Calisthenics and rowing workouts are two effective options for creating exercise routines that work all of your muscles. In addition, these two workout methods let you create muscle-building, muscular endurance and weight-loss workouts. Alternate your calisthenics and rowing routines to get the most benefit from your fitness workouts.
Rowing Machines
Rowing machines and their newer counterparts, ergometers, have several advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include being able to engage most of your body’s muscles to work the machines, you can add resistance to your workouts, and you can improve your stamina, endurance and burn calories. The main disadvantage is the repetitive motion can create knee, hip and lower back stress and injuries.
Calisthenics
Calisthenics include familiar exercises with little or no equipment. They include pushups, situps, pullups, chinups, dips, crunches, squats, lunges, jumping jacks, burpees, jogging and skipping in place and butt kicks.
Cardio Workouts
To create weight-loss workouts with rowing and calisthenics, perform the exercises using little resistance. Raise your heart rate with the intensity of your movement; using gravity and momentum help provide some assistance. For example, when you make the downward movement of a chinup or pushup, let gravity help you drop, then bounce back up. This will decrease the amount of muscular effort you’ll need each rep, preventing the muscle fatigue that would otherwise cause you to require frequent breaks. Find a resistance setting on a rowing machine that raises your heart rate but lets you keep exercising for 10 minutes before you need a break, and lets you work out 30 minutes or longer with only a few short breaks.
Bodybuilding Workouts
To increase muscle size and strength, increase the resistance you use to perform your exercises. Perform body-weight exercises slowly, using your muscles to raise and lower you each time. Pause between raising and lowering yourself each time to increase the amount of muscular effort you use. Raise the resistance setting on a rowing machine to a level that makes it difficult for you to perform more than five repetitions without needing a one-minute break. Perform three to five sets before taking a longer, five-minute break. Use more leg effort for some sets and more arm effort for others.
Endurance Workouts
To improve your muscular endurance or you ability to perform activity for longer periods, perform calisthenics and rowing at roughly 50 percent of your maximum intensity. Work at this pace for 60 seconds, then take a 60-second break. Move from exercise to exercise, creating a circuit training routine. If you plan to use the rowing machine for your endurance workout, vary your hand and feet placements on the machine, length of your rows and amount of leg and arm effort you use each circuit.
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