RowingWOD™ FAQs

      GENERAL ROWINGWOD™ QUESTIONS

      A company dedicated to providing you with the resources to master the movement and the machine. You’ll learn the secrets of pacing and how to build your engine as well as how to unlock speed using your body’s natural biomechanics.

      Anyone. The beauty of the rowing stroke is that anyone can do it. Our training is scalable to all abilities and caters to athletes that want to improve their fitness and get better at life to competitors aiming for the top of their sport.

      Access to all our programmes, workouts, coaching notes and training videos.  You’ll also be the first to know about upcoming seminars, deals and offers from RowingWOD™.

      There are three separate programmes on the website, all with a slightly different focus:

      ‘Fundamentals’ – for those looking to start their rowing journey.  Learn how to master the rowing movement and focus on the all essential building blocks of your rowing technique.

      ‘Engine Room’ – for those looking for a goal specific programme or inspiration for their next workout.  All our RowingWOD™ workouts are here.

      ‘Competitors’ – for those looking to compliment their training as a CrossFit® athlete or fitness racing athlete, this is the page for you.   

      It’s up to you. But we’d suggest three options.

      1. If you’re unfamiliar with the terms rate, speed, split and pacing or are looking to work your way from where you are now to mastery of the rowing movement, we’d highly suggest starting our ‘FUNDAMENTALS’ programme.
      2. If you have a specific goal in mind, start following one of our preset programmes that’ll get you to your goal faster. All of these are located in the RowingWOD™ VAULT.
      3. If you’re a CrossFit® or fitness racing competitor and want RowingWOD™ to complement your training, we suggest having a look at the COMPETITOR programme. This displays two unique sessions per week that help you understand your pacing better, give you opportunities to work on your technique and develop your aerobic capacity.

      As a general guideline, we suggest training twice a week, but you know your body best and what you are capable of in terms of volume and recovery time needed.  But the website is structured so you can work through the programming at your own pace (whatever that may be).  Be guided by your body and it’s recovery!

      All our programmes are written with two workouts a week in mind, and the current programme in Competitors section has two workouts released each week for the duration of the programme.

      The following order works well if you are starting from the beginning, but you can easily work towards your chosen goal or just dive straight into a WOD: the choice is yours!

      Fundamentals

      1. Benchmark Test
      2. Rate & Speed
      3. Power & Volume
      4. Rhythm & Length
      5. Pacing & Racing

      Engine Room

      Specific focus programmes:

      1. Capacity & Power 101
      2. Calorie rowing 101
      3. Calorie row/burpee 101
      4. Calorie row/thruster 101
      5. Rhythm, Move and Row

      Goal specific programmes:

      1. 2k Row 101
      2. Aerobic capacity for 2k row

      Stand alone workouts to pick and choose from:

      1. Podium workouts
      2. Holiday workouts

      Competitors

      This section contains the most current programming.  The workouts get released on a weekly basis, then moved across to the Engine Room section once that programme has finished.  

      A rowing machine, and your phone.

      Most of our programmes are written with the Concept2 rower in mind but sessions can equally be applied to other machine or even on the water.

      Occasionally rowing is combined with other simple movements that can require standard gym or home gym equipment.

      You can record your results in many ways, but we suggest either manually (good old fashioned pen and paper) or via the Live Rowing app.  

      Live Rowing is an app (currently only available for Apple products – Android is coming soon!) that allows you to connect your Concept2 Rowing Machine to your phone, as it takes control of the Concept2 Performance Monitor.  This allows you to record and analyse your results. You get detailed post-workout feedback for each workout automatically sent to your inbox.

      You can download the app here.

      The Live Rowing app offers 40 Pre-Programmed RowingWOD™ Sessions in the LiveRowing App (5 Months worth of training) with a variety of benefits from the Live Rowing app itself like data analytics and being able to sync with your Concept 2 Log book.   

      This is different from the RowingWOD™ website (www.rowingwod.co) which is a separate entity from the Live Rowing app programming (www.liverowing.com/training).  

      The RowingWOD™ website is being constantly updated with over 140 programmes for you have signed up to for a monthly fee.  You get hundreds of RowingWOD™ workouts, goal-specific training programmes, detailed coaching instructions, and regularly updated content.   

      Subscription to RowingWOD.co doesn’t get you premium access to the app, but you can programme in all the RowingWOD workouts yourself within LiveRowing with the premium access.

      Investment for RowingWOD™ is either £10 per month, or an annual fee of £90.   You can cancel your account at any point (see below in the FAQs for how to do that).

      Create your user account and add your payment details to begin your 14 day free trial. Billing is either monthly or annually with no contract and you can cancel at any time.

      Yes!

      Coaching notes are available for each session.  If anything isn’t clear, simply email info@rowingwod.co for more information.

      We’re sorry to hear that.  First port of call would be to check is your issue is answered in the ‘Common Account problems’ below.

      If not, ping a quick email to info@rowingwod.co and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

      TECHNICAL ROWING QUESTIONS

      This section will be constantly updated and if there are any questions you have about ‘how to row’ that aren’t answered here, please email us at info@rowingwod.co and we’ll be happy to help!

      Damper setting and drag factor are two different things that describe the same thing: the resistance we feel on the handle. The resistance on the handle is simply a gearing. It can be heavy, or it can be less heavy. What controls the heaviness, or resistance, is the amount of air that flows into the flywheel. The more air that is allowed to flow into the flywheel, the heavier the resistance.

      By increasing the damper setting to a higher number, 7,8,9,10, etc. you allow more air to enter the flywheel and then increase the resistance. The same is true for the reverse.

      The MOST accurate way to measure resistance is by using something called the ‘Drag Factor’. This can be found by navigating from the main menu: ‘More Options’ -> Display Drag Factor. You will then see a box. When you start rowing, a number will appear in the box. This is the drag factor. Think of this number like gearing on a bike. gear 1 is very light and gear 30 is heavy on a bike. On a rowing machine, drag factor 80 is light and 180+ is heavy.

      We recommend starting with a drag factor of 125-130 for female athletes and 130-135 for male athletes. This is simply a starting point and just like gearing on a bike, your drag factor will be personal to you to get the best return of speed. Have it too high and you’ll find you can’t maintain power that well each stroke; too low and you’ll find it hard to get connected to the machine to accelerate the handle.

      Set your drag factor to within the ranges above and see what works best for you. But ALWAYS set your drag factor. Machines wear at different rates and can have completely different drag factors depending on geography, length of use and level of maintenance, so make sure you set it before each session.

      Rowing for calories on the monitor is based on a few assumptions. The machine assumes your bodyweight (I’m not sure of the exact value) and it calculates calories directly from its own algorithm from your wattage, or power output.  It doesn’t take into account gender, basal metabolic rate, etc.

      The larger your power output (higher wattage), the better the calorie/hr score you get. The interesting point with calories is that the relationship between calories, calories/hr and wattage is more exponential than that of speed (X:XX/500m) and wattage. What this means is that you get rewarded disproportionately more for rowing faster at calories than speed.

      Calories are a great tool to measure work done and give faster rowers a disproportionately larger advantage than metres. It also helps scores fit more nicely together. For instance, working out the reps for a 10min AMRAP of: 500m row, 40 squats, 30 burpees is much more difficult than 50 cal row, 40 squats, 30 burpees.

      I would use calorie rowing as a way to mix up your training, teach yourself a different pacing strategy and a way to plot your training progress with different metrics, which is always refreshing.

      Enjoy your training and follow the calorie programmes we have on the site and you’ll quickly realise what we mean.

      A word from  Cam on hand care:

      My old coach Jurgen used to say ‘your health is your business’. And he’s completely right. One of the often neglected areas of health is hand hygiene and hand care. We spend a lot of time foam rolling, stretching, hydrating, fueling and recovering, but it’s always surprising to me how little time and care people take over their hands. After all, your hands are one of the most important points of contact in the rowing stroke.

      There are three things to consider in ensuring your hands don’t stop you from training.

      The first is prevention.

      I don’t care what names people call you if you need to wear gloves or grips and these help you, then go for it. I’ll call you names myself if gloves prevent you from getting blisters and you choose not to wear them because you think they don’t look cool. Ego comes after performance. Another obvious tip to prevent blisters is to STOP when you feel a hot spot coming alone. A hot spot is when your hand starts to feel abnormally sore during a workout and you get a focussed area of acute pain. In my experience, it just isn’t worth the extra kilometre to have a big blister preventing you from rowing the next 100 kilometres. Until your hands are seasoned or you’re an expert at recovering from blisters, don’t feel ashamed to cut your session short. Your health is your business. A final tip to help prevent blisters is to rub a very small amount of thick moisturiser into your hands. This creates a thin little layer that rubs off into the handle and reduces friction in between your own dermal (skin) layers.

      The second is acute maintenance.

      You’ll have either noticed you have a nice new blister that hasn’t yet popped or one that has just blown a gasket. For the former, the best thing to do in my experience is to use a sterilised needle (get one from your local pharmacy) and gently drain the fluid from the side of the blister. This will stick the layers together and the residue fluid will also help heal the raw layer while the fully formed but now semi-detached layer is protecting it. For blisters that have popped, I try to leave the outer layer on top of the raw skin unless it’s positioned in a way that more strokes or repetitions will lead to a larger and deeper tear. In that case, trim the top layer away neatly, leaving no edge.

      The final thing to consider is chronic maintenance.

      Your hands should be two things: thick and moist. It’s a complete myth that hands have to be hardened. The harder your hands, the more likely they are to crack. You should be living with a mini tub of moisturiser in your pocket and constantly applying. This should be interspersed with smoothing out large callouses but leaving thickened dermal layers that offer the perfect amount of protection from the force and friction the stroke brings with it.

      Your health is your business and if you enjoy training, your hands should always be at the forefront of your mind.

      COMMON ACCOUNT ISSUES

      In our experience, this is likely to be because your account has been put on hold.  You can check this if you log on and access your account details here.

      If there is an issue with an association a payment method with the account.  You can check that here and then amend or update your details.

      If the payment methods are up to date, have you had any notification that payment has been taken?  If it has, please let us know at info@rowingwod.co and we can check the system to see what’s happening.

      In our experience, this is likely to be an issue with association a payment method with the account.  

      Once logged in, you can check and/or change payment details here: https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/payment-methods/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Payment methods” and you can add your card details there.  Visa, Mastercard and American Express are all accepted.

      If the payment methods are up to date, have you had any notification that payment has been taken?  If it has, please let us know at info@rowingwod.co and we can check the system to see what’s happening.

      ACCOUNT FAQs

      In our experience, this is likely to be because your account has been put on hold.  You can check this if you log on and access your account details here.

      If there is an issue with an association a payment method with the account.  You can check that here and then amend or update your details.

      If the payment methods are up to date, have you had any notification that payment has been taken?  If it has, please let us know at info@rowingwod.co and we can check the system to see what’s happening.

      In our experience, this is likely to be an issue with association a payment method with the account.  

      Once logged in, you can check and/or change payment details here: https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/payment-methods/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Payment methods” and you can add your card details there.  Visa, Mastercard and American Express are all accepted.

      If the payment methods are up to date, have you had any notification that payment has been taken?  If it has, please let us know at info@rowingwod.co and we can check the system to see what’s happening.

      You can change your password once you’re logged in here: https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/edit-account/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Account details” where you can enter a new password.

      Please try again and if you still have issues please let us know what browser/device you are using so we can try and replicate your issue.

      You can change addresses once logged in here: https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/edit-address/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Addresses” and then you can edit either your billing or shipping addresses there.

      You can cancel your account at any point.

      Click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      You then click on your subscription number (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/subscriptions/) e.g. #12345

      and then you can cancel/suspend as appropriate.

      You can reactivate your account at any point.

      Click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      You then click on your subscription number (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/subscriptions/) e.g. #12345

      and then you can cancel/suspend as appropriate.

      and then click on reactivate.

      BILLING AND PAYMENT FAQs

      Once logged in, you can change payment details here: https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/payment-methods/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Payment methods” and you can add your card details there.  Visa, Mastercard and American Express are all accepted.

      You can find past payment history here:  https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/subscriptions/

      Alternatively, click onto the link “MY ACCOUNT” on bottom of the main page: (https://www.RowingWOD.co/my-account/)

      Then click on “Orders” and you can view past payments.

      AND FINALLY….

      If the answer to your questions isn’t here, please feel free to email us at info@Rowingwod.co and we’ll be happy to help.

      Happy rowing….