1. Ease it Back
As with many other sports injuries, the first step toward rehabilitating a serious rowing injury is making sure not to aggravate the injury. With minor injuries, it may be possible to keep rowing with minor adaptations or a decrease in intensity, but but you should give major injuries a rest despite the rower's usual inclination to "row through it." Rowing can put enormous stress on the back, legs and shoulders in particular. This makes it an excellent rehabilitation exercise and great for strengthening injury-prone areas. The downside is that rowing too much--overuse--or poor technique is a doorway to injury. When you notice an injury, give it a short rest and give the inflammation a chance to subside. Once it's on its way to mending, you can start to gradually resume activity as the injury improves.
2. Strengthen the Deficit
Muscles come in push-pull pairings like the chest/back, biceps/triceps, quads/hamstrings and so on. Rowing works some paired muscles more than their counterparts. When you strengthen one pair of a muscle grouping but leave the other neglected, injury may result. You can work out and prevent injuries related to muscular imbalance by proactively exercising to balance out the muscle pairings. Sweep rowers also tend to be stronger on one side than the other, since they're plying just one oar, resulting in a slight left-right imbalance in their strokes. It's important to pay attention to this left-right balance and proactively strengthen the weaker side to prevent injury.
3. Tape it
You can patch up some minor injuries with tape, and little more. Slide burn, caused when a rower's powerful calves scrape against the metal rails their seats slide back and forth on, can be painful and annoying but doesn't need to keep you from rowing. Just make sure you protect your calves. Some rowers like to wear long socks to help protect their legs. Other minor injuries include sunburn--easily remedied and prevented--or blisters and sores on hands from the oar handle. This can result from poor rowing technique or simply tender hands and a tough handle. The remedy here is an examination of technique and in a worst case scenario, wearing extra protection for your hands. Some rowers also wet the handles of their oars to improve the grip.
4. Correct Technique is Vital
Rowing is a very powerful and strenuous sport. When done properly it is remarkably injury free. Almost all rowing injuries result from either improper technique or badly adjusted or poorly functioning equipment. Correcting these problems is the best way to avoid rowing injuries in the first place or to keep injury from recurring.
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