Latest News

Building Training Momentum

It has been a while since I have written anything meaningful down in a full blog, and as I look back now it has been a pretty rough 2 or 3 years in terms of rowing performance since I was peaking in 2016. This is of course all relative, but for a good few years […]

DIRC Race 2022

INFORMATION FOR ENTRANTS Hi All, Really looking forward to having a good day’s racing on Saturday. Just a quick post with some final details and a few reminders. I’d be grateful if you could forward this on to anyone you know who may not have received these reminders and would also like to request that […]

Wattbike Vs BikeErg

I have been injured for the last 9-12 months or so to the point where I had to find an alternative means of testing and pushing myself as I’ve been unable to use the rowing machine. For the most part that has come in the form of the Wattbike (WB), an indoor static bike, and […]

Setting new goals…

Creating a monster. With my enforced hiatus from indoor rowing set to continue for a while yet, I found myself in danger of becoming frustrated and losing my way a bit so I needed a new focus until I could make a sensible return to rowing. Whilst all my main goals ultimately remain erg related […]

Training and Injury

Dealing with injury. There are many things that motivate me to write my next blog and at times it isn’t always following a positive experience. I think the clue is within the title here and I’m hoping I am able to turn a frustrating situation into a positive. As is the case with any athlete, […]

Weight Training for Indoor Rowing

I am very often asked about weight training and its effectiveness for improving indoor rowing times. To answer this correctly, in my opinion, I need to know more about the individual asking the question as it is rarely a one size fits all scenario. It is a really grey area as there have been very […]

Torn between specific and generic training.

This article was originally posted on http://johntherower.com/. I don’t think I have any “real” competitions until the indoor season kicks off again in October/November. Sadly I can’t make the Devon Indoor champs on 16th September, so the next race I think I have is the WelshIndoor  Champs in November (if I can work out how to […]

Mental Toughness

Mental Toughness for Rowing Performance. ‘It’s OK for you, you are mentally strong’. ‘It’s OK for you, you are good at rowing – you love it’! I have heard people say these things to me on many occasions. Whether they are true or not is a different story, but what is certainly true is that […]

Head, Heart and Gut.

Most decisions we make are a combination , sub consciously or consciously, of head, heart and gut. Well it seems I’ve had a weekend long battle with these three. I have trained very well this week. It has been very hard, but I have hit some very good numbers. However, of late I have not […]

Keep Going at Rowing … Sam’s 5 Top Tips

I was recently asked my opinion on the very general topic of ‘Top Tips’ for rowing. Rather than focus on issues related to the use of the machine or technique, I instead focussed on a lifestyle approach to answering the very pertinent question ‘What are the things that are going to contribute to motivation, progress […]