What Mistakes on the Rowing Machine Should Be Avoided?

With the increasing attention of aerobic equipment, rowing fitness machines are becoming more and more attractive to people. It burns calories while exercising your arms, core, legs and back. But as anyone who regularly uses a rowing exercise machine for exercise knows all too well, it's easy to make mistakes the first few times you use a rowing workout machine. To help you make unnecessary mistakes in use, here is a summary of the most common mistakes and how to correct them. You can continue to read to provide safe and effective help for your rowing exercise.

1. Neglecting the warm-up
One issue that many people always overlook when doing fitness workouts is the warm-up preparation before working out. Rowing as a full-body exercise, we need to warm up our muscles in advance to raise the body's temperature and speed up blood circulation. This allows the body to adapt more quickly to the strenuous exercise that will follow, thus reducing the chances of injury to itself. Although the warm-up seems simple, but for the exercise before rowing and its important.

How to correct: We can perform a simple warm-up before exercising on the rowing machine, and feel a slight increase in heart rate. Examples include reverse lunges, hamstring stretches or push-ups. This helps open up your hamstrings, lower back and chest, and fires up your abs. Feeling more blood flow to your muscles prepares us for rowing.

2. Rowing with only your arms
One of the most common mistakes when using a rowing cycling machine is to rely solely on arm strength. But the truth is that rowing is an explosive, leg-centered exercise. The real power of rowing comes from your legs. While it may seem natural to pull with your arms and back, if you keep using your upper body muscles to generate power during the exercise, your neck and shoulders will feel sore after a while.

How to correct：When rowing, you should let your legs do most of the work. By letting your legs bend and push your body upwards before pulling with your arms, while keeping your core muscles engaged. Generally speaking, our legs are much stronger than our arms, and only a proper distribution of our muscular strength can help us achieve the best results from our exercise.

3. Hunching your back when rowing
Another issue worth noting on the fitness rowing machine is the back. Some people will unknowingly become hunchback or round back when rowing. It may be a straight posture at the beginning, but the further you practice, the more your back relaxes and sinks. This posture over time can put tremendous pressure and soreness on your back, especially your spine.

How to correct：When you sit on the rowing workout machine seat, you need to sit up straight, chest out, shoulders back, and your spine should always be in a neutral position. Also don't forget to maintain this position all the way through the workout. If you feel that your posture is too tight during exercise, then you may need to make some changes to the rowing machine's setting.

4. Using mismatched resistance setting
Many novices do not care so much about resistance settings before rowing. But the difficulty of the exercise often depends on the resistance setting, and using different resistance gears can help us achieve different exercise results. Some people may not be very knowledgeable about their athletic ability at first. Set the resistance at a very high level, and the longer you exercise, the heavier your steps will feel. And deplete your muscles before you perform reliable aerobic exercise, resulting in an inability to sustain the exercise.

How to correct: Before you start exercising, if you are a beginner you can do 3-5 levels of resistance settings depending on your exercise capacity. As your muscles become more familiar with the machine, then increase the resistance setting on the rowing sport equipment. Of course, when you reach a different level of exercise the results sought certainly differ. We can start with level 1-5 of aerobic training. If you want to lose weight and increase muscle, you can choose 6-10 and 11-16 resistance gears. But we must proceed step by step and act according to our ability.

5. Going for speed over power
Some people just start using the fitness rowing machine and feel so excited that they row at a very fast pace. Some people even feel that the faster they row the more calories they burn. But running the fastest is not necessarily the same as having the best workout. Too much speed can not only cause muscle soreness, but can even cause muscle strain and injury.

How to correct：Keep a steady pace of movement, any exercise should not be rushed. Too fast or too slow is not conducive to getting the best exercise results. Instead, focus on working your core and legs so that each row is effective and powerful. Maintaining a steady speed is also conducive to the regularity of our exercise, so that the whole body can get the most effective exercise.

Whether you have already started using a rowing workout machine or not, I hope that reading this will help you in your rowing training.