Tag: Wolverine Plan

Fall 2017 Training Plan – Back to Basics

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Here I sit in the ANA lounge in Narita Airport.  I’ll be taking off for Los Angeles in about an hour.  During this two week trip to Asia, I’ve been lucky enough to have access to an erg for 7 training sessions.  Tomorrow, I’ll be in San Diego and hopefully, I can sneak over to Cross Fit Del Mar for another session then.

During this trip, I’ve had plenty of time to think about training routines and rowing in general.  I was very disappointed about cancelling out of the Blackburn Challenge.  I was, and still am, looking forward to the adventure of such a long race under such unpredictable conditions.  I’ll have to try again next year.  But I won’t plan my training around it.  In fact, I’m going to violate the first rule of training planning.  I am not going to plan around my events at all.

I am hoping to do some head races this fall.  I want to do the Head of the Charles if I get an entry.  And I’m hoping I can do at least one or two other races.  But I don’t want to disappoint myself or other people because of my unpredictable schedule.

What I think I need to do is come up with a “chaos tolerant” training plan.  So, what does that mean?

Here are the principles

  • It needs to be simple.  I should never be at a loss for what to do in a session
  • It should be progressive, so I can hold my self accountable for making progress and see how much missed training impacts my fitness
  • It should be balanced, so that my performance across all distances improves

I’ve decided that using the Wolverine Plan is the best option for me right now.  Here are the salient points

  • 6 sessions per week
  • 3 L4 endurance sessions
  • 1 each L1, L2 and L3 session

I have set up a schedule for the core L1, L2 and L3 workouts that I will go through.

  • L1: 8 x 500 / 2’30”, 4 x 1000 / 5′, Pyramid (250/500/750/1000/750/500/250)
  • L2: 5 x 1500 / 5′, 4 x 2000 / 5′, Waterfall (3000/2500/2000)
  • L3: 10K, 30′, 15 x 3′ / 1′
  • L4:  The duration of the L4s will be dictated by the amount of time that I have.  When I have time, I will aim for 80′ sessions.  I will leave the format open and decide on the day.  In general, I will be trying to increase the stroke counts over the next 4 months.

As I have done before, I will substitute workouts in for L1/L2/L3 to keep myself from getting bored.  This will include ranking pieces, CTCs, and interesting OTW workouts.  I will sub them in in accordance with what type the pace and duration is closest to.

I will follow the same plan on the erg and on the water.  The only difference is that i will generally do the intervals in time based format instead of distance.  I will follow the plan whether I am on the erg, in my fluid or in my Maas Aero.

As an example, the August workout is a 200m sprint.  I think I would probably do that as the first piece of a pyramid in place of the 250 and take a bit of extra rest.

I’ve laid out a rough session plan to get me through the fall.

This link will take you to a google sheet.

As always, comments and feedback are very welcome.

Rate prescribed workouts (Like Wolverine L4 workouts)

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I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationship between rate and pace in steady state workouts. It started with a suggestion from Ben Redman that his target 2K pace was based on his steady state pace governed by the relationship

steady state power ( W ) = 2k power ( W ) * 55%

I had seen this before on the Rowing Illustrated boards and it was generally paired with the guideline that one should row steady state at 18 SPM to try to make sure that power per stroke was roughly the same as race pace work.

This made me go back and dust off the old Wolverine Plan pace charts. These give specific paces for r16 up to r26 based upon your 2K test pace.  Here is an excerpt.

2015-02-12_6-20-03

When I looked at them, I couldn’t make sense of how there were derived.

They are not based on linear increase in pace with stroke rate, nor an linear increase in power, nor are they constant SPI, nor are they constant distance per stroke. They are closest to constant SPI, but start at a high SPI, decrease a bit in the middle and then increase markedly as you get up to r24 and r26.  Here are the splits, watts and SPI for a reference pace of 1:43.

2015-02-12_6-24-18

An alternative to the L4 paces that are included in the wolverine plan are to use a constant “Work Per Stroke”, or “SPI”.  to derive training pace or power for different rates.  One example of this is a model posted on the BioRow website.  There is a spreadsheet for erg training paces that allows you to plug in the intended race rate and then provides paces for stroke rates higher and lower than that rate for different 2K times.  Basically, the model calculates the SPI for your race pace and rate and then maintains that SPI for different rates.

Another, different approach to constraining rate and pace is “S10MPS”.  This stands for “Strapless 10 Meters per Stroke”, and I think it was promoted as an approach by Paul Smith (His website is here).  A number of very good ergers use this approach which constrains your efforts to try to hit exactly 10 meters per stroke, indendent of stroke rate.  This naturally constrains the pace.  Here’s what that looks like from a wattage, pace and power perspective.

2015-02-12_7-43-55

Having looked at the workouts that Paul recommends for his clients, they seem to be constrained to a relatively narrow range of paces from 2:00 to 1:45, which translates to rates between 25 and 30.  I have also drawn the conclusion, but I’m not sure if it is true that S10MPS is a training technique, and then for time trials, and races and some high intensity interval sessions, you strap in and row to pace, without regard to maintaining 10 meters per stroke.  The thing I find interesting about this is that it does really hammer home the idea of maintaining stroke power as you increase rate.  You can see this with the SPI going way up as the paces get faster.

Anyway, having looked at all of this stuff, I have settled on using the simple idea of using linear increases of power with increasing stroke rate.  I am using the 55% of 2K power formula to come up with a reasonable power level for 18SPM and increasing 10 watts for every 1 spm increase.  This is not far off of the L4 levels and the same as the Biorow eWPS approach,  It’s also handy because it’s easy to remember a 10 watt change for each rate.  Here’s are my current targets.

2015-02-12_7-54-17

These are reasonable powers levels for rowing on a static erg.  For rowing on slides, where it is quite uncomfortable to row at low rates, I find that I need to shft this whole table by 2SPM.  So, I target 160W for r18, 180W for r20, and so on.

If anyone wants to play with the spreadsheet, here it is:L4 variations