Building a successful para-rowing programme

The British para-rowing squad routinely tops the medal tables at international regattas – most recently winning three golds and a bronze medal at the 2024 European Rowing Championships, and holding world best times in the PR2 mixed double sculls and PR3 mixed coxed fours.

At the 2024 World Rowing Cup III in Poznan, we sat down with Paralympic high-performance coach Nicola Benavente to find out more about the principles of building the world’s most successful para-rowing programme.

The basics of the programme start with talent identification. Becoming part of the team is not as simple as having an impairment and wanting to row – British Rowing sets out the physical characteristics, including height or seated height, age, weight and minimum arm span, that it looks for in its athletes.

“We’ve got really good coaches back home whose job is to go around the country, advertise what we do, and give people who are either newly injured or newly impaired just another look on what they can do,” explains Benavente.

“Also finding kids that haven’t been into sport, and just showing them what else is out there. We go into schools and rowing clubs and just tell people what we’re about, what para-rowing is, that it’s for everyone and it’s competitive and it’s hard training.”

Benavente says development is key, as it keeps the current Paralympic squad on their toes.

“For us having the development side pushes the Paralympic team. They have to push on harder and all of a sudden you’re seeing speeds you’ve not seen before,” she adds.

Benavente says the basics of the British programme are centred on getting the volume of training right while acknowledging the athletes’ impairment.

“The basics of rowing, just the sport of rowing, not just for paras, is the volume and the adaptation that you want. Obviously the 2k race is quite long, but also we need to be powerful,” she says. “So we’re building something that’s got enough volume, but has got the training adaptation with it, so they’re strong enough and study enough that they’re not getting injured.”

So far, so standard for any rower – or indeed any athlete.

“The more specific bit with paras is making sure that the programme helps their bodies and is not something that’s going to impact them or their impairments or disabilities, and make their weaknesses stronger, which may sometimes be slightly different to the Olympic side and the able bodies,” Benavente continues. “But ultimately the actual fundamentals of the programme are very similar to the able-bodies – volume and power training, moving their own body weight, moving well; mobility, being able to get into a good compressed position, a lot of trunk training.”

The similarities have grown closer since the para-rowing distance lengthened from 1000m to 2000m after the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, matching the standard international racing course. That pushed the volume of training up for para-rowers to address the additional physiological needs.

“But racing is racing and the top speed you need is the top speed. That hasn’t ever changed, it’s just then how do you do that for a longer period,” Benavente adds.

Particularly important for para-athletes is ensuring that their individual ways of moving are addressed, and that they keep on top of any physiotherapy or rehab work. They may each have their own warm-up routine, for example. After that, the key is making however the athlete moves within the limits of their impairment strong and repeatable, and making any area of impairment as strong as possible.

“Making those areas not weaker and allowing them to move to the limits of their function without injuring them is important, because when rowing and at pace and intensity they put their body through that. So you have to do that in training, or at least get to the limits in training so you know you can do that in training,” she says.

But Benavente says after that the physical fundamentals of a high-performance para-rowing programme are very similar to a high-performance programme for Olympic athletes – and indeed in Great Britain, the Paralympic squad trains on the same course at the same time as the rest of the GB team.

One area which is a little different is rigging. Not only does each athlete have a different way of moving, but para-rowing crew boats are currently all mixed-gender. Benavente says she spends more time thinking about rigging “than my head likes”, but equally, says starting from basic principles is key.

“Some people, how they want to move isn’t going to fit well in a crew boat, so you can tweak how they move with the rig,” she says, “but ultimately you’re trying to get people pushing in a straight line. Although we do adapt things so that we can get the straight lines as simple as possible, we wouldn’t go too extreme to making the boat set for how they are. We try to get them to move how we want with their capabilities and then rig around that.”

Small tweaks are key, and Benavente says coaches should not overthink things, and work initially by eye before making big changes to a boat’s set-up.

One thing that is currently evident is the way the strength and depth of the para-rowing field is increasing. Benavente attributes this partly to the world now understanding how to make the most of the athletes’ abilities and physicality.

“Some of them won’t be able to use their legs and some of them won’t be able to use their arms the same, but the rest of their bodies are phenomenal. When you start training towards that with that in mind it pushes the boundaries a bit more and people start realising you can do more with the athletes you have in front of you and you can take a few more risks with them,” she thinks.

“Obviously you then get a bit faster and competition gets a bit tighter, which is great for the sport. The depth starts coming up now and people start getting excited that there are medals out there to be won.”