#75737
AvatarKatie Hemphill
Participant

Hey Angus,

What sort of movements do you work on in the gym for your rowing?
If you’re not already on it, I’d say you could use some squats and deadlifts in your life. They mimic much of the lower body action involved in rowing (bending through the hips, knees, and ankles), so they can provide a good framework for training yourself out of your old rowing habits and making your NEW habits very strong and robust.
What I would recommend is some progression where you find the simplest version of each of these movements that you can’t do properly. And by properly I mean like 90% perfectly. Fundamental movement problems (like not being able to hinge from the hips with a braced neutral spine in a deadlift) are a strong indicator that you will have problems with similar high-level movements (such as rowing).
Unless you’ve already fine-tuned your squat and deadlift, challenged and trained those patterns against speed, load, and metabolic demand, then doing something like trying to engage your psoas while rowing is going waaaaaaaay deeper into the rabbit hole than you need to.
Fix those fundamental patterns, restore any missing lower body ranges of motion (especially hip flexion and ankle dorsiflexion), and then apply those lessons learned on the rowing erg before you hit the water. This will be a process, not an all-or-nothing thing, and it starts with you knowing what a neutral spine and good hip motion feel like.
Now go get’em, rower.