Peak Power Rowing/Bri @ Granite Games!

Congrats to Bri who competed amongst the top dogs in CrossFit @ the 2018 Granite Games in Minnesota last weekend! For this competition, qualifying was a 2-week, worldwide online qualifier which took the top 35 for the pro division. The top 35 traveled to Minnesota to throw down in a grueling 4-day competition. While we couldn’t get live action of the events, Bri and Marcus were sending updates! She did very well and the competition looked like a blast! The workouts involved almost everything known in competitive Crossfit, including an hour long workout with a long open water swim, 5k run, and 4k row, multiple gymnastics tasks like handstand walks, ring obstacle course runs, muscle ups, along with strong man elements like axle bars, and simple gritty work like uphill sandbag sprints. As you might now, CrossFit just recently announced the Granite Games as one of the major sanctioned events for the upcoming CrossFit Games so I’m sure this year was a nice dry run of what they will be to come. Bri handled the events and had several top 20 finishes (her best finish in the muscle up event taking 13th). Strong and impressive work to Bri! Check her highlights out on her instagram page here!

One of my students in my graduate exercise science class is the Saint Mary’s College rowing coach and he passed over an article to me that I thought that would be useful to all of you who love or have a love/hate relationship with rowing! While I’m not anywhere close to being an average rower, I have a couple clients who are pretty darn good and asked him for some rowing programming tips. I specifically asked about ways to improve upon our normal distances in our weekly programming such as 500m, 1k, and 2k. The topic during class was “energy systems” and he presented to us that “peak power” was a commonly neglected aspect in rowing training amongst the elites. He spoke a lot on how aerobic rowing training is essential in the process to be elite, but, the separation at the top, he says, is peak power. Regardless, of the level or intention, I learned a lot from this article on looking at a fuller picture of rowing besides getting mileage. As much of what we talk about in CrossFit is developing our overall engine, this article dives into specific anaerobic/power training that helps improve your overall rowing engine. Check out the article here.