I had meant to do a P90X workout today but I as I was leaving work at the end of the day I realized that I locked the workout sheets in the office that I don’t yet have a key to. I also have the videos on my iPod Touch which is now broken due to an exploded pear in my backpack, ugh. As a last resort, I also have the videos on my laptop so I just pulled that out when I got to the gym. However, it only had 3% battery and promptly shut off, bummer. Not quite sure what to do, I consulted my master list of cool workouts that I came up with for this month and decided that I would do an erg rowing workout. I had wanted to wait to do it with a few friends who rowed in college so that I could get my form right because I’ve only rowed a total of 5 minutes in my whole life. However in the spirit of this 30 day fitness experiment I decided to jump right in and hope for the best.
As far as form goes, I spent a few minutes trying it out and figured that as I came forward I would need to get on my toes and keep my arms and back straight, core tight as always. On the way out I drove with my legs through my heels then used a combination of my arms and back to finish the stroke. As I found out later, this is pretty much correct in terms of form. However, what I think I looked like and what I actually looked like where probably very different. I just hope I didn’t look as bad as this guy:
Afterward I watched a few videos on YouTube to try and learn about form. I found this video by Concept 2 to be pretty helpful, boring, but seemingly helpful:
One thing I found interesting about this workout was that it was pretty hard to get my heart rate up to a high level. My min/max/average heart rates were 72/139/123 respectively. My rowing rate stayed somewhere around 25-27 strokes/minute and I did 7000m total, 2000m for a warmup and 5000m. I definitely could have pushed myself harder but I didn’t want to hurt myself having never done this exercise before. I found my form went to hell when I really tried to push it up to 30 strokes/minute. I was told that race pace was somewhere around 34-37 strokes per minute but I would have definitely hurt myself by pulling a back muscle or something if I had gone for that level of intensity.
The erg in the gym at work. I suppose I'm pretty lucky to have a small gym at work, although, I hardly use it because 99 times out of 100 I'd rather be outside exercising.
As expected, I found rowing inside to be SUPER boring, I only kept going because of my fitness goal for this month, otherwise I would have stopped and gone for a run outside. I don’t typically workout while listening to music because I find iPods and headphone wires to be really irritating. Having something bouncing around or strapped to my bicep is something I’d rather avoid. Plus, I like hearing the sounds around me whether it’s nature, cars, bikers, other runners, etc. There’s nothing I hate more than seeing bikers in the city with their headphones in, let alone the people I’ve seen texting while biking, yikes. Case and point, the picture below shows what happens when God doesn’t want you to listen to music during your workout:
The headphone cord dangled down near the seat and eventually, the seat clipped my headphone wires right in half, bummer. It just reinforced how much I dislike using headphones while I work out.
