Jack Burns - Edge Rowing

Jack Burns - Edge Rowing The one and only Online Rowing Coaching specialising for Busy Professionals.

Join our wait list for our next coaching intake: www.facebook.com/share/g/19SDoErWFP/?mibextid=wwXIfr

11/09/2026

First ever masters race! Had great fun with David, Phillipe and Richie (thanks for subbing in with 10 minutes to go!)

Loving the friendly and competitive energy of this event. Thank you so far to all the volunteers and organisers at

10/09/2026

This is me when I was an unknown name racing head to head against, Olli Zeidler - the worlds number 1 ranked male sculler

This is what I learned about his technique by racing him..

And yes, his technique is not textbook. But there is one thing he does better than almost anyone I have ever raced against.

It’s his ability to stay impassive and relaxed.

Just look at how relaxed his face is here.

This is a sign that there is no tension anywhere in his body

And its why he was able to come into the sport and become so fast so quick

He already had the physical attributes, but people always let tension and aggression get in the way of that.

Olli was able to go fast because:

1- he was naturally very fit and powerful

2- because he stays loose as he recovers and as he pushes.

If you are tense on every stroke and wondering why you cannot go faster, you might already have the fitness. You are just not letting your body use it.

09/09/2026

Why do all the best female scullers hang with straight arms, and why do all the best male scullers row with bent arms?

Is it because women are technically better than men? Is it because men can simply get away with it?

It’s all about relative strength - where are rowers relatively strong and where are they relatively weak.

Generally, women have stronger lower bodies relative to their upper bodies and men are generally more even from lower to upper body

But how does that explain an arm bend?

The big reason rowers will bend arms is to change their lat angle.

It’s the same reason Olympic weight lifters do it too.

When you bend your arms, your humerus gets closer to your torso, this shortens your lat and puts it into a stronger position.

Now the con to bent arms is it shortens your stroke and it can increase upper body tension.

The pro is that it can help you transfer more force through your lats and into your glutes.

So, should you bend your arms? You should do it if you are a man or a women? No.

The cons generally outweigh to pros, and being able to transfer more force through your lats is simply something you can fix by building lat strength in the gym - regardless if you are male or female.

Laurent was doing everything right. Except the things that actually move the needle.Good career. Travel on the calendar....
08/09/2026

Laurent was doing everything right. Except the things that actually move the needle.

Good career. Travel on the calendar. Sessions squeezed in between.

And the progress didn’t match the effort.

His UT2 kept creeping up towards threshold. The mid zone work piled fatigue on without paying it back. Hard days got harder. And on race day he was rowing slower than he did in training.

STUCK.

He was already doing plenty of volume. What was missing was precision.

So we brought him into Edge and built the training around him.

We polarised his weeks: light, medium, heavy, very heavy. Set his true UT2 on the erg instead of the number he’d been guessing at. Planned the dips at the end of heavy weeks rather than letting them ambush him. Built blocks around real work trips and last minute tests, and added top end work with a purpose.

Technique came from regular video reviews, cut down to short cues he could use mid piece. This resulted in a cleaner catch, stronger posture, more hip drive and strength that showed up in the boat.

Mindset we trained like any other system. A simple process for the moments his head got loud, plus visualisation and pressure rehearsal, so a final felt like just another piece.

What changed?

His UT2 came down eight splits at a lower heart rate.

His 1k erg went from 3:18 to under 3:10.

And on the water, the ex*****on finally matched the training. He won his national title.

He went from collecting data to using it, from cramming around trips to planning around his life, and from overthinking mid piece to one cue under pressure. He stopped guessing and started converting work into speed.

If you are training hard and not getting paid for it, if your UT work drifts high and your motivation dips when it should be rising, I am here to tell you there is a better way.

We do not have space for new athletes right now, but soon we will.

Join the wait list.

The waitlist hears first, and spaces go first come first served. Join it via the link in bio.

A few months from now you could be looking back on this as the best decision you ever made for your rowing.

08/09/2026

Calm before the storm. Edge Rowing coaches sneaking a cheeky session in before racing starts tomorrow. One of the most beautiful places I have ever been, let alone rowed in.

07/09/2026

People still love telling masters rowers that all this hard training will wear your heart out eventually.

A research team in Paris decided to check.

They took two hundred and three Olympic rowers, followed them for up to a hundred years, and compared them with the general population.

The rowers’ death rate came out forty two per cent lower.

And here’s the part nobody expects. The biggest gap was the heart. Deaths from cardiovascular disease were nearly sixty per cent lower.

The organ everyone warns you about is exactly where the rowers were the healthiest.

Now, some of that is selection, because you don’t make an Olympic team with a dodgy engine.

But a gap that size, held across a century, is hard to argue with.

So when your family asks why you’re still doing this at fifty five, tell them the evidence points one way.

All that hard rowing looks less like wear and tear and more like maintenance.

Follow for more of the science of rowing faster after forty.

05/09/2026

Watch the video to find out how to claim the free pacing tool

04/09/2026

Imagine training consistently for ten years, then stopping completely and letting scientists measure exactly what leaves, and when.

Seven endurance athletes did exactly that in a famous 1984 study.

After twelve days their aerobic capacity was down seven per cent,

…and the first thing to go was the heart, with stroke volume, (which is the blood it moves each beat), down ten per cent inside two weeks.

By eight weeks the aerobic enzymes in their muscles had fallen by about forty per cent.

But here’s the part every busy rower should hold onto.

After twelve full weeks of nothing, their muscles still sat around fifty per cent above untrained levels, and the capillary networks built by years of training hadn’t budged at all.

A decade of consistency left a floor that three months of no training couldn’t touch.

So as long as you’re tracking your data, one missed session changes nothing, and even a rough fortnight isn’t the disaster it feels like. The damage lives in either over training or stopping completely.

Follow for more of the science of rowing faster after forty.

03/09/2026

Some rowers look like they’re pulling themselves up the slide, and if your stroke rate falls apart every time you take the rate up, this might be you.

Good crews use the swing of the body to carry themselves forward, so the slide is something that happens to them.

The momentum of your body swinging forward from the rock over is meant to transfer you onto the second half of the recovery.

Waste that momentum by rocking over slowly, and the only way to reach the catch is to drag yourself there, and everything about the stroke gets harder than it needs to be.

So rock forward faster.

To emphasise this, try an exaggerated rhythm to feel it: speed up the arms away and the bodies forward, and slow the slide right down.

Speed early in the recovery buys you the time on the slide.

When you get it right, the rhythm and flow improve and everything feels easier.

Your rhythm will feel different while it settles.

Follow for more on what makes fast crews look so unhurried.

02/09/2026

Masters rowers love to blame weak arms for a soft finish, when a lot of the time the real problem is a bent wrist.

Watch your hands as you draw through. If the wrists are bent, you’re pulling with your weaker forearm muscles, and flat wrists are what let you use the stronger part of your arms and back.

Bent wrists also add unnecessary movement to the finish, exactly where you want to be still.

Here’s why it happens.

If you hold the handle in your fingers, because your fingers are weak, when you go to turn the handle feathered, you have to get the wrist involved.

So move the grip of the handle further back into your palms.

Like you would if you were hanging from a chin up bar.

Then the drill: tape a ruler along your wrist so your hand has to stay in line with your forearm, and row like that until flat is normal.

Pause at the finish and check it, every few strokes.

The finish will feel more awkward for a while, and in the boat the feather will feel harder until the new grip beds in.

Like this video if you found it useful, so that I know whether or not to make more of them.

Address

Clyde Offices, 2nd Floor 48 West George Street
Glasgow
G21BP

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Jack Burns - Edge Rowing posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category