Does Rowing 'Count' as Strength Training—or Is It Just a Cardio Workout?

By Tiffany Ayuda

Reviewed by Christa Sgobba, C.P.T.

Rowing has always been a great workout. But recently it's been experiencing a bit of a resurgence in pop culture thanks to the buzz around Peloton's new rower and the growing popularity of Hydrow's indoor rowing machine.

Exercisers are drawn to the gym staple for a bunch of reasons, but there's one major one. Unlike other cardio machines, such as treadmills and ellipticals, rowing enlists pushing and pulling motions, which simultaneously works your lower- and upper-body muscles while you get your heart rate up. This makes it a great full-body workout—and more than just a cardio challenge.

Which begs the question: Does rowing count as cardio or strength training? While the ask is simple, the answer is a bit more nuanced. Ahead, we explain what exactly rowing is and how an indoor rower can be used to cater to your specific fitness goals.

Before we get into the cardio versus strength debate, it can be helpful to look a little closer at how rowing works. There are two forms of this activity: You can literally row a boat using oars on the water—a sport sometimes known as crew, in which a team of rowers on one boat compete against rowers on another. Rowing the oar into the water provides the real-world resistance that makes each stroke feel so tough.

But more common for exercise purposes is the indoor rowing machine, or an ergometer. With a rowing machine, you sit on a gliding seat with your feet strapped into foot pads in front of you, and you pull a handlebar toward your chest by driving through your legs. This drive creates the resistance. In a traditional air rower, for example, air enters the cage as the flywheel spins with each stroke, so the more air that enters the cage, the harder you have to work to keep the flywheel spinning.

Air-based rowers also include a damper, which controls the level of wind resistance in the cage, usually on a scale of zero to 10. Think of it as the drag of your boat, Caley Crawford, NASM-CPT, director of training and experience at Row House in Tustin, California, tells SELF. The more momentum you build, the heavier it will feel as you rev it back up. (Some indoor rowing machines, like the Ergatta, do use water for their resistance, though they can be pricier.)

Whether you’re on a boat or on an indoor rower, a proper rowing stroke has four phases: the catch, drive, finish, and recovery, according to the American Council on Exercise. You’ll begin with the catch, or the starting position, with your arms straight and upper body hinging forward slightly at your hips, with your lats and core engaged. The catch sets you up for the drive, the phase where the major work gets done: You’ll press your feet into the foot plates, driving energy through your heels and pulling your arms back. In the finish, or the stabilization phase, you’ll fully extend your legs, pulling your upper body back a bit more, so the handlebar is above your belly button at your lower chest. The recovery phase is the prep for the next stroke: You’ll extend your arms over your legs before hinging at your hips so you can do it all again.

For the sake of this article, we’ll talk about rowing machines, since they’re a lot more accessible at gyms and home gyms.

Anyone who's tried a workout on a rowing machine knows that it will challenge your cardiovascular endurance, leaving you breathless, and oftentimes, soaking in sweat. But it’ll also leave your butt, legs, and back feeling spent—just like they do after a hard strength workout.

So, which kind of workout is rowing: strength or cardio?

Simply put, it's both. Rowing is a cardio exercise because it involves continuous, repetitive movement that increases your heart rate. But it can also challenge your muscles from a strength perspective. During the drive, you’re engaging your glutes, quads, hamstrings, and core, Crawford says. And as you pull the handle toward you, your lats, upper-back muscles, and biceps fire in turn.

One reason for the muscle benefits? The form you use when you row correctly—driving each stroke from the back-of-the-body muscles in your legs and butt—is actually the same movement pattern used in traditional strength training exercises like a deadlift or kettlebell swing: the hip hinge. But instead of pulling against the resistance of, say, a barbell, you’re moving against the resistance of your own bodyweight and the wind in the cage.

Still, while there is both a cardio and strength component to rowing, it leans more in the cardio direction, Sam Chan, DPT, CSCS, a physical therapist and athletic trainer at Bespoke Treatments in New York City, tells SELF.

That's because you’re working continuously on a rower—similar to how you do on a treadmill or an elliptical—and really getting in a lot of reps (or strokes). For instance, people generally perform about 20–26 strokes per minute when rowing at a moderate intensity, Crawford says. That means if you row for just five minutes, you’ve racked up more than 100 straight reps.

That's way more than you’d perform during that period when strength training. When you’re working on getting stronger, you have periods of work (your sets) and periods of rest (when you take a breather in between). This rest-and-reset allows you to really challenge your muscles with higher load or resistance during your working sets. Because the weight is more challenging for your muscles, you have to do way fewer reps (say, usually between 6 to 12 reps per set) and then rest so your body can do it again in a minute or two.

In fact, if you used the same resistance on a rower as you did when strength training, you likely wouldn't be able to sustain it for more than 15–20 seconds, Dr. Chan says—much less than the length of a typical rowing workout!

So while rowing does challenge your muscles, "it's more of a muscular endurance workout" than a strength-focused or muscle-building workout, says Dr. Chan. For those latter goals, you’d need to use progressive overload with strength training—continually challenging your muscles with gradually increasing weight.

Rowing is not going to be the best sole modality for specific strength or muscle-building goals, but it can be a great complement to them. That's because certain rowing workouts can really hone your power, which has a strong carryover to your gym routines. In fact, high-intensity rowing workouts recruit the same type II muscle fibers—those that create lots of force, but for short durations—that lower-body strength training does, research shows.

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If you want to train explosive power on the rower, focus on power output, which you can gauge by the number of meters you pull per stroke, says Dr. Chan. (These numbers generally will be shown on the display of your rower.)

The harder you drive through your legs and pull the rower, the more you will see your power output increase, says Dr. Chan.

In order to build power, you want to focus on driving with great intensity and slowing down on the recovery. This way, when you drive back again, it will take more effort to rev up the flywheel, Crawford says. With power workouts, you want to maximize your stroke count within the interval time. (As you work at higher stroke rates, your form tends to break down, so you want to make sure you’re rowing with great form throughout the workout. If you feel your form starting to falter, ease back on the intensity until you get back into good form.)

Producing power depends on your ability to create force on the machine, Crawford says. There's no one damper setting that's best for producing power, since power depends on your technique, fitness level, and size, but you can think of 4–8 as a solid range. If you’re just getting started with rowing, you may want to try the lower end first.

With that, try this power-building workout:

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As you do this workout, keep an eye on how long it takes you to get to that 500-meter mark.

"If you can achieve 500 meters in a shorter period of time, that tells me you are generating more power and force per row," says Dr. Chan. That means you’re really focusing on getting that harder contraction and that explosive drive through your legs.

If your goal is to simply build cardiovascular endurance, your best bet is to focus on rowing with low-to-moderate intensity for a longer, continuous period of time. This means you want to keep the stroke rate low and the damper relatively low. These strokes won't feel quite as tough as they did in the above workout, but on the flip side, you’ll be able to keep it going for much longer.

Here's how to try an aerobic-based workout:.

Bottom line? Look at your exertion levels, and exercise duration, to guide your strength or cardio focus on the rower. If you’re rowing for strictly cardio work, your exertion level must be lower, simply so you’re able to sustain the same intensity over a longer period of time, Dr. Chan says. If you’re looking to train for power, you’re able to put a little more oomph into your effort periods, since they will be shorter—which is one more thing that kind of routine will have in common with strength training. With a little bit of planning, you can fit the rower into a workout that works toward whichever fitness goal you may have.

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