Leander Club visit the GSK Human Performance Lab for series of assessments
Posted
19/11/2014
Featuring
Leander Rowing Club
Leander Club visit the GSK Human Performance Lab for series of assessments:
On October 21st, we opened our doors to 10 men’s heavyweight rowers from Leander Club for a series of physiological assessments. Leander’s members have won more Olympic rowing medals than any other single-sport club in the world and its impressive alumni includes Olympic medal winners James Cracknell, Steve Williams and Pete Reed. The GSK HPL has worked with the club since July 2013.
We wanted to know how the rowers found the day’s session and find out more about their training and nutrition strategies. We caught up with Callum McBrierty and Francis Highton in between tests to find out more.
When they arrived, we sent them straight into step tests on the rowing ergo. These increased in four minute increments until they were working at a 5km pace, leaving them ‘flat out’ for 15-20 minutes. After that, things got even tougher, with a ‘tricky’ 500m max effort test.
Callum said: ‘Today’s tests were relatively straight forward, for me it’s the last 4 minutes that start to get tough! We do it with a mask on so it’s measuring our oxygen, what we’re taking in and out. They measure our heart rate too so we can see how hard we’re exerting ourselves.’
Matthew Furber, Sports Scientist at the GSK HPL, explained: ‘What we’re doing with the guys today is aligned to their specific needs as athletes and to their coaches, it’ll help inform their current training programmes and fitness level. The testing provides us and the coaches with insights into each athlete’s abilities, identifying physiological strengths and weaknesses to support the development of their individual bespoke training programmes’.
Ultimately, this helps the rowers understand the correct intensity that they should be training at to get the best out of their performance. This can also help mitigate fatigue, which is a common problem with the sport, given their heavy training regime.
‘It’s important that we don’t push ourselves over our limits. If we don’t know the zone we’re supposed to be in, I might train for 3 weeks harder than I’m supposed to... then I’ll make myself ill and need to spend 2 weeks recovering.’ said Callum.
Callum has visited the HPL twice before, taking cognition and body composition tests. This was Francis’ first experience of the facility. ‘I’ve done step tests but not necessarily at this complexity - with the oxygen masks and the heart monitor and the blood tests. From just wandering around here... the facility is pretty incredible.’ he said.
So what do their training programmes look like? In short, their strategies differ between seasons. Winter training is land based, spent building up their endurance and developing the more technical side of their performance strategy. More time is spent outside during the summer, focusing all efforts on training for races like the highly competitive Henley Regatta.
At the moment, the athletes are moving into their winter training sessions, which means that today’s max test was particularly tough for them. As the season draws to a close, training at the kind of level that the max test demands is something that the guys haven’t been used to. Although it’s clear that the Leander rowers have an intense training schedule all year round. They train two or three times a day, six days a week. Sunday’s are a day off, unless they’re racing.
Fuelling this kind of training correctly is essential. As the rowers manage their own nutrition, we were keen to understand more. They tell us that the key is in the balance.
“Of course we need to eat a lot of carbohydrate but we do need to be careful that we don’t overload. It’s easy to convince ourselves that we need loads of pasta and potatoes because of the amount of training we do, but if you overload it doesn’t store properly and it sits as fat. It’s about finding that balance.” said Callum. The rowers are also keen to add the importance of ‘green’ in their diet. Their heavy training load means it’s easy to get ill, making sure that they get enough Vitamin C and D is an easy way to help prevent it.
Finally, we asked the guys what their hopes and aspirations were for 2015.
‘We want to get to the point where we should be in the senior squad. That doesn’t necessarily mean being a part of it, but knowing that you’re right behind it and ready to step in is a good place to be too. There are a number of trials that run throughout the year, if we perform well then we’re ticking the right boxes... I want to make sure I’m right up there.’ said Francis.
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