Rowing Machine Workout Benefits

While all exercise is generally good for you, various forms of it benefit your health in different ways.  One of the best ways to exercise is by using a rowing machine.  So what exactly are the benefits of working out using a rower?

1.  Heart Health

There are decades of proof behind showing that when it comes to exercise, primarily it’s being more active that is important, not knocking yourself out with overzealous exercise.  So even if you engage in relatively easy exercises such as walking you are still helping yourself.

Rowing exercise can help lower your risk of getting heart disease by 36 percent.  Since all types of cardio exercise help your heart health, rowing, being a kind of aerobic exercise, can be of great benefit to you.  It can radically lower your chances of getting or even dying from heart disease.  It can do this by lowering your blood pressure and cholesterol, LDL, and even your triglyceride amounts.

It’s known that plasma free fatty acid (FFA), has the ability to increase your chances of developing heart disease if found in high concentrations.  However, it was found that in type 2 diabetics who practiced rowing machine workouts for a total of 8 weeks, the level of this dropped by 2.6 percent.  Furthermore, after 6 months of aerobic working out using a rowing machine, there was a 9.2% drop in the systolic blood pressure.

Even more good news.  Once these people had been at the process of rowing for 6 weeks, their cholesterol levels dropped by 3.5 percent .

Amazingly enough, the death rate for rowers linked to cardiovascular diseases is 59 percent less than that of non-rowers.

2. Physical Fitness and Muscle Conditioning

Because of its extraordinary variety of movement, using a rowing machine is believed to give you one of the absolute best total body workouts that you can want.  It can activate the muscles in the back, legs, chest, abdomen, and arms and keep them engaged throughout the entire workout.  Plus, it is also a wonderful type of cardiovascular exercise.  This type of workout builds muscle, strengthens  and conditions your entire body, and helps to build up your endurance and stamina.

A rower actually forces a person to use nearly all of their muscles, that’s why it is heralded as such a great exercise machine.  It’s also fantastic for toning and strengthening leg muscles along with most of the lower body.  Although not as much of the upper body is used during these workouts, it too benefits from rowing.  As a matter of fact, there’s hardly a section of the body that receives no benefits from this type of workout.

3.  Older Adults

Using a rower is also an option for older adults or seniors.  The benefits listed above, plus all of those that come with this type of exercise are also available to them.  If they are in reasonably good health and willing to practice regularly, they too can reap the amazing results that users of these machines boast of.

4.  Weight Loss

It seems like the marvels of rowing never cease, as this type of exercise is also promoted as being fantastic for achieving weight loss.  Since rowing burns many calories in only a short period of time, it is quite efficient at lowering body fat along with the total body fat percentage, yet still manages to keep, sustain, and build muscle.

If you are interested in radical weight loss, a combination of exercise and diet, of which rowing was a part, along with walking and cycling which took place for 8 weeks led to substantial weight loss, with most of if coming from a reduction in body fat.  This was both for women and men.

5.   Brain Health

While it is certainly important to maintain and even improve bone health in order to keep injuries from occurring and keep muscle function working fine as well, brain health can be just as important in its own way.  Nearly 8 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease.  In order to fight this, as well as other issues associated with cognitive ability lessening with age, it is highly recommended that physical activity be increased.  Rowing is a big help with this and can even improve the ability of the elderly to remember information.

6.  Sleep

It has been shown that using a rower can indeed help a person to sleep better, but this is true only if they don’t overdo it by rowing too vigorously.  The exercises which appear to ease chronic insomnia are normally done as moderate and high-intensity workouts.  So you can use a rower for longer periods, but just do not increase its speed and you should get a good night’s sleep. 

Conclusion   

As you can see, there is just about no condition that a using a rower for exercise cannot make better.  That is why as more and more people are becoming aware of the beneficial effects of working out with a rower and starting to take advantage of them.