Ask ten rowing families whether high school rowers should lift weights and you will hear everything from "squats are the secret" to "lifting is dangerous for teenagers" to "the erg is the only training that matters." The research supports none of these positions. What it supports is more useful: strength training produces a real but modest improvement in rowing performance, it is safe for adolescents when supervised properly, and it earns its place in a training week without ever displacing the aerobic work that actually drives boat speed.
This article lays out what the studies show, what remains coaching judgment, and how a high school rower should apply both.
Does strength training actually make rowers faster?
Yes, by a small but real margin. The most rigorous evidence is a 2020 meta-analysis in the Journal of Sports Sciences by Thiele, Prieske, Chaabene, and Granacher, the first to pool only controlled studies of strength training in rowers. It found significant improvements in lower-body maximal strength and a small but significant benefit to rowing-specific performance, with no effect on cardiorespiratory endurance. In plainer terms: lifting makes your legs stronger and your rowing somewhat faster, and it does nothing for your engine. The engine is built on the water and on the erg.
The supporting evidence points the same direction. A 2011 review in Sports Medicine by Lawton, Cronin, and McGuigan found leg strength and power correlate moderately to strongly with 2K time, and a 2007 study by DuManoir and colleagues found ten weeks of added strength training improved both leg press strength and 2K ergometer time in novice rowers. A 2010 study by Gallagher and colleagues is worth knowing too, because it keeps everyone honest: over just eight weeks in collegiate rowers, adding strength training produced no statistically significant advantage over endurance training alone, though the heaviest-lifting group improved most. Strength training is a season-scale investment. It will not transform a 2K in a month, and any program claiming otherwise is selling something the research cannot support.
For younger athletes specifically, a 2017 study in Sports Medicine – Open by Egan-Shuttler and colleagues found that four weeks of plyometric training improved 500 meter time trial performance and rowing power in male high school rowers compared to an equal volume of easy cycling. A small study over a short window, but a useful signal that explosive work has a place in junior development.
Is strength training safe for high school athletes?
Yes, when it is supervised and technique comes before load. This is settled ground. The National Strength and Conditioning Association's position statement, authored by Faigenbaum and colleagues, concludes that a properly designed and supervised resistance program is safe for youth and improves strength and power. The 2014 international consensus in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, endorsed by the major sports medicine and pediatric organizations, reached the same conclusion and addressed the fear most parents carry: growth plate injuries. The consensus found that fear unsupported by evidence under qualified supervision. The injuries that do occur in youth lifting overwhelmingly trace to unsupervised training, poor technique, and loads the athlete was not ready for.
The practical translation for a rowing family: a fourteen-year-old learning to hinge and squat with a coach watching is at lower risk than a seventeen-year-old maxing out alone in a garage. Supervision and progression are the safety mechanism, and both are within any family's control.
Should rowers squat? Answering the skepticism
A recurring claim in rowing circles holds that squats and deadlifts are overrated for rowers because the loading pattern differs from the rowing stroke. The premise is true and the conclusion does not follow. No one squats because it replicates the stroke. Coaches program squats because leg strength raises the force an athlete can apply on every drive, and the correlation evidence backs this up: Lawton's review found leg press strength and power among the measures most strongly associated with 2K performance. The stroke supplies the specificity. The barbell supplies the general strength the stroke draws on. An athlete who can produce more force per stroke at the same aerobic cost has gotten faster, and that is what the meta-analysis measured.
The honest boundary is the one the research draws: strength is a contributor, and aerobic capacity remains the primary driver of rowing performance. A rower who lifts three days a week and skips steady state has the priorities backward.
Which exercises should rowers prioritize?
Here the controlled research thins out and coaching judgment takes over, so these recommendations are attributed to the coaches who make them rather than to studies that do not exist.
Will Ruth, whose Rowing Stronger program is the most widely used strength resource in the sport, favors the front squat over the back squat for rowers: the more upright torso and narrower stance sit closer to rowing positions, and the front rack reduces shear on the lower back. There is a supporting biomechanical signal, an EMG study by Hamlyn and colleagues finding roughly a quarter more erector spinae activity in the front squat, but the preference is coaching consensus, and a well-taught back squat is a fine substitute. For hinging, both Ruth and Ed McNeely, the longtime Rowing Canada strength researcher, prefer the hex bar deadlift for the tall, long-limbed builds rowing selects for. The bench pull and bent-over row are the standard rowing-specific pulls and appear as test exercises throughout the research literature.
Two rowing-specific cautions from the coaching side. Ruth avoids the barbell bench press for rowers because it loads the rib cage directly in a sport with meaningful rib injury risk, preferring dumbbell pressing and push-ups. And for the trunk, the consensus favors anti-flexion and anti-rotation work, planks, carries, and their variations, over crunches, because a rower's spine already accumulates thousands of loaded flexion cycles a week on the water and does not need more in the gym.
Survey data show how mainstream all this is. Gee and colleagues surveyed British rowing and strength coaches in 2011 and found 94 percent of their rowers strength trained, most at two to three sessions per week, almost all within a periodized annual plan.
How often should rowers lift, and how does it fit around rowing?
Two to three sessions of 30 to 45 minutes per week is the consensus that both the survey data and the leading coaches converge on, and the exercise science explains why more is counterproductive. The interference effect is well documented: high volumes of endurance training blunt strength adaptation, and a hard endurance session can reduce force output for six hours or more afterward. The scheduling advice that follows from the research is to separate lifting and hard rowing by a day where possible, or at least by several hours, and to keep the rowing easy in the 24 hours after a heavy lift. A rowing-specific study by Gee and colleagues in 2016 found that an intensive strength block produced soreness and muscle damage while 2K performance held, and recommended easy aerobic work, never sprint work, in the day after lifting.
Across the year, the shape most programs follow is heavier general strength in the winter, a shift toward power as racing approaches, and one to two maintenance sessions in season. An athlete who lifts twice a week from October to June arrives at the summer stronger and more durable than one who lifted daily for three weeks in January and then stopped, and the summer training framework shows where those sessions sit in a full week.
Can strength training prevent rowing injuries?
This is where families most want a guarantee and the research offers a probability. The injuries themselves are well quantified. Rib stress injuries occur in roughly 8 to 16 percent of elite rowers over a career, about 2 percent of university rowers and 1 percent of junior rowers, and they are the costliest injury in the sport, typically requiring six to eight weeks away from training, according to the review by Vinther and Thornton in Sports Medicine. Low-back pain is more common still: a prospective study of representative rowers by Wilson and colleagues found 53 percent reported an episode within a single year, and back pain causes more total missed training than any other complaint. Both injuries track training volume and rapid load increases.
Whether strength training reduces these risks has not been proven in a controlled rowing trial, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. What exists is a plausible mechanism the coaching community acts on: stronger legs keep the load off the upper body and rib cage, a stronger trunk protects the lumbar spine through the thousands of flexion cycles a season demands, and biomechanics research on sweep rowers shows measurable left-right asymmetry in back muscle activation that authors recommend addressing with targeted strength work, which is the rationale for single-leg exercises in most rowing programs.
One caution specific to female rowers, and to anyone managing weight for the sport. Research on rowers with rib stress injury history has found associations with restricted eating and lower rib bone density, consistent with the IOC's consensus on relative energy deficiency: underfueled athletes build weaker bone and break more easily under training load. Strength training cannot protect a skeleton that is not being fed. An athlete restricting food to chase a weight class or an erg score is trading away the durability this entire article is about, and that trade is never worth it.
How strong does a high school rower need to be?
Less than the internet suggests. The strength standards that circulate online, roughly 1.9 times bodyweight in the squat and deadlift and 1.3 times in the bench pull, come from McNeely's published profiles of elite adult national team rowers. They describe the ceiling of the sport, and they are averages of Olympians in their mid twenties. They are not targets for a sixteen-year-old, and treating them as targets pushes juniors toward exactly the loads and shortcuts the safety research warns about.
The right target for a high school rower is competence, then progression: own the movement patterns with light load, add weight only as technique holds, and let the numbers arrive over years rather than months. This is also where strength training earns its second return. A rower who logs their lifts, watches how their steady-state splits respond, and notices what their body tolerates is running the same observe-and-adjust loop that coaching yourself is built on, and that loop is worth more over a career than any single number on a bar.
At Sparks, strength work is one input among many in how our athletes learn to manage their own training, and we make no promises about what it does to any individual's erg score, because the research does not permit them and neither do we. What the evidence supports is the plain version: lift two or three times a week under supervision, prioritize movement quality, protect the aerobic base that actually makes boats go, and build the kind of durable athlete who is still improving when the college recruiting conversation begins.
