Training Day at Concept 2 HQ

09/09/2015

The alarm goes off at 6.15am, although I’m already awake because I’m excited.
Today is the day that 3 Men & A Little Lady visit the Concept 2 Head Quarters to purchase our refurbished rowers and get rowing tips and techniques from one of the main guys, Alex.

I’d watched a few Concept 2 YouTube videos and started applying them to my workouts at my local gym. Now I was in front of expert Alex, I felt unsure about my technique.

It turns out that an efficient and effective rowing technique is quite an art – legs, torso, then arms, then reversed. It sounds simple enough, however, each movement is separate from the next whilst being gelled together in one seamless movement.

Alex filmed our technique in slo-mo on his phone and then we all watched it back and pulled it apart.

We were there for about 4 hours and gained so much from the morning.

We went in with a messy, sloppy technique, pulling the rowing machine as hard as we could, and we left calm, efficient and had even begun rowing like a team. That’s a good job I suppose, considering we are going to be rowing 3,000 miles together.

So now, we’re heading home with a refurbished Concept 2 rowing machine and going to ‘grease the groove’. We’re going to slow down every movement we learnt in order to lock it in our minds, so our bodies do it as second nature.

Alex told me, I had a tendency to want to pull hard and I leant back a little too far. He thought this was the case because I was the smallest (little lady) of the team and wanted to catch up with the guys. I must admit, it’s a challenge for me knowing that I’ll not be able to row as hard and as fast as the guys. I don’t want to let them down. Alex assured me that by taking it slow and steady would be far more beneficial so not to cause injury.

We’re going to head back to Concept’s HQ in the winter for an update training session and check we’re making good progress on our techniques.