Rowing Machine Training

Rowing machine training offers a full-body workout, and may suit newcomers to exercise or well-trained endurance athletes. This kind of training mimics the smooth motion of rowing on water. Increase the intensity of your training by setting a higher resistance on the machine. Greater resistance requires more strength in your lower back.

Upper Body Conditioning

Rowing machine training conditions multiple upper body muscles in your shoulders, arms and back. Rowing training involves a shoulder extension, which targets your deltoids, triceps, teres major and muscles in your back. You retract your scapula while rowing, and condition muscles, such as your latissimus dorsi, trapezius and rhomboids. Rowing machine training also involves elbow flexions, which condition muscles throughout the inner part of your arm during rowing machine training. These arm muscles include your biceps, brachialis and brachioradialis.

Lower Body Conditioning

You condition muscles that support your hips, knees and ankles during rowing machine training. Your hips extend to move your thighs and the top of your pelvis backward. Hip extension movements engage muscles that form the back of your thighs, such as your gluteus maximus, semitendinosus, semimembranosus and adductor magnus. Rowing machine training requires leg extensions, which condition your quadriceps. You also condition muscles in your lower legs, which include your calves and soleus, with rowing machine training.

Types of Training

Rowing machine training may support weight loss and athletic conditioning goals. Training with a low resistance on the rowing machine helps you burn fat during training sessions that last 20 minutes or longer. Your target pulse for fat burning while rowing is between 50 percent and 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, which you calculate by subtracting your age from 220. Endurance athletes, particularly rowers, may use rowing machine training to improve athletic performance. Athletic rowing machine training may include bouts of extreme energy that you can only sustain for 90 seconds to three minutes, followed by five minutes of complete rest.

Avoiding Injury

Performing the full arc of the rowing movement, which requires enough space around the machine, helps you avoid injury. Your legs should initiate the drive phase of rowing motion. Your arms stay straight until your knees are mostly extended, then you bring the oar handles against your upper stomach by flexing your elbows. The recovery phase begins as your hands and arms move away from your body by extending your elbows, and your upper body moves forward over your hips. Your knees begin to flex as your hands pass over them, and your seat moves up the slide, bringing you back to the catch position.