Originally Posted by
MWM
And that's partly why I think there's value in an article/chaper/book laying these things out.
Shot putters, wrestlers, sprinters, and Olympic weightlifters need strength. Rowers, cyclists, swimmers, canoeists, and cross-country skiiers need endurance. They also need strength, but strength training alone isn't enough, because the nature of the sport requires them to train their cardiovascular system too, so as to specialise to some extent and become competitive in it. For both, strength is necessary. For the former, it is both necessary and sufficient. For the latter, it is necessary but not sufficient.
Both the strength athletes and the endurance athletes need to practice too, but the strength athletes don't also need to train for endurance. The rower needs to strength train, practice his technique, and also train his cardiovascular system (in many cases there is overlap between the practice and the training, unless the athelete is doing some kind of 'cross training' - e.g. hill sprints or pushing the prowler). Similarly, the runner needs to practice in order to develop an efficient gait, but he also needs to do some hard running before he can go out and win a middle distance competition.
A 2000m rowing race is done at 98-110% of power at VO2 max, and at a heart rate approaching an athlete's maximum, for around 6-7 minutes. Consequently, rowers have recorded some of the highest blood lactate levels of any athletes immediately following a race (in excess of 18mmol). Don't tell me that significant endurance training, beyond the requirements of technical practice, is unecessary or unimportant. Perhaps strength training is the best way to combat local fatigue, but we also need to develop a resistance to non-local fatigue, i.e. we need to improve our endurance. It's all very well saying that being stronger makes each stroke a more submaximal effort. I would respond by saying that being stronger means you can pull harder, and that the proportion of your maximum effort in each stroke doesn't change significantly. If you're deliberately moving the boat at the same speed you did when you were weaker, fine. But the point of strength training is to enable you to move the boat faster.
On the other hand, most rowing programmes involve almost no proper strength training at all, and I'm aready acutely aware that in general there's too much endurance training being done and not enough strength training. Given that in the weight room most rowers will be novices under SS's definition, I'm also aware that strength training will make a much bigger impact on performance than more endurance training. But we still have to do a lot of endurance training, and we have to recover from it, whilst trying to get stronger at the same time and recovering from that, too.
You said during a podcast that you 'can't think of a better way to fuck everything up than doing 100 air squats.' What about doing 500m/90 second sprints on the rowing machine? Or what about 60 minutes of long, slow distance rowing, which is done at a much lighter intensity but for many more repetitions? These things can impact our strength training. Optimising our training in what is, from SS's point of view, substantially suboptimal conditions for acquiring strength is an important topic. Unlike other suboptimal factors, such as being fed terrible food at your public school during the day and then trying to get stronger for football in the evenings, the means of mitigating them, and therefore training more effectively, aren't as obvious.