Jack Burns - Edge Rowing, Clyde Offices, 2nd Floor 48 West George Street, Glasgow (2026)

22/10/2026

How good do you have to be to race at events like the world rowing masters ?

Some of the best masters rowers around the world come to events like Henley masters, head of the Charles and world masters.

And it’s a very good standard at the top.

And it’s such a fun place to compete at.

So what boat speed, technique and erg score do you need to be worthy of entering these events?

NO LEVEL.

There is no standard that you need to be at.

And in fact, thinking that you need to be good enough to go to certain races is holding you back from progressing.

This is one of the reasons our athletes progress so fast.

Because we treat racing as a means to an end, not a end itself.

When i started rowing i was eleigbnle for the beginner single at British university champs.

But, i entered the hardest event, and I got pumped.

I was happy about that.

I was able to measure myself against the best people in the sport.

And that gave me so much more value than competing in an event i was likely to win.

Rowing is about getting to your full potential.

And while it’s easier and more comfortable to enter races you are “ready” for.

And train and train and train until you eventually are at a speed to be winning these bigger events….

It’s holding you back from progressing at the fastest rate possible.

The sooner you can go out, measure yourself against the best, the sooner you are going to progress.

Racing is a measurement of your progression. You might as well measure yourself against the best.

Just make sure you go into these events with solid process focused values.

This is also why so many of our athletes progressed and improved during the world masters. While many of them won medals, many of them didn’t, but taking away improvement and experience is so much more valuable than some hardware that says you went fastest on this day.

20/10/2026

ALWAYS CONSULT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL BEFORE USING ANY SUPPLEMENTATION.

THE DOSAGES IN THIS STUDY ARE EXTREME.

DO NOT START AT THIS DOSAGE.

The right dose of caffeine an hour before your 2k is worth about five seconds, and a study on competitive rowers measured it.

Eight competitive male rowers took caffeine or a placebo one hour before a 2k on the erg.

With caffeine they went 1.2 percent faster, which on a 7:30 2k is about five seconds.

The follow up on competitive women found the same thing, and most of the gain came in the first 500 metres.
Now here’s the part people get wrong.

The dose they tested was 6 milligrams per kilo. For an 80 kilo rower that’s around 480 milligrams, four or five espressos, a lot more than your morning coffee.
So if you are going to implement caffeine, there are two rules.

Test it in training first, starting lower than the study did, because the study also found it doesn’t work for everyone.

And ALWAYS consult a doctor before using any supplementation. Especially for busy rowers over 40, excessive caffeine use can put your heart and health seriously at risk, especially if it’s combined with intense exercise.

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

Bruce CR, Anderson ME, Fraser SF, Stepto NK, Klein R, Hopkins WG, Hawley JA. Enhancement of 2000-m rowing performance after caffeine ingestion. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2000. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11079528/

19/10/2026

Comment “strength guide” and I’ll send you our free strength guide for beginner, intermediate and experienced.

17/10/2026

Tom was 57, a grandfather of three and a business owner, and the same high standards that built his business were turning into anxiety every time he sat on the erg.

In his words, not succeeding wasn’t acceptable, so every test became loaded.

Two months into coaching he pulled a lifetime best 6:25 2k, beating what he thought was an ambitious goal of 6:29.

If you’ve built a successful career, there’s a good chance this is you too.

You’ve spent decades learning that pressure produces results, that if you push yourself hard enough you can control the outcome, and that self criticism keeps you sharp.

The erg doesn’t respond to any of that.

You can’t control the state of your physiology on any given day, and when your mind is fixed on something it can’t control it releases stress, stress blocks focus, and focus is what you need to row to your full potential.

So before your next session, write down one process focus, like a technical cue or the pacing you’re going to hold at the start.

After the session, judge it on that, not on the splits.

You can still want the PB, so long as most of your value is going towards how you execute.

Mindset is a muscle. You won’t feel the benefits immediately, and you might even feel worse for a time.

It’s probably the number one problem the athletes we work with face, which is why we train it step by step, the same way we train fitness.

Follow for more on training your mindset the way you train your body.

09/10/2026

“Oh wait, this feels familiar.”

said Spencer, this winter, when a technical change finally landed.

It was a feeling he last had in college.

Back then he went to the US development camps and was told, kindly, that he wasn’t big enough for the sweep team. He and a mate moved to Virginia to try the sculling route instead. Neither made it. “I did what I could,” he says, and walked away without regret.

As his 50th approached, Spencer got the itch to get back into a boat. He purchased a single and hit the water with great aspirations, but no coaching. With no guidance and no plan, bad habits started to form and set like concrete.
Despite his hard work, Spencer was not producing the results in his single that he expected given his prior successes. He believed he was capable of more.
If you’ve rowed at a high level, you know this feeling. Fit enough and fine. But it eats at you, because you remember what fast felt like and you can’t see how you’ll feel it again.
So, Spencer took action.

He set a goal, the Head of the Charles a year out, and 30 seconds off his 6k. We got him set up so his Edge coach, Taylor, could see him every week. He gave the single the whole winter, the big dark included. He followed a personalized, long-term training plan instead of an ad-hoc “see how I feel today” workout schedule. Feedback carried through from the erg to the boat.

And Spencer started to get the same sensation during the stroke that he last felt in college. Hang. Acceleration. Relaxation.

Spencer improved at a rate that he didnt think was possible, but we knew would happen due to our data driven approach.

“Long time listener, first time caller to the wins chat.”

Right where the data said it would be.

The Charles is next week. Watch out for Spencer!
The rower you were is still in there. The habits on top might be older than some of your coaches, which is why a two-week fix doesn’t touch them.
If you’re ready to take action, our books open on 25 October.

Join the waitlist (link in bio). The application form drops there first.

06/10/2026

Rate 18 doesn’t make it UT2.
Half of you are doing a threshold session and calling it steady state.
UT2 is set by how hard your body is working, and the stroke rate has nothing to do with it. Low intensity sits around 1.5 mmol of lactate, proper high intensity at 8 to 12.
Drop the rate to 18, but keep working hard and you’re sat in between: hard enough to stop you recovering, nowhere near hard enough to count as a hard session.
Rowers get told to make every session count, and that’s true, but it gets misinterpreted as every session needs to feel like work.
Most of your week should be UT2, so if it’s slightly too hard, every session starts to feel lethargic and eventually you burn out.
You should finish a UT2 session feeling like you could have done more. If every steady session leaves you flattened, your zones are wrong, no matter what the rate says.
And over 40 there’s a second trap: your max heart rate falls with age but your low intensity zones don’t fall at the same rate, so the standard formulas put your easy pace in the wrong place.
Comment “over 40” and I’ll send you our free tool that gives you the exact range your UT2 should sit in.

05/10/2026

Jason took 8 seconds off all of his splits almost straight away, before he’d had time to get any fitter.

He’s 47, he runs a business, manages a team and has a big family, and he’d been following a generic programme at his club.

In his words, he had no one to tell him if he was doing something wrong.

The changes we gave him were small, and they’re the kind you don’t find by feel.

A lot of the changes that make you faster feel worse when you first make them.

Square your blades earlier and it might feel like you are tensing up.

Stay relaxed as the load picks up in the first half of the drive, and you may feel like you’re doing less work.

Place the blade on the way forward like you should, and it’ll feel like you’re stopping the boat at the catch.

So if you row by feel, you keep doing a stroke that feels powerful, is often the reason you are not improving.

We naturally do what feels comfortable, change is often the opposite of that.

Film yourself from the side this week, and trust the video and the split over the feeling.

The video only shows you what you’re doing. Working out which fault is costing you the most is the hard part, and that’s the part Jason needed us for.

Four weeks in, his 2k had gone from 7:13 to 7:01.

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

04/10/2026

You have done all the hard work and now you are 7 days out from a race - yet - you throw away those months of solid prep by screwing up your taper week

Tapering is the easiest thing to get right, you just have to get over some counter intuitive concepts.

Stop taking extra days off.

Stop being afraid of work.

To get your taper week right so that you can capitalise on every once of energy you put into your training block and row to your full potential - do this:

Start dropping the length of your steady state sessions from about 7-10 days out.

Dont immediately drop it, gradually nudge down the length of your sessions, this is where the majority of the tapering happens.

Then make sure you keep in some intensity.

I like to start sprinkling in bursts every day in the lead up to the race.

And 2-3 days out, i like to programme a couple reps of some longer intervals at race pace.
DO NOT take a day or two off before your race.

Dropping training completely will result in your blood volume dropping, which makes it harder to pump around your volume.

Getting your taper week right is like getting your warm up right, if you feel like you have done too much, its probably perfect.

03/10/2026

You have probably been told to accelerate the boat on the drive, but when you do that, you just feel like you are working harder and the splits stay the same

And it’s a shame because you are stopping yourself from using the muscles you should use.

And it’s why you will look at fast people with bad blade work, posture and sequencing…

That still drop you in the middle of the race.

Here is how you can fix it so that you can create boat speed at a relatively low cost.

To accelerate, you need to press through your feet.

To use your feet, you need to be able to engage your quads, glutes, core and lats.

But when you try to accelerate, you increase upper body tension.

This sends force into your fore arms, biceps and traps.

Which is why you FEEL like you are working - but you are not using the muscles you need to.

So, instead - you need to make sure that you are relaxed AS you drive, not just on the recovery.

When you are relaxed as you drive, your shoulders drop, and the force passes through the lower body muscles.

Meaning you get more acceleration for less effort.

02/10/2026

Most people hit 50 and quietly decide the boat will never feel fast again.

Heather is 50 and became British Indoor Champion.

She came to rowing at 45 and fell hard for it. Strong on the erg, but in the boat it would not click. Messy water and steering spiked her nerves, side by side starts rattled her, and pushing hard while steering straight felt like two jobs at once.

Add running a company as its CEO on top, and training time was whatever was left over.

The technical input she was getting was patchy. Results felt “meh”, confidence dipped, and the fun was draining out of it.

So she applied.

We built everything around her. Her work, her kids, her club sessions. A data led plan with balanced weeks and the right mix of steady work and strength, so fitness climbed without her ever feeling cooked.

Technique became a short list of things to work on, tracked session to session, instead of a vague cue shouted across the water.

And the mindset piece. We trained a system for rough water and side by side racing, and a visualisation routine to get her ready for stroking the quad at British Masters. Racing started to feel enjoyable again.

Where she is now:

2k from 7:52 to 7:28. 24 seconds.
70 seconds off her 5k.
British Indoor Champion.
Entering single scull races she would not have had the confidence to go near a year ago.

At 50.

Her fastest days were not behind her. I would bet yours are not either.

If rowing is not as fun as it used to be, and the fitness you have on the erg is not showing up in the boat, our books open on 25 October.

Join the waitlist (link in bio). The application form drops there first, and with 1000 people already on it, spaces will go fast.

Jack Burns - Edge Rowing

22/10/2026

20/10/2026

19/10/2026

17/10/2026

09/10/2026

06/10/2026

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04/10/2026

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