While the question whether to row harder to train may seem simplistic or even stupid (how can you get faster if you do not pull harder, right?), at my age I wondered what I could and should do. And with no helpful input from my doctor, other than his faith that I could do what I wanted to do, I had to wonder what would happen when I started to pull harder.
It is common knowledge that an issue with rowing moderately is that it has less of an effect on the body than rowing harder. I suspect that those who only train hard may demand too much of their bodies, leading to stress and possibly damage. On the other hand, was I similarly creating a negative result by not pulling hard but instead rowing moderately most of the time?
To be fair, let me explain a bit about what I was doing before I started to try to get more fit to race. I rowed most days. And/or biked and stretched and did core work. I rowed outside when I could and often indoors. After tiring of repairs to my dynamic erg, I went back to my Model C with a PM5 monitor. I often rowed a fairly good distance - not two hours or 20k or 12 miles a day, but usually 45 minutes or more. And I usually broke a sweat and got my breathing deeper than when at rest. But that is not saying much. I clearly was developing a much slower/weaker pace on average, especially when starting out on a given day. I could remember starting pieces (5k, 10k or more) not that many years ago and beginning at full pressure, planning to set a pace faster than I knew I could maintain, but then facing the challenge of doing my best to maintain it with as little slippage as I could manage for the rest of the piece. (In other words, if I thought I could row a given piece averaging 1:55 per 500, I might start out at 1:50 or 1:52.) Now, I started out very, very slowly. And it felt to me like it took me not just 5 or 10 minutes but longer than that to warm up, to feel comfortable pushing harder. And I usually did, but most often near the end of a piece for a relatively short time, having gradually increased my pace throughout the piece (i.e., the opposite of my old approach). What I did not do was to start out hard or row a power 10 or pyramid or two minutes power piece in the middle of a 45-minute row.
One can imagine the positive effects in the body of rowing, really at any pace. The idea is that using most of the muscles and breathing deeper and getting the heart beating faster all have positive health effects because the exercise is an enhancement from the resting status of the body. I used to think primarily of three benefits, sometimes even using them as incentives or goals to think about while rowing or riding:
Clear the lungs - breathing deeper definitely helps engage more of the lung capacity. And whether from coughing up stuff to clear the airways or simply feeling the greater depth of breathing, the effects are clear. What I wanted when I started to train harder - and what I found - was that the harder, interval work and longer, tougher workouts did in fact help me clear my lungs more effectively, more fully.
Build muscle - rowing daily certainly helps build or maintain muscle. With the increasingly noticeable withering of muscle size as I age, however, this became important in a different way. I was no longer trying to toughen up the quads to a level of toughness that was visible, to a size that was trunk-like; I was just hoping to reduce the amount of muscle loss and to put some power back into the legs and back. And I wondered, of what I had lost in appearance and functionality (not rowing hard), could I regain that? It is frightening to hear that older people cannot build new muscle. I am not sure where the line is between “build more” and “restore the existing” when it comes to muscle cells, but happily, training harder did have a positive effect when it came to building muscle.
Burn calories - As with the prior two forms of bodily motivation, the desire to burn more calories as I worked out harder was a factor I paid attention to. My weight had gone up over the years and rowing daily did not keep the weight off or easily translate into weight loss when I wanted it to happen. Happily, as the intensity and frequency of my workouts ratcheted up during my training to race, I began to feel that I was indeed burning enough calories to make a difference. Not enough to stop watching my diet. But enough to help me lose nearly 20 pounds. Now, I found, when I rode or rowed harder, I could imagine burning more calories and feeling it was really happening.
Now, as I worked at training to race again, I began to think about two additional types of benefits to my body from working out harder:
Move digestion along - Maybe it is simply the effects of breathing more deeply, but digestion seemed to improve as my workouts became more intense. Certainly, the whole central part of the body is massaged, if you will, by the diaphragm helping the air in and out of your lungs more extensively. And the caloric demands certainly changed. The muscles needed more energy. The water in the body was flowing more - not just in the higher pulse of blood flow but also with increased sweat and drinking of water.
Extend blood flow to kill infection - Just as I used to think of a good hard workout as the best defense against the common cold, I found myself now thinking about raising my pulse and blood pressure while working out harder. And I pictured that causing the flow of blood to increase to extremities, to capillaries, to gums and joints and other places blood may approach but tend not to flow too well, to a disappointingly increasing effect as we age. How many people become ill or die from pneumonia (lungs cannot be cleared) or from infections in the body? It was another positive thought I held onto, that rowing hard would help the blood reach needed areas of the body.
So, I cannot attest to having beaten a particular infection or a achieving specific digestive victory, but when I found that my muscles were stronger, my lungs felt fuller and breathing deeper and I took off about 20 pounds, I have to attribute those changes to the harder workouts. I have been lucky not to have heart problems over the years, and that was the case during this training, as well. I do not know whether this would apply to all, but it seemed if anything that my heart reacted positively to the harder work. My blood pressure went down from high/needs medication, to low/moderate - no medication needed.
In the end, it made me wonder whether the idea of health through moderate rowing might be misleading. I certainly still think it is obvious that it is a positive thing to do compared to not exercising at all, of course. But, maybe I was letting myself down by not training harder or at least incorporating more interval work on a regular basis?
More on the training efforts I made to prepare to race again another time.