Sylvain is one of our first regular members, one of the most successful and he holds the number 1 spot on our global leaderboard. We wanted to share his inspiring story. Enjoy!
Let me introduce my indoor rowing journey in a few short lines:
– full of right intentions at first,
– bought a concept2 rower, and
– screwed up the execution,
– ended up turning it into a piece of furniture.
The problem when you start is that you think that by buying the rowing machine, you have already done the hardest part (or the treadmill, or the bicycle, or the elliptical).
“I just have to define the perfect training plan and it is done!” So wrong…
I don’t know about you, but I am lazy. I am really gifted to find excuses not to work out.
So, I can manage to start working out, but I never last long enough. Here is what my previous rowing seasons look like (from the concept2 website). As you can see, it varies a lot.
On top of constantly trying to keep up with the rowing, I also swim at the nearby Olympic swimming pool and do runs in the local forest. But I am as lazy running and swimming, as I am rowing.
The problem is – for me – that there is a long period of body adjustment I have to go through, before taking pleasure in rowing. The pain and tiredness are all I get at first. This stop-and-go behavior reduces my chances to succeed to nothing.
With all this, I also discovered by chance that I have a severe high blood pressure (type 3) in 2018.
Unfortunately, I never had any symptoms so I couldn’t take care of this earlier. Fortunately, I caught it still early enough before it turned into something even more serious.
I decided that I should change some of my eating habits, and be more serious about the sport. I am French, I love wine and food, and am fortunate to have a wonderful wife and marvelous kids who cook plenty for me so this was not easy.
My greatest weakness is cheese, and that can’t go without wine, bread, and something sweet at the end.
So, close to a year ago I discovered Holodia. Gamified workouts were what attracted me, and that immediately resonated with me as I am also a gamer. I quickly bought the HOLOFIT Go package + HOLOFIT membership subscription, and I really hit it off.
Holodia changed the paradigm of rowing for me. It used to be a sport that was very hard and very boring.
With HOLOFIT rowing became gaming and amusing.
The first immediate benefit was: regularity and workout frequency increase.
I came back regularly to the rowing workouts – and with pleasure – I could quickly row 3 or 4 days a week. I found myself motivated, wanting to collect all the trophies, and test all the different HOLOFIT workout modes.
I longed to discover new HOLOWORLDS, exercise in Snowy Mountains, chill in Babylon, deep dive under the Ocean, or let my mind float around Saturn. I used the Exploration mode to start.
Without realizing it, I got to the stage where my body got used to rowing every other day after 3 or 4 months, and the length of my sessions rose to around 1 hour. After 10 painful years, I finally was through the initial painful stage, and I started enjoying my rowing workouts in full.
Rowing became such a pleasure activity that I started going for performance improvement training, to be able to register record times in the Concept 2 worldwide log.
I had the pleasure to get better times and new records over and over again, thanks to my regular HOLOFIT workouts and the HOLOFIT Race modes. Because I was in virtual races with other HOLOFIT competitors, either real or computer-generated, I felt super motivated to push harder. A big plus for me was also that HOLOFIT kept being refreshed, new HOLOWORLDs, and workout modes were coming out every month, and that kept my motivation always high.
The bottom line is: I rowed 10x more in 2019-2020 than the average past seasons. I lost 16 pounds, I am almost back to normal on my blood pressure. My next challenge is to further change my diet, and do 60-minute workouts on a daily basis.
I now alternate between running/swimming and rowing, giving me a full-body workout, and engaging all my muscle groups. I am also starting with bodyweight workouts with HOLOFIT Freestyle.
Thank you for reading my story, and know: if a lazy guy like me could do it, you can do it too 😉
