Has your rowing been affected by injury?

Rowing well in a single scull uses a maximum 10% of leg strength to reverse the body momentum at the catch and a negligible amount for the hip flexors at the end of the stroke. The same is true for Rowperfect (in fact slightly less at the catch due to the elastic rope.)


By contrast in a stationary ergometer, up to 90% of leg strength is used at the catch (and hip flexors at finish) to reverse the body momentum.

This leads to:

• Over compression of knees (at the catch)
• Jerk of hip flexors and back (at the finish)

Over time these repetitive shockloads can result in injury to lower back, knees and tendons. On a stationary ergometer, the harder you go the more damage you can do. This situation is even more dangerous for the younger athlete in using stationary ergometers as their cartilage is softer.

For training to have an optimal effect, the load on the rower needs to be kept within a certain bandwidth of the maximum allowable load. Too low a load provides no training effect, too high can lead to injury. The speed of adaption to higher load varies from one tissue to another. Muscle (from four weeks), bone, ligaments, tendons, cartilage (over one year).

The graph at right shows tissue adaption times. From this graph it can be seen that full adaptation for muscle tissue can be achieved in 35 weeks, whereas for cartilage only 75% adaptation can be expected in two years.

For many a young athlete the weakest link is the cartilage, because it adapts the most slowly to a higher load and is more prone to damage by the repetitive strain of constantly loading above maximum.

To prevent injuries the maximum allowable load to the weakest link should not be repetitively exceeded and peak loads should be avoided.

Rowperfect helps you to avoid injury:

• By not overloading the knees and hip flexors.
• Forces the rower to maintain technique at higher levels of fatigue to avoid overloading.
• Peak loads in the boat can be avoided by synchronising the crew stroke profiles with Rowperfect. This prevents an individual rower pulling the boat alone for a split second.
• To properly control the loads on the various tissues of the rower, training on a prescribed stroke force/length profile, which may not be exceeded, is recommended.

More on mitigating injury - tissue adaption

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