hmmm, that’s interesting - thank you for the heads up.

Assume you have to put your own pacing on it?

Yeah, you would have to pace it yourself. If you click on "show alternate short", you can even keep scrolling until you find one you like or that fits in to your schedule!

actually found time to go to the gym at lunch today

5x5 Press 55kg
3x7 DB Press 24kg DB
3x8/8 Superset 40kg Preacher Curl/16kg Hammer Curl
3x14 Dips
4x15 Face Pulls

Press felt stronger than it has for a while - the week off must have helped
Ditto, the first time I've managed to do full ROM Dips without pain in 6 months

actually feeling 'back' today and totally recovered from excesses of last weekend.

Plan is to do a hard 30min row tomorrow

10k row 39.48.3 1.59.4/500m stroke rate 21

It’s a PR in the sense that I’ve never rowed this distance as anything other than something about a UT2 before but it wasn’t a max effort. It wasn’t easy either though, as you can see from the stabilisation/slight slowing of pace in the final 4k

I set the timer to 40 mins with the expectation that I would probably only do 30mins but then I just decided to keep on going.

Happy to get a hard row in at a long distance and my body has finally felt ok and healthy again the past two days after last weekend’s excesses

Nice piece!

thanks. not really my distance...certainly looking at the rankings. Again...not a PR but I 'ranked' it for interests sake and it's 79th percentile vs total population...vs 95th+ for the 1 and 2k and like 93rd ish for the 5k

my guess is that 39.10/15 ish might be an accurate PR if I went balls out and that's still not even to 85th.

IDK. Not sure I'm mentally tough enough to row hard for really long distances.

I am close to upping my distances though and permanently adding a 4th proper row session per week. Probably look at a Pete's Plan where I do the shorter and longer interval session then one long slow and one long hard row per week...potentially subbing a time trial into one of the sessions every fortnight as doing those..as well as the shorter intervals, really does motivate me.

Challenge with that is that...given how busy my work is..I'll have to drop down to 2 weights sessions per week. If I do that, I might go to a 'do everything twice in one session' body split...which will be quite the adjustment for me.

Training today

5x4 Bench 95kg
3x8/8 super set DB flyes//bench
5x12 DB bent over rows 22.5kg

session interrupted by son who wanted to practice his rugby league, so did 45mins kicking/catching and some sprints with him

7x500m 3.30r

1.38.8/500m 0.7secs/500m faster than last time

so..I'm counting this as 7 rounds, even though I had to finish about 80m from the end of the 7th round. I bought a sparkling mineral water at the gym for hydration by mistake and it was making me burp a little and giving my lungs a burn occasionally during the session.

about 150m from the end of the 7th interval, I felt like I needed to burp, risked a few and then needed to do a bigger one and actually vomited in my mouth! I was on course for the same time (I was tracking at 1.38.2 which was how I'd done the others...slowing down in the last 50

tbh, this ended up being a 9.5 RPE so the next time I do it, I'm gonna aim to do the same times as these...just for 8 intervals. I assume that my improved fitness (we hope) by then should mean that it's manageable as a 9 RPE

completed intervals were

1.38.8 (31)
1.38.9 (30)
1.38.9 (31)
1.38.7 (32)
1.38.9 (32)
1.38.8 (32)

Sick pace plus lol olds

so I've decided to switch things up the next 4 weeks.

instead of the weekly schedule being 3 rowing, 3 weights and potentially a 4th row if I can fit it in and feel good enough to do a double day, I'm switching to 4 rowing and 2 weights per week, so that I can get some more distance on the erg and improve my overall fitness and hopefully my times.

which means...I'm moving from an A,B body part split which I rotate 1.5x per week, to a construct where I work all body parts each session. I'll do the barbell Bench and Press movements each time and then rotate other movements...eg one time I'll do DL and the next time I'll do front squat or Bulgarian. There'll be less lower body than ideal, purely because of the amount of rowing I'm doing and because with the injuries I have in my knee and lower back, I want to be very sensible to ensure I keep training.
to

Will see how it goes - I'm a little worried about it as I've really enjoyed the past 9 months and have made some upper body strength gains that I'm afraid of losing, but it'll be good to do something different.

Training

3x3 Strict Press 60kg
3x5 Deadlift 120kg
3x5 Bench 90kg
3x8 Bent over DB row - 34kg DBs
3x6/9 Preacher Curl 40kg/Hammer Curl 16kg DBs
3x13 Dips

the plan had been to do bench first but both benches were in use.

I actually really enjoyed it. It felt 'harder'...my heart rate was higher and I was way more tired afterwards than doing the normal.

thoughts and suggestions on the above split?

The burpgate story is A+. The faster pace with a lower stroke rate is very promising. The gains won't slow down for a while, imo.

Wow, adding lowerbody? Going to two full bodies per week? Not time trialing every week?

Gonna have to remove the flash in the pan moniker. This guy going semipro.

do you make any ‘allowances/adjustments’ with your running training on the days after you’ve lifted lower body?

Eg schedule easier runs on those days to help with recovery?

40 mins steady distance

9550m at 2.05.6/500m 19s/m

started very easy and slowly warmed up

2.08.1/500 for the first 12 mins
2.06.3/500 next 12
2.04.6/500 for 3rd 12 then
2.00.4/500 for the final 4 mins

I rather double up. Easy endurance in the morning, lifting in the evening. Day off the next day.

But there is also muscle groups that recover in less than 16 hours. And strength training is better than hypertrophy for endurance athletes.

You see the montecore blasting 8 reppers on front squat and it's like, no. 3x3 bro or 5x3 if you feeling frisky.

Soreness is actually a pretty good guide that you most likely overdid it. I am almost never sore, unless I messed up.

interesting and thanks.

rest day yesterday.

training today 5x1500m 5r

1.51.1/500m average, s/r 26

1.51.3
1.50.9
1.51.1
1.51.2
1.51.0

all with stroke rate 26

first time doing this and I wanted to take it a little easy and see how it felt given my mental issues with doing longer distances...either steady state or intervals.

I went into it with 1.51/500 as my target time and I think it was about right. Probably an RPE of 8 and it wasn't as mentally challenging as I'd thought...probably because I was listening to a great podcast. So all in all, a successful session

I'll do it at sub 1.50/500

I'm gonna get an accurate HRM for my birthday and I'm interested in advice on which one to get.

I'll only be wearing the watch when I train....so I don't need bells and whistles. As should be obvious to readers of this thread, I'm not a tech guy so while I don't mind spending $$, I really don't need to get top of the range or start of the art anything and I'm highly unlikely to ever use additional features

My brief is simple

- a comfortable chest strap that will stay on and not annoy me when I'm rowing
- something accurate
- something that can bluetooth and download results to my phone

I'll almost certainly be buying a new erg with a PM5 so I assume some of them also will connect to the erg...but I'd say I'm not that likely to use that function

thanks for any input

Sounds like you are already decided on a chest strap. Probably get the highest rated on Amazon. And it's probably the same one montecore has.

Is there another kind? I just know how useless my Fitbit wrist strap is

There's not a lot of research you need to do with a chest strap. I still have one from maybe 6 years ago and it works fine. If you want to be safe, just get a Garmin chest strap.

Is there an alternative to a chest strap?

I am not aware of anything else that has the accuracy of a chest strap. It might be out there, but a chest strap is so accurate that I haven't bothered reading about it lately. If you really want to compare different things, look at DC Rainmaker's blog. He does indepth, non biased reviews of basically every endurance gadget.

training today

3x3 Bench 97.5kg
3x5 Press 55kg 4,4,5
4x3 Power Cleans 75kg
3x8 Bent Over Row 75kg
3x7/8 Barbell Curl 45kg/Hammer Curl 14kg
3x14 Dips

Definitely getting more fatigue and training for longer with these sessions

I was going to do some light front squats but my knees and quads were so stiff that I subbed for power cleans. If I'm gonna squat, I'm gonna need to warm up for longer

still adjusting to training both Bench and Press in the same session - my Press definitely struggled more than usual, coming directly after Bench.

Still...need to commit to this so that I can do 4 hard row sessions per week

thanks. will check it out, though I do think I'll probably need to find a good reason not to just get a middle of the range Polar

Sydney went into a 2 week lockdown yesterday, so I did what every red blooded Australian should do and drank significant quantities of alcohol

We’re allowed to exercise outdoors though, so I Heroically backed up at the coal face today. 75 min walk and then kicked the football with my boy before doing an easy 8k this pm.

34.22 which is 2.08.9/500’ at 18 strokes per minute

Just having a winter swim with one of my daughters and about to uncork a bottle of red