Peaking in Team Sports - 2007 - USOC Olympic Coach E-magazine, Winter Issue

The 2007 - USOC Olympic Coach E-magazine, Winter Issue arrived recently in my inbox. The various articles focus on teams. A few stood out as having some relation to rowing:

For coaches and athletes: Peaking for Team sports.

For coaches in particular : You were Hired to: Win Now Oo Win Consistently.

Sport Psycology - Great Groups, Great Coaches

Physiology - What Every Coach Should Know about Energy Systems.

There is a lot of great information there for you. If you would like to see back issues or subscribe you can receive future e-magazines via email by going to their main page.

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Rowing Coaching Education - Rowperfect Resources

Thanks to Rebecca Caroe of Rowperfect (and her own blog) who sent me an email with references to several of their resources related to recent posts here. I would encourage you to go over and have a look. In the near future I may get a chance to expand on some of these resources but for now, a brief summary and an encouragement to take a look.

Resources from several Rowperfect seminars is provided including:

Information on Seat Racing by Duncan Holland

This relates to my posting of an excel sheet for use with a pair matrix, and our poll on selection.

He includes some important points:

• It is a big assumption that a pair can select an eight!
• Don't repeatedly test young people on the erg.
• Fit the test to the training (and events) at the time - longer in winter, shorter in summer.
• Seat racing assumes athletes have comparable fitness, skill, honesty and motivation.

Although just points from slides, his layout of how and why to use fours, rather than pairs of eights is well worth a read if you plan on doing any seat racing.

Training to Perform presented by Paul Thompson

British Rowing Technique presented by Rosie Mayglothling

Athlete Testing Protocols presented by Martin McElroy

This one relates to our most recent post on peak power as a valid sub-maximal test for evaluating athletes and athletes progress. This includes protocols for:

• Sub Maximal
• Strength Power
• Step Test
• Anaerobic Capacity
• 1000m
• 500m

There are some great resources there and excellent graphics to help demonstrate the testing protocol.

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More Excel Examples for Rowing Coaches - Time Trials and Pair Matix Seat Racing

Since the last excel file I posted on doing weight adjusted erg scores proved to be our most read post to date I decided to post a couple of more example sheets for you. They are not necessarily ready to be used at a local event tomorrow, but they provide good examples of going beyond basic excel functionality to enhance your coaching. Athletes may well be interested too if only to gain a better understanding of some things coaches often talk about.

While I liked using ZoHo for posting the last online spreadsheet it didn't perfectly recreate my work in Excel and the next two examples are more complex. So, I have posted them to a free file sharing site called "4Shared.com." Please go there and download your own copies of these two examples. As always, feedback is most welcomed and if you find them useful I would love to hear from you. I am also happy to make some changes if you need anything different but aren't up to speed with Excel.

Pair Matrix.xls

This file allows for easy calculations used in a traditional "pair matrix" for seat racing. It is limited to 4 port rowers and 4 starboard rowers, but simply putting in the name of the athletes and the times for each trial will rank each athlete. Scroll to the right of the matrix to see the ordered ranking of athletes. Of course not everyone feels that crew selection in a pair is the best way to select a larger crew, but that is for another post.

Time Trial.xls

This is for using Excel to calculate times in a time trial or head race. It is far more detailed than a simple calculation of (finish time - start time) as it reports perecentages of gold standards and percentages of winning times, and it also ranks crews on a separate worksheet without the need for doing any sorting. It's probably well suited for a coach to use with several crews in his/her club, but would need a bit of work to run a whole head race. I hope that it does provide some useful examples.

Download the files at 4Shared.com

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Spreadsheet Tool for Weight Adjusting Erg Scores

As I mentioned in the last post there may be a better way to weight adjust scores for a whole crew than to just enter each of them in the Concept 2 calculator. I use excel for many things and have posted a speadsheet using Zoho Sheet that you are free to use. It is far from perfect I'm sure, but by entering a mass (in kg only for now) a distance and an erg score you are provided with several bits of information. You can use it below or for a better and more powerful view click the link to save it on your own machine as an excel file. I tried using Google Spreadsheets for this but when saved in excel format many formulas were lost for some reason. Zoho is also imperfect - losing title formatting and inserting some extra rows - but it is a simple way to provide a file for downloading.

• Split gives you the average 500 m split for the piece.
• Watts the average watts for the piece.
• P:W power to weight ratio as described in the last post.
• Physics .167 is the weight adjusted erg score using a .167 exponent as described on the Physics of Rowing site.
• Physics .222 is the weight adjusted erg score using a .167 exponent as described on the Physics of Rowing site.
• And finally the C2 .22 is the scorce as calculated by Concept 2.

Feel free to use, or modify this as you see fit. I'm sure I have made a few errors and will not be bothered at all if you find any and report them to me. If you send me any fixes or improvements I will incorporate them on the sheet published so that others can use them too.

If you need the original excel file, send me a note and I'll get a copy to you.

If you do find this at all useful or informative please drop me an email to let me know, please!

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