July 20, 2021

By Deane Barker
5x
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Every 3:00, do 30 pulls on the rower

Score is total distance

This is a weird one that I just made up. I was doing 500m x 5 once, and I counted my pulls out of sheer boredom. Then I got the idea that a workout for total pulls might be interesting.

I got 2,644m on this. It wiped me out.

For the first round, I had the bright idea that I should set the damper to 10. This was not a good idea. That murdered me. Thirty pulls at 10 is really hard. After that, I turned the damper down to my normal setting (about 7).

I would usually get the pulls done at 1:45 or 2:00, which means I was pulling about 17 stokes-per-minute. This would give me a minute of rest.

It’s a bizarre workout. Very rarely on the rower do we concentrate on max efficiency per pull. I feel like if you did this workout a lot, your rowing form would improve, because this will just punish poor form. It’s all about efficiency. How do you wring every last meter out of every pull? It’s a very interesting angle.

One warning: watch your lower back. It’s easy to over-exert on a pull. Be careful.

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