Where technique, fitness make their gains in unison
Unique gym offers members elite training, high-level workout
Fitness clubs devoted entirely to rowing are now appearing in the U.S., but Toronto’s Scullhouse Rowing does things differently.
Classes are geared for all levels — including mobility levels, as a woman in a wheelchair recently did a class — rowers row in unison, they learn elite athlete-style technique and get inundated with lingo such as stroke, catch, half slide and coxing.
Trace this attention to professional detail back to owner Kristin Jeffery, 34, a former Canadian national team rower — and also a trained lawyer. Her new studio on Jarvis St. just north of Front St. (you can see the main St. Lawrence Market building from the front door), promises a sweat-inducing workout designed to get people hooked on rowing as both an exercise and a sport.
Jeffery took up rowing relatively late in life, while she was majoring in philosophy at Western University in London, Ont.
She joined the team — racing quad sculls, which means all four rowers have two oars each — and did well right away.
A fully funded trip to Taiwan in the late summer after fourth year made her realize the sport offered considerable opportunities.
That fall, she started at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. “I missed the first week of law school to go on that trip,” she recalls. At Osgoode, she badly missed the sport, so she transferred to Western’s law school so she could keep competing.
The national team, meanwhile, was training in London, and she ended up practising with them, and did well at time trials. She began elite-level training in preparation for the 2009 World Rowing World Championships.
But her body struggled to get into race-ready shape so quickly. “I was breaking,” Jeffery recalls. As her muscles grew more rapidly than the fascia on her arms — a painful condition that turned her muscles rockhard — she had a double fasciotomy in 2008. Twenty-four hours after surgery, she was back on a bike, training. She began developing rib stress fractures too.
Jeffery competed at the world championship, but retired soon after. She wrapped up a masters in law at Western by 2010 and moved on to the professional world, working at the law firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP in Toronto.
For six years, she enjoyed her job, but something was missing. “I liked law, but I found it to be isolating.”
In fall 2015, she heard about rowing studios in the U.S. She went down to New York City to visit a few, noting that few owners or instructors had competitive-rowing backgrounds, and were not teaching precise technique or encouraging rowers to go in unison. “That’s what makes rowing cool,” she says. (In fact, if rowers in a real boat don’t work in unison, they won’t get very far.)
Jeffery soon decided to launch her own studio. “It was only a matter of time before someone brought this idea to Toronto. I didn’t want it to be a chain from the U.S.”
In March 2016, Jeffery quit her job and started on her business plan.
“Had I not had the opportunity to work in law, I would not have had the confidence to do this,” she says. Former colleagues and the contacts she’d made on the job were key to getting things off the ground.
It took a year to deal with all the paperwork and build out this 3,500square-foot space, which includes a personal-training room and a studio kitted with 20 Concept II rowers.
A single class pass costs $26, or you can buy a five-class pass for $125. A monthly membership costs $240, which allows you to book 12 classes over the course of a month, at a cost of $20 a class.
Classes, either 55 or 45 minutes, start with a progressive drill that teaches rowers the basics of techniques and warms them up. Then, the class moves to timed rows at various speeds interspersed with mat work. While everyone rows together, Jeffery says there’s plenty of room for people of various skill and fitness levels to adjust.
Instructors, whom Jeffery says act like the “stroke,” which is the person who sets the pace, are all personally trained by her.
But Jeffery teaches the majority of the classes herself, at least during the studio’s early days. It makes this new gig exhausting, but worth it.
“I’m terrified, but I’m excited,” Jeffery says of her new venture.