One of my standard sessions is an hour at a fixed heart rate of 130 beats per minute. I have rowed it for years. It is the closest thing I have to a laboratory.
Across one three-month block, the average split for that hour went from around 2:02 to 1:57. Same heart rate. Same perceived effort. No extra aerobic work worth mentioning.
What I had added, over six months, was roughly 3 to 3.5kg of lean muscle mass — from strength work I had always filed under injury prevention.
Five seconds a split, from the session most of us drop first.
The gym is not where masters rowers buy insurance. It is where we are leaving the most speed.
The distance we race
When I interviewed James Goodwin — for years head of physical performance and sports science lead for the Swiss national rowing team, programming for everyone from the under-19s to the Olympic crews, and with the British team through the Rio cycle before that — he started with the race itself.
Masters regattas are raced over 1,000 metres. Olympic racing is over 2,000. James puts Olympic 2k at roughly 70–80% aerobic, with the exact split depending on whose research you follow. Halve the distance and the anaerobic share rises meaningfully.
His second point: the first 500 metres predicts final placing more strongly in masters racing than at Olympic level. It matters at 2k. It matters more at 1k.
So the population racing the distance where strength and power count most is the one that has embraced strength training least. The Olympic crews, racing the more aerobic event, took it seriously first. We watched them do it and concluded it was elite polish.
Why the split moved
James’s explanation for my 1:57 is a ceiling.
If you race at 400 watts and your maximum is 700, that 400 consumes a large fraction of what you have, and you feel every one of them. Raise the maximum to 1,000 and the same 400 becomes comfortable. The aerobic system has not changed. The demand is simply a smaller share of the capacity.
The Swiss team models this with a critical power curve built from a three-minute test, a twelve-minute test and a sprint test. It separates three systems: sprint power at the top, anaerobic capacity above the critical power line, aerobic critical power beneath it.
Strength training moves all three. Sprint power is the obvious one. The aerobic side shows up as economy — the ceiling effect. And on the anaerobic side, James says one of the strongest influences the Swiss team has found is lean muscle mass: at very high intensity muscle oxygen saturation drops, and more lean tissue improves what you can still do in that state.
And it keeps you in the boat
The largest study of masters rowing injuries surveyed 743 competitors at the 2007 World Rowing Masters Regatta in Zagreb (Smoljanović et al., Croatian Medical Journal, 2018). A third had been injured in the previous year. Most injuries were chronic rather than acute, and the most common site by a distance was the low back, at 32.6%.
The strongest evidence on prevention is a meta-analysis of 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants (Lauersen et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2014). Strength training cut sports injuries to less than a third. Stretching did nothing measurable.
James’s point on the back is specific. Most rowers train the legs and neglect hip extension, and if you cannot hinge from the hips on land you will not hinge from them in the boat. You compensate with the lower back, every stroke, for years.
Rowing will not fix this on its own, he says. High-volume aerobic work does not defend muscle mass as we age. And the cost of losing it is not abstract: muscle weakness in people aged 71 to 80 carries an estimated £2.5 billion a year in excess UK health and social care costs (Pinedo-Villanueva et al., Calcified Tissue International, 2019).
“I don’t have the hours”
This is the real objection, and it is a serious one. Most of us train around jobs and families on six to ten hours a week. Every hour in the gym is an hour not in the boat, and the boat is where the race is rowed. Taking time from the specific session to give it to a general one looks like bad arithmetic.
James’s answer is to stop adding and start swapping. One session a week, taken from a steady ride rather than stacked on top of a full week. Two is where the benefit properly arrives. Set that against the arithmetic of the alternative: a third of masters racers losing time to injury, most of it the slow, chronic kind in the back.
The judgement
For masters rowers, strength training is not the session that protects the training. It is part of the training — and over 1,000 metres, one of the most important parts. Treating it as optional is the most expensive habit in the masters boathouse.
What to do
Put one heavy strength session into your week this winter, and keep it there through race season, when it is usually the first thing to go. Cover five patterns: squat, hinge, pull, push, single leg. Free weights over machines. Heavy enough that the last rep is hard; never to failure. If you run a masters squad, give it a fixed slot on the club timetable.
The Maximum Strength Session in the Members Lounge is where I’d start: two days, eleven movements, every set 3 × 5 at 80% of your one-rep maximum, with the warm-up and load rule written out. It comes with Faster Membership, alongside the Critical Power Calculator that maps the three systems James describes.