How Long to Use Rowing Machine

Last Updated on October 8, 2023 by Justin Harris

How Long to Use Rowing Machine: Rowing machines offer excellent workouts for the cardiovascular system and, at the same time, help in weight loss, and building muscles and strength. If you plan to start a rowing machine workout, ‘how long to use a rowing machine workout be’ is one of the first few questions to cross your mind. This may seem to be a simple question to answer, but it is not that simple since it depends on many aspects.

Different people have different perspectives and goals when doing rowing machine workouts. However, in this post, we will try to give you good clarity on the duration of rowing machine workouts. A lot depends on your requirements, and to begin with, you could perhaps ask yourself why you want to take up rowing machine workouts. Once you are sure of that, things will get easy for you as we can guide you depending on your workout goals, and you will find it right here in this post.

The Duration and Frequency Depend on Your Workout Goals

So, what is your fitness goal? If you haven’t found it yet, let us help you with a few essential questions to consider. Is the reason behind taking up rowing is burning calories? How many calories do you want to lose per hour? If that’s not the case, you are probably looking forward to building strength. Many people also take up rowing for a good cardio workout.

Hence, you can see that rowing machines have something brilliant to offer pretty much for all types of fitness enthusiasts. Now, it’s time to determine how one can go about the various workout goals and what should be the right frequency and duration for your workouts.

Rowing for Weight Loss

A lot of people take up rowing machine workouts for weight loss and burning calories. If you are one of them, you need to first consider your current body weight and determine the number of calories you want to burn per day. Another way to go about it would be by deciding the number of days in which you want to achieve your goal.

As per one recent research by Harvard Health Publishing, a 155-pound would burn about 260 calories with a 30-minute workout at a moderate pace. And that way, one can burn more than 2,500 calories in two weeks, doing it for five days a week. 2 days of break every week is essential for your body to get some rest.

However, if you are comfortable, you can take only a day off instead of two days of rest for fast results. Besides, you can gradually try to increase your daily timing as well for better results. Most importantly, you must use the correct posture and the proper technique else all your efforts will be in vain.

Rowing for Cardio Health

Cardio health is another crucial reason behind taking up rowing machine workouts among people of all age groups. Cardio health issues prevail worldwide, and the sooner you start getting serious about your cardiovascular system, the better it is. Rowing machine workouts are believed to be the best for cardio workouts.

According to a popular health and human services department, a cardio workout of 75 minutes per week at a high intensity or a cardio workout of 150 minutes per week at a moderate intensity is ideal for maintaining good cardio health. However, you must also ensure that your body gets enough rest and you don’t push the limits too hard as it may adversely affect your body.

Rowing for Achieving Sports Goals

If you are looking forward to achieving your sports goals through rowing, you must go for challenging workouts for strength building. And for that, rowing machines with adjustable resistance levels are the most recommended ones. However, just as in losing weight, even achieving fitness goals for sports would require you to fix a date by which you want to achieve your goal. Things depend a lot on your current body weight and fitness level.

Doing the long and steady rows is the best in this case. Besides, you can do sprint intervals in case you want to develop sprint speed. Further, you can do more power strokes for faster results. As far as the duration goes, you can keep it 45 minutes to 1 hour. With that being said, it is also essential that you pay proper attention to the correct technique and you don’t overdo things. You must also give your body enough rest, at least one day off every week.

FAQ

Is 20 minutes of rowing workout’ enough?

If you are just a beginner, you may start with just a 15-minute workout and gradually push it to 30 minutes. Even 20 minutes of rowing can get you a full-body workout and excellent results in a month or two. However, if your reason behind rowing is to build strength to achieve your sports goals, you must try to keep your workout duration from 45 minutes to 1 hour.

How long does it take for one to start seeing some good results out of rowing?

This is one of the most obvious questions to strike your mind when you take up rowing for the first time, and if you do rowing religiously with the correct technique, you can start seeing good results in just about 15 days. However, a lot depends on your current fitness level, your workout goal, duration, intensity, and, of course, the technique.

Conclusion

‘How long you should use the rowing machine’ is undoubtedly a very crucial question if you are going ahead with a rowing machine workout. The duration and frequency of the workouts largely depend on your fitness level and fitness goals.

We have explained the suitable duration and frequency for the three common scenarios and goals, such as rowing for cardio health, rowing for weight loss, and rowing for achieving sports goals. However, you have to also pay close attention to not overdoing things and getting proper rest while trying to achieve your workout goals.