You don’t have to be an olympic athlete to take your rowing seriously enough that you do some extra training to improve your performance. Chances are improved core strength, especially in the lower back, would help with your rowing performance. Let’s have a look at 10 exercises rowers can use in their strength training and a sample workout you can try today.

Benefits Of Core Exercises For Rowers

1. Improved Performance

The benefits of good strength and conditioning protocols within sports have been illustrated again and again. Developing a resilient core musculature is a huge part of these training systems as they can be important in improving performance. Different disciplines require different types of adaptation, but all rowers can feel the benefit from having a well rounded base.

2. Injury Prevention

When the full core musculature is taken into account and trained appropriately, it can have a large impact on preventing injury.

3. Improved Recovery

Having a solid core can be the difference between being able to deal with physical strain without getting muscular soreness or not. If your body is strong it will mean the challenges from training will have less of an impact and therefore improve both your recovery from a race.

10 Core Exercises For Rowers To Use in Their Strength Training

Common Questions

How Do I Strengthen My Rowing Core With Exercise?

Very simple, consistently train the core musculature using all the different movement patterns that the core muscles can produce. Using exercises where you can correctly do the exercise and progressively making the movements more difficult.

How Do You Engage Core When Rowing?

Rowing technique does require a strong core musculature, but if you have a strong core, thinking about engaging the core shouldn’t be very necessary. It should engage because it’s required to perform the movement not because you had to think about it.

Is Rowing Good For Core Strength?

It will probably produce some adaptation for core strength but will cap pretty quickly and stagnate as it won’t progressively get harder and harder for the core musculature.

What Core Muscles Does Rowing Work?

It will use the anterior core at the end of the stroke. It will use the spinal erectors a great deal during the pulling phase. It used a great deal of the core musculature but not all of it, like the hip stabilisers.

Is Core Training and Workouts Good For Rowing

Yes. The improvements to the core musculature will have some beneficial aspects but once a certain level is achieved the impact will become negligible to performance.