The Irish national Rowing squad (‘Rowing Ireland’) held a training camp at the National Rowing Centre in Cork this weekend. The camp’s purpose was to see how the athletes had progressed on their weights programmes over the past few months, to observe their technique and to carry out some strength testing….

The camp was the first time we’d seen the U23/senior squads all together in one place at the same time, so it was a great opportunity to develop technique and coach through the squad. Over the last 6-8 months, the athletes have been working on their lifting technique and strength, so the idea was wanted to check form, look at progress and do some strength testing.

The camp was held at the National Rowing Centre in Cork, with the specialist focus of lifting and strength testing. It was also the first opportunity to get a look at the athletes after their performances at the 2010 Rowing world cup series at lake bled, Slovenia.

You’ll see the facilities aren’t exactly luxury at the moment (the lifting is taking place in a cleared out rowing bay :), but that’s because the centre is in the process of being remodelled. Once the works are completed, there’ll be brand new athlete’s quarters, an erg room and a lifting room.

“The technical ability of the athletes has dramatically improved, which’ll serve as a platform for future strength development to carry over into the boat,” said Ed Hallam (our Director of Performance), “We got through some great lifts – and then had a bench press competition at the end for some fun.” “Overall, the guys have developed really well and made some great progress.”

When asked if this means there was likely to be any emerging cross-over from the athletes into powerlifting, Ed’s reply was “I would expect at least as many athletes that cross-over from powerlifting into an elite-level 2K erg sprint.” :)

I’ll put up some more photos of the lifts when we get the videos back and annotated, and of the new facility when it’s complete. The next camp is in September.

We’d like to take this opportunity to say a massive ‘congratulations!’ to the winners of the 2010 Xchanging Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race – Cambridge!

(If you’re – quite rightly! – wondering what took us so long to post this, the 2009-10 “wash up” meeting was held today, which is the first time that everyone’s back in the same place after the race, and the first opportunity for us to grab photos! =)

We’ve been involved in the Strength & Conditioning for Cambridge University Boat Club for three seasons now, but this last year was the first time we have had the opportunity to design and implement a complete year-round programme…

In actual fact the day was a double victory for Cambridge Boat Club as Goldie (which is kinda sort of a ‘2nd boat’) won their race too versus Oxford’s “Isis” boat.

What made the Blue boat’s victory extra special for us was the fact that it was a win from middlesex station – which means that the crew has to be strong enough to hold on for the middle 2/3rds of the race on the outside of Surrey bend before launching the attack to win.

We believe another key factor was that there were some of the guys in both crews who we have worked on our S&C programme over three years – which means that their physicality is a result of the structure that’s been put in place to graduate them to that point. (Despite popular myths to the contrary, athleticism doesn’t happen overnight!)

Chris Nilsson, Chief Coach, Cambridge University Boat Club, said “Supplementing Core Cambridge’s S&C coaching into CUBC’s on-water training was a key part of the 2010 Boat Race wins. By integrating our on-water coaching with their land-based S&C training we produced stronger, fitter, injury free athletes who went on to win the races.”

“Many thanks for your support and hard work to help us achieve all of the above. All of our guys appreciate it and know they were all the better for your programme.”

Here’s to 2011!

All of the above photos are copyright Getty Images.

This week, record breaking adventurer Sarah Outen started work with us to prepare for her next adventure. In 2009, Sarah rowed solo ~4000miles across the Indian Ocean from Australia to Mauritius, breaking 3 world records in the process.

If that sounds impressive, then you should see the trip she has planned for next year…

In 2009, Sarah rowed solo across the indian ocean, – just her and “Dippers” (her faithful boat) alone for 124 days and 4000 miles.

Starting next May 2011, Sarah is planning a trip from London to London, via the rest of the world; A global circumnavigation of approximately 20,000 miles involving rowing both the South Pacific and the North Atlantic oceans, and cycling the rest.

Having seen/heard of the work that we’ve been doing with Dan Martin she got in touch with us to help plan some key components of her strategy.

We’re really excited by this project because there are some really interesting logistical challenges as well as the obvious physiological demands too. To give two quick trivial examples – Sarah has to carry all of her food on the boat, so exactly how much does she need, and of what type to leave her in the best condition when she finishes?; When you develop knots and niggles from overuse (that’s a lot of rowing!) you would normally stretch and self-massage – but how do you do that on a tiny boat in a big ocean?

…so we’ll be working with her over the next year to prepare her as best as possible for the challenges ahead – to keep her injury resilient and to teach her the skills she’s going to need to transition from months of rowing to months of cycling and vice versa. We’ll also be looking closely at the physiological demands of the challenge and putting various management strategies in place.

I’ll be posting far more information about all that in due course, but for now you can see what Step 1 of the challenge was/is – to iron out all of the knots and niggles, to correct a few postural imbalances to prepare for the next step! I can assure you that you really wouldn’t want an audio clip to accompany the photos above :)

Exciting, eh?!

Sarah’s great value and is involved in all sorts of interesting stuff, I heartily recommend you check out her blog and twitter feed.

Last weekend Ed took part in the latest Rowing Ireland land-based training camp. Sadly, because he was back-to-back non-stop coaching the athletes, he didn’t actually get chance to take photos of the guys in action (hopefully next time) – but he did snap some pics on his phone of the places that he visited on his journey.

The camp was a 3-day tour catching up with the various athletes at each regional centre to assess and teach lifting technique, answer questions, sort out any niggles and re-programme.

The weekend started off in Cork at the National Rowing Centre.

The coaches then moved to Dublin for a day at the Irish National Boxing Centre. You can imagine that this is a pretty high-profile facility as it’s where they train their their national and Olympic athletes, and Boxing is one of Ireland most succesful sports.

The final day was at the University of Limerick, which houses the Irish National Strength & Conditioning Facility. This set-up is pretty legendary as it features lots of high-class athletes as well as people like Gerard Hartmann (who’s worked with everyone from Usain Bolt and Paula Radcliffe downwards and collaborated on the Nike Free running shoes). The gym shown in the photos is also used by Munster RUFC (one of the top Rugby Union squads in Europe).

Having seen these photos, I’ve only got two questions – how does one manage to visit three international performance centres and not capture a single athlete? :) — and how on earth do you go about running the inside lane of the bend on that warm-up track? :)

…stay tuned sportsfans…

Being a major university town for the last 800 years, there’s obviously a lot of sport being done in Cambridge by a lot of students. For those that don’t know, Cambridge University is made up of a collection of individual colleges, and each of the colleges have their own sports teams (which leads to some interesting inter-college competition!)

Pembroke college boat club Men’s & Women’s 1st VIII have recently started a training programme with us - enabling them to dominate in such competitions (we would imagine :). The two boats are having weekly sessions at our centre and will have bespoke programmes to undertake when they’re not with us to improve flexibility, mobility, strength etc. and hopefully to help make them relatively injury resiliant.

“To have Core Cambridge’s facilities and expertese on our doorstep is awesome – our crews were fascinated by the taster session, and we could see straight away that strength & conditioning was the going to be the key to taking our performance to the next level” — Samantha Bennett, Captain PCBC