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Q. Where do you live and work, and how long have you been there?
A. I am a Professor of Biomedical Science at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. I've been here for 35 years. I teach advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and medical students. I work hard, but I like what I'm doing. I still can't believe they pay me for working here!
Q. What is your background?
A. I did my undergraduate work at a small college in west central Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, where I majored in PE and Biology. After teaching junior high school for four years, I decided to get a Masters degree at Ohio State. In the spring of 1964, our twin boys had been born, I hadn't finished my dissertation, and I didn't have a job. The most attractive ad on the bulletin board at school was for a job in New Zealand teaching exercise physiology to undergraduates. It attracted me a lot because, at that time, they had very good distance runners there, and Arthur Lydiard was coaching.
To stimulate my anaerobic energy systems, I try to perform the following workouts once or twice a week.
DYNO Leg Press: As many reps with as high a power output as possible in 30 seconds followed by a 2 minute recovery period.NOTE: Because the anaerobic energy systems are maximized at 40-60 seconds and because you need sufficient time to clear and metabolize the lactate produced, all of these workouts will offer an effective challenge to the anaerobic energy system.DYNO Arm Pull & Push: same as above.
Concept2 Indoor Rower: One minute of hard rowing (90-95% of max); three minutes of recovery at an easy paddle. Begin with 2-4 of these exercise-recovery cycles and build gradually to 10 cycles.
Q. When and how did you first get involved with the sport of rowing?
A. When I went to New Zealand, as I had hoped, I got to work with runners (doing physiological testing and helping develop training plans). We got some publicity for our work, and soon these big guys showed up in the office. They were rowers. They wanted to know if we could test them, too. I didn't know much about rowing, so they invited me down to a regatta at the local boat club. I was very impressed with the sport and I soon became more involved with the rowers than with the runners.
The President of this rowing club was a guy named Fred Strahan. Soon after I started working with him, he was appointed to be one of the selectors for the 1968 New Zealand Olympic Rowing Team.
Fred called me to talk about the possibility of doing some testing with the national team. They flew me down to the National Championships in March, 1966. There, they selected 30 rowers to come to a camp.
I tested all 30 athletes and helped them select an eight and four. They came to the U.S., Canada and Europe and beat the pants off everybody. Up until then, selectors had been parochial, sticking with well-known athletes from strong clubs, but our testing revealed some lesser-known, but dynamite kids that they could develop for the '68 Olympics.
In 1967, Marge and I were ready to come back to the U.S. so I took a job at Ohio University, thinking that my work with rowing was over.
In December, 1967, I received a letter from Jack Frailey (then president of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen - the U.S. governing body for the sport of rowing). He had heard about the testing I had done in New Zealand and wondered if I would be interested in doing some work with the first U.S. composite development camp for the 1968 Olympics. That started my work with USRowing. We did the testing and 3-4 boats of that group won the Olympic trials. The young NZ four that I helped select won the gold in '68. I helped both New Zealand and the U.S. select their eights for the '72 Olympics and between them, they won gold and silver.
Q. And when did you first hear of Concept2?
A. When Dick and Pete started doing business and invented the erg, we started talking about doing things together and have been doing them ever since. Whenever Concept2 has questions about physiology or energy cost, we try to help. "Give us the ergs and we'll do the work." It's been fun.
I also encouraged them to get into the general fitness area. I told them the erg could compete against bike ergs and everything else coming out.
Your product speaks for itself. You've driven every other ergometer out of the business. We have a museum of ergometers in the attic.
Q. What has your research shown about the sport of rowing?
A. I might be accused of being overly biased, but I've had a chance to study other sports and, as far as energy expenditure goes, you burn more calories in rowing than any other activity. Cross-country skiing comes the closest. At standard submaximal levels of exercise, rowing will burn calories at a rate 10-12% higher than running, and 15-20% higher than cycling.
Why? First, in biking and running, it's lower body only, but in rowing you use upper and lower. If you look at it closely, cycling is so efficient. Your legs are always moving in the same direction. There's no deceleration phase as is built in to rowing. In rowing, you catch, accelerate, decelerate and change direction twice in every stroke. You have to overcome inertia each time. So, the energy cost of rowing is much higher.
Q. What has continued to interest you about rowing compared to other sports?
A. If you were to examine the muscle fibers of rowers, cyclists, and skiers, you would find them all to be mostly slow and oxidative, except for the fact that this unique sport of rowing causes fibers to develop power not found in other sports. Rowing is different in that it not only develops aerobic capacity but also power. The fibers get bigger. So rowing itself is a great weight training activity. I'm a big fan of selective weight training. You don't need much else and it should be as specific as possible.
Q. What other rowing consulting have you done?
A. I've developed a training program for NASCAR drivers, and I've put ergs in several baseball training rooms. Marge and I work with the Pirates, Mets, Reds, Marlins, and Indians; quite a few teams have ergs in their training rooms.
Q. What are you doing now?
A. At present, my projects include testing rowers on the Slide; and continuing testing on the DYNO. We did a DYNO study this past winter, and though we're still working on the report, we found that the DYNO and Erg group showed greater improvement in their erg scores than the erg and traditional weight-training group.
Both Concept2 and USRowing steer people in my direction. I probably have at least one call per week asking about workouts on the C2 erg or the energy cost of rowing or whatever. I like that. You should tell them to call me. It's important to be in contact with the real world, not just academia.