The following is a brief email conversation I recently had with a concerned father of a competitive high school athlete. Both the father’s and my emails have been lightly edited.
A Concerned Father’s Questions:
I am a “retired” triathlete who has trained using Coach Friel’s techniques during my best years. I’m looking for something unusual in coaching. My son is a high school junior, lightweight, crew rower who is competing at an elite level on one of the best HS rowing programs in the US. He is highly motivated and at the Olympic Development HP level.
I want to guide him in this off-season to more science-based workouts. The boys basically just go nearly all-out on every erg session (especially in the off-season). Two questions/concerns:
- Do you have any experienced coaches in rowing?
- I’ve suggested a different training approach and a “workout coach” but am sensing resistance from the head coach.
I am looking for a coach from now through the off season to improve his anaerobic threshold, and overall 2K erg times (and overall erg times), without overtraining him. He plans to row in college but wants to improve to a level even higher than he is now.
Thanks in advance.
My Reply:
I can sympathize with your concerns. When my son, Dirk, a road cyclist, turned 13 I looked for a coach for him as I thought it was a bad idea for a father to coach his son. I found a young coach who worked with him for the next 3 years. I told the new coach upfront that I didn’t want him pushing my son to win races. Instead, I wanted him to still be training and racing in 10 years and, most importantly, enjoying it. I also required that Dirk participate in other sports besides cycling until he was 16.
All of this paid off. He went on to win the Colorado Junior Road Championship (beating Bobby Julich, who was third at the Tour de France a few years later), started racing in Europe as a pro after HS, had a number of race accomplishments in college, and then raced in the US as a pro and podiumed in many races. He is now 52 and still enjoys races of all types and a couple of years ago won a masters national championship in ski mountaineering. The coach I hired for him as a junior did a great job.
Along the way I’ve read several pro athletes’ biographies in which they wrote about their teen years. Few of them raced seriously then. Most did it for fun, but with an eye to the future.
In a few weeks I’ll be interviewing Norwegian Kristian Blummenfelt’s junior coach, Arild Tveiten. Kristian is arguably the best triathlete in the world right now. I’ve been doing some studying to prepare for the interview. Coach Tveiten focused Kristian on aerobic training in his teen years. Very little anaerobic, from what I can tell so far. It’s paid off.
I’ve also read the limited research on this topic (see three studies below). The studies point to success for 20-something athletes who weren’t all that serious as teens.
I’m writing about all of this because I question if it’s a good idea to try to focus on improving a teen athlete’s anaerobic fitness. At that age the endurance athlete should be enjoying the sport and doing almost all aerobic training, introductory strength training, and skills development. That’s what pays off later when they become more mature. My reading and experience on the subject both point in this direction. I’d suggest that rushing into anaerobic training isn’t a good idea at that age. A great deal of it for a teen could easily be detrimental to their long-term success—and enjoyment—of the sport.
But I’m also not a rowing coach. Rowing is not exactly the same as working with young cyclists, triathletes, or runners. For one thing, I suspect that rowing is an anaerobic-focused sport given the typical race durations, more so than the endurance sports I’ve mentioned here, which can be several hours long. Also, crew rowing is a team sport and not individual. And there may or may not be any future in the sport after college (other than the Olympics, which isn’t likely to produce an income). I’m outside of my comfort zone in commenting on what he and you should do for his rowing career, so I’ll leave it there.
-Joe Friel
References on Youth Training
