Im just curious to what muscles are exactly worked out when rowing and how effective is it for weight loss and muscle development if done for an hour every other day.

-- Snehal Patel (Dalaal94@aol.com), June 02, 2000

Answers

The quick answer to this question is all of them. However, the muscles that are more heavily utilized are the ones used for extending the lower body, and contracting the upper body. These include the quadraceps, lats, biceps, and traps, to name a few.

The exceptions to this are your glutes, and your erectors, which are used for straigtening your back/thigh alignment.

Rowing is primarily a leg exercise, which is what makes it particularily good for gaining strength. A large muscle group is used through a long range of motion, which is great for maintaining a high inrode, low energy loss (relatively speaking) ratio.

For gaining strength, rowing is not the way to go. You'll get really good at rowing, but won't get stronger. You might train your muscles to make better use of what mass they have, thus increasing funtional strength, but you won't accumulate muscle mass like you would during a high intensity, low volume workout. On the other hand, for losing weight, rowing is great. At higher volumes, caloric demand is quite high. Since such a large amount of muscles are utilized, energy depletion can be maximized increasing demand on alternate glucose supplying channels like fat, with increased lipase production.

-- ethan rose (nftr99@hotmail.com), July 10, 2001.

Following on from the previous answer, rowing is excellent for weight loss. I used to weigh 280 lbs and got into rowing about 6 months ago. I now weigh 200 lbs, and have got a bit sloppy with my rowing as I just got an Impreza turbo and spend a lot of time driving around now!

-- Andrew James Mellor (Andrew.mellor@wabco.com), November 14, 2001.

I too have lost 24 kg's in six months of rowing. I find ergs are the best for weight loss but its also good to mix it up. If you can do 60 minutes at anaerobic threshold 3 times a week you'll lose a lot of weight.

-- Nick Barton (barni779@otago.ac.nz), June 07, 2002.