Heads up!
This article walks through an early design of what training plans could be. You can find what it currently looks like in our help center by looking at how to create a planned workout.
A better way to train your rowers remotely
RowHero is a powerful erg data platform for teams and individuals, which came of age in a world where rowers erged together in the same boathouse. That world no longer exists, and it’s time for us to shift gears.
We want to support the thousands of coaches reinventing their programs in this socially distanced world. Our job is to help you supercharge what you can offer to your teams.
Building off what we’ve already done, our first service is remote training on the erg. With the data that you can capture from RowHero, you get a very good picture of someone’s performance even if you aren’t there to observe it. However, RowHero has up to this point only recorded workouts for the whole team or for the individual alone — nothing in between.
This means for rowers who want to improve their erging on their own (especially for better 2K times for college), getting consistent, meaningful feedback from their coaches is often a big challenge.
So in July 2020, we have extended RowHero in two major ways:
- Rowers can share personal workouts with their coaches, so they can get great feedback when they want to do more than the team’s baseline.
- Coaches can create training plans for athletes to complete remotely.
Let’s walk through how it works.
New in July: Training Plans
As a RowHero coach (as of July 2020, by request only, contact us for pricing), you can see your team’s roster and workout history. New in v0.12 is the ability to add a training plan. Simply select an athlete from your roster, tap the “+” button in the top right corner, and select “Training Plan.”
You’ll get an email with a link to a Google Sheet to create your plan. For now, training plans can only be authored in Sheets. Most coaches we talked to use Sheets for training plans already, so it makes it easy to get started.
This Google Sheet is special because it’s linked to your RowHero account.
Step 1. Choose the athlete this training plan is for
To get started, go to the “Start Here!” tab and click the Import Teams/Athletes button.
You’ll be asked for your permission to run a script. This is Google’s way of making sure you want to connect with RowHero. Click “Continue” and then “Allow” on the next page (you may need to scroll down to see the “Allow” button).
You may need to click on the button again. This time you’ll be asked for your RowHero username and password, and then you can fill in which team you’re building this plan for and who you’re building it for.
Step 2. Name your plan
In the future, you’ll be able to browse the list of plans you have available for your team — use a name that you’ll remember.
Step 3. Write the plan
Enough setup! On to the good stuff.
The training plan model we use is one spreadsheet tab per month. To create a month, fill in the start date of the month you want to build, and then select the number of workout slots per day. Use the maximum number you might want to use. For example, even if there is only 1 day in the month you might want to use 3 workout slots, set it for 3, and hit the Create Month button.
You’ll then get a new tab to fill in the details of your training. For each slot you fill in, Workout Type and Title are required. Description is optional.
Step 4. Save the plan to RowHero
When you’re ready for your athlete to see your workout plan, go back to the “Start Here!” tab and click “Save Training Plan to RowHero.” You’ll be asked for your RowHero email and password one more time, and then your workouts will be in the app.
Special note: You can click this button at any time, and it will update the workouts that your athlete sees. So if you make a mistake, no problem! Just change what you need and try again.
The Athlete’s Side
A rower can see your training plan by navigating to their personal workouts and tapping on the calendar tab. Here they can view a week’s worth of workouts at a time and browse through the plan at their leisure.
For erg workouts today, rowers can tap “Start Workout” directly from the app and record data from their Concept2. When they finish, coaches can see these results directly in the app when looking at their team’s roster.
Next Steps
If this becomes a valuable service, we’re planning on building more which will also help team and individual workouts in many ways. Here’s the roadmap:
- Athletes can record their RPE, recovery (readiness to perform), and any additional post-workout notes (public or private). Coaches can see this data and give their own feedback as well to the athlete.
- Coaches can create and view trends of their own specific benchmark workouts to track whether their athlete is making the expected speed improvements.
- Coaches and athletes can view trends of athlete recovery, so they can determine whether their expected workout load matches the actual load.
- Notifications for coaches to know exactly when an athlete completes a workout.
- Way in the future: heart rate data, auto-setup of the erg workout to avoid the rower doing the wrong workout, force curve/peak force data, and more detail on off-strokes/leaving energy in the tank.
Call to action
We’re looking for excited coaches who want to give this a shot! The app is currently iPhone only and records data with the Concept2 PM5.
Reach out to me directly at " target="_blank" rel="noopener">, and we can check out if this is a good fit!
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Have a great day!
