The 10 Best Strength Training

Exercises for RowingIf I could only take 10 lifts to my desert island to build a better rower...

made with

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Front Squat

Romanian Deadlift

Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat

Overhead Press

Batwing Row

Y-W-T Raise

Inverted Bodyweight Row

Pull-Up

Pushup

Core

Table of Contents

I'm a strength coach who just wants everyone to row stronger so they can row faster,healthier, and longer. 

As a junior rower, I tried it all from bodybuilding programs to powerlifting to Crossfitto high-rep machine-based training and it was always missing something. I wasgetting stronger in the gym, but it wasn't carrying over to my water performance orerg times. Now I know why, and I want to share that with you and how you can dothings differently to train better than I did and be faster than I was.

I wrote "The 10 Best Strength Training Exercises for Rowing" before a season of wintertraining with my team where I knew we weren't going to have a lot of time to train onthe weights. There was no time to waste and it was vital that every lift be the best liftfor my rowers' success. 

Covered in this guide are the 10 lifts as well as the how and the why for benefit torowing performance and injury prevention. Remember, the #1 reason to strength trainfor rowing is injury prevention. Rowing performance is the next goal, and it’s totallypossible to train for both at once. Our general pattern is 3-5 work sets of 2-10 reps onmain work exercises (#1-4 in this article) followed by 2-3 work sets of 10-20 reps onassistance work exercises (#5-10). This allows you to customize your main work goalto match the goal of the rowing season and then clean up with assistance work formuscular balance and injury prevention. It doesn’t have to be complex to be effective!

Thanks for reading and happy training,

Will Ruth aka Strength Coach Will

BS, MA (in progress), NSCA-CSCS, US-Rowing Level 2

Rowing Stronger The online home of strength training for rowing.

This may be the single best lift for rowing performance. Stand with your feet justoutside shoulder width, hold the bar in the clean grip or the cross grip, keep yourelbows high to prevent the bar from slipping down your arms, sit straight down untilyour thighs are parallel to the ground, then explosively lift straight back up to the startposition.

Rowing Benefits: Holding the bar on yourshoulders instead of your back, like in a backsquat, emphasizes a more upright torso thatrequires more core strength, more upperback strength, and more quadricepsstrength, all muscles that you need to hitthose low splits. The bottom position of afront squat is also a similar position to therowing catch, making the strength built inthe front squat more likely to carryover torowing than the back squat.

Injury Prevention: Tall athletes, common in rowing, tend to find it easier to hit paralleldepth with the front squat than the back squat. The more upright torso of the frontsquat also puts less shear force on the lower back than the back squat, reducing someinjury risk from a commonly injured area.

Front SquatMain Work

This simple version of the deadlift emphasizes all of the good parts of the deadliftwithout the difficulty of the start position. The RDL starts at the top of the deadlift.From this top position, keep your torso braced and a slight bend in your knees as youhip hinge, pushing your hips backwards until your hamstrings reach their flexibilitylimit, then reverse direction, snapping your hips forward to the bar in one explosivemotion.

Rowing Benefits: The RDL is a great lift both forstrength as well as flexibility. Each rep is a deepstretch of the hamstrings as the entire back worksto stabilize the weight and control the descent.The RDL’s hip hinge is similar to the motion ofmoving out of the bow during the recovery. In myexperience, athletes who struggle with the RDLalso struggle with maintaining an upright postureas they move out of bow. This gives them morechance to practice this movement while buildingup a rock solid posterior chain (hamstrings, glutes,and back).

Injury Prevention: The deadlift is a short man’s lift due to its fixed height from theground and taller lifters tend to struggle to get into a safe and effective startingposition. This can result in some nasty deadlift form where rowers are mostvulnerable to injury, the lower back. The RDL eliminates this risk. Lower back pain canoften result from imbalanced anterior hip (quadriceps muscles) and posterior hip(glute muscles), so building up that backside is a key to staying healthy.

Romanian DeadliftMain Work

Using strength training exercises to work one limb at a time is a highly effective wayto offset muscular imbalances. In the RFESS, we’re working on getting both legs tocontribute to the stroke as well as getting a great stretch on the back leg, so it’s bothan excellent exercise for performance as well as injury prevention. The front leg doesall the work in this lift with the back leg just resting. If you notice that one leg issignificantly harder to do than the other, make sure to perform your reps with yourweaker leg FIRST and then only match that number of reps and weight with yourstrong leg. Your weaker leg will catch up to your stronger leg soon and then you canpush both equally.

Rowing Benefits: Tired of having one leg muscly and strong and the other leg lookingmore like a toothpick? The RFESS will make sure you’re building up both legs equallyand is a highly effective quadriceps-blaster.

Injury Prevention: In addition to improving performance through better hip mobility atthe catch, flexible hip flexors can help reduce low back pain and injury risk. The bodylikes balance, so balanced quadriceps and hip muscles also help reduce long-terminjury risk. This exercise also doesn’t require a lot of load, so it’ll blast the quadricepswhile sparing the back.

Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat Main Work

A barbell or dumbbells can be used for this exercise. The overhead press is one of theharder presses to master but offers some major benefits over bench pressing, and notjust for going up-and-over-heads.

Rowing Benefits: The upper back is the foundation of your catch and connection to thewater. Weak arms, weak shoulders, and a weak upper back makes it harder to applyall that power from the legs to the oar.

Injury Prevention: More scapular (shoulder) muscles are used that tend to beneglected in rowing. Athletes with poor overhead pressing will often exhibit rowinghunchback, and working those mid-back muscles in the overhead press can helprestore a more upright posture.

Overhead PressMain Work

We’re out of the main work exercises now and onto the assistance work. The batwingrow is NOT a bench pull and offers some major benefits over the bench pull.Dumbbells require greater stabilization and allow for a longer range-of-motion (ROM)than a barbell. This means we can use less load for more muscular activity, whichdecreases injury risk. The greater ROM also encourages athletes to really target thegoal muscles in this exercise, rather than just slamming the weight from end-to-end.

Rowing Benefits: The batwing row provides a great squeeze at the finish and usingdumbbells builds up better arm and grip strength for a more effective stroke.

Injury Prevention: The batwing row hits the main mid-back postural muscles thatrowers are always missing. Developing the middle trapezius, rhomboids, and posteriordeltoids will contribute greatly to better posture and less risk of shoulder impingement or injury.

Batwing RowAssistance Work

This is another humbling exercise for the mid-back. I usually teach this with justbodyweight at first and then maybe adding 2.5-10lbs per hand as the athleteprogresses. Don’t worry about the weight, just focus on using the right muscles ateach phase.

Rowing Benefits: Like the OHP and batwing row, the YWT raise contributes to buildinga strong upper back to build that rock solid connection from torso power to the oar.

Injury Prevention: The YWT raise targets muscles never used in rowing and uses verylow load to do so. Like the batwing row, these muscles will improve posture both inand out of the boat and reduce risk of shoulder impingement and injury.

Y-W-T RaiseAssistance Work

Any time we can work torso stability into another exercise and force athletes totransmit force from their feet to their hands through their torso, I’m all in. Theinverted BW row, or Australian Pushup as my guys like to call them, offers severalgreat advantages. You can get a great back workout in without loading, important forrowers with often overloaded backs. If the athletes let their torso muscles disengage,they’ll sag and won’t be able to complete the lift. Also, it can be done almostanywhere using a barbell, Smith machine, gymnastics rings, or even a tree branch.

Rowing Benefit: This lift builds up the muscles of the lats and arms and that plus thetorso stability combines for a strong finish to your stroke.

Injury Prevention: As you can tell from this list, I’m big on reducing load whenever possible. This lift lets us reallywork the athlete’s arms and backwithout adding a bunch of weightfor more systemic stress. 

Inverted Bodyweight RowAssistance Work

You could probably write this one by now! A low-load exercise that targets the back,shoulder, and arm muscles while forcing the lifter to maintain a tight torso? I'm allover it. My one complaint with the pull-up is that it can be hard to do correctly, buteasy to do incorrectly. This leads to athletes thinking they can do a bunch of reps andthen having to re-learn a more difficult form. The real key here is torso tightness andpulling straight up to the bar. The pull-up should look almost like a reverse overheadpress, not a crazy swinging loose torso row. If you find it too challenging at first, youcan use a band for assistance or focus on doing negatives–jump yourself up to the topposition, hold it as long as you can, and then slowly descend maintaining correctpositioning. This is the best way I've found for new athletes to build the pull-up.

Rowing Benefits: Builds strong lats and arms for great posture and a powerful finish.

Injury Prevention: Done correctly, the pull-up is a great lift to build up the mid-backmuscles as well as the powerful lats for better shoulder balance.

Pull-UpAssistance Work

My rule-of-thumb is that an athlete should be able to do 30 pushups with great formbefore needing to add weight with a bench press variation. Even when the athlete cando 30 pushups, you could also just make the pushups harder by using gymnasticsrings or adding load with chains or a sandbag. The pushup is a great exercise thatmore people should really reap the benefit from before turning to added-load lifts likethe bench press.

Rowing Benefits: For rowing, the pushup is mostly about not “going T-Rex mode” akahuge legs and tiny arms looking silly at the start line. Build some muscle and fill outthat uni!

Injury Prevention: The pushup is a great simple lift to build muscular balance betweenthe pulling muscles and the pushing muscles. In a pulling sport like rowing, this is veryimportant for keeping the shoulders healthy.

PushupAssistance Work

No rowing list would be complete without core exercises, but I couldn’t pick just onefor the list. The core exercises I like are anti-rotation, like the Pallof press, or anti-flexion like the plank and plank variations. There are a lot of cool creative plankvariations you can do to change up a simple exercise. I think in general rowers needless motion in their core exercises, not more, so emphasizing these stability exercisesfrom different angles will be more effective than doing a lot of crunches or sit-ups.

CoreLinking it all together.

Check out my free Youtube Exercise Guide for 50+ videosdemonstrating and coaching the lifts used in this guide and

the rest of my rowing programs.

Click the link below to watch a playlist of just the exercisesfrom this guide.

www.youtube.com/c/strengthcoachwill

The Exercise Guide

Thanks for ReadingThere's a lot more strength training content where this came from! 

Visit RowingStronger.com via the button below for 60+ more articles onstrength training for rowing, mental skills for sport psychology, mobility,

injury prevention, as well as my "Strength Coach Roundtable" podcast.

START ROWING STRONGER

made with