 strokes. For ten strokes push harder through the power phase but you're not allowed to take the rate up. This showed us how much harder we could push and how much more rest we got as a result. It depends on your muscular strength and fitness. Then we moved to doing this for a minute. After each intense stroke period we allowed 5 strokes to recover and take a little rest. Over time, you don't need to take that rest. 06:00 Up one: down one Taking the same principle of increased intensity into the boat. We call "Up one down one" which means take the stroke rate up one point in rate through the water and down one point in rate on the slide. So at rate 20 you move to rate 21 through the water and rate 19 on the slide - which averages to 20. This has the effect of intensifying the power phase. Train yourself to do this and it gets a better ratio in the stroke - you learn how to relax more as you rest on the recovery. The benefit is slightly more boat speed, slightly more rest and this helps to keep the boat moving fast through the water. Here's an earlier episode which covers this topic further of how to train yourself to relax. Do this for short periods to begin with as it's tiring. Introduce it to your warmup just for 5 strokes at each stage in the pick drill. Want easy live streams like this? Instant broadcasts to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. Faster Masters uses StreamYard:

You can listen to Up your intensity online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Up your intensity is an episode from RowingChat by Rowing Chat.

This episode is 00:09:10 long.

This episode was published on Nov 23, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from RowingChat when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.