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I’m obsessed with rowing, but before I got my hands on the Hydrow Arc Rower, my experience was pretty limited; I’d tried the rowing function on all-in-one devices, but never a proper rower. It took less than a week for me to go from total novice to being banned from bringing up rowing fundamentals during meals.
People who love rowers know what I’m talking about. They’re an incredible way to mix cardio and strength training. Made to mimic the workout you get rowing a crew boat through water, it works your legs, core, chest, back, and arms, all while getting your heart pumping. But until I put in my time with the newest Hydrow release, I assumed the mechanics of rowing boiled down to some version of most workout machines: go faster, increase the difficulty.
With treadmills, achieving a more intense workout usually requires a combination of speed and incline. With bikes, it’s speed and resistance. I assumed the better you got at rowing, the more you’d amp up the resistance and the faster you’d try to row, but I quickly learned that’s not really the case.
Hydrow Arc RowerThe Hydrow Arc is a sleek, sturdy device with a pretty substantial footprint. If you don’t have a dedicated gym space, you can purchase a kit that allows you to stow the Arc vertically when it’s not in use. But if you end up using it as much as I have, you’ll never want to tuck it away.See At Hydrow$2295
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After setting up my wi-fi and creating a profile (fast, easy), I hopped into one of the recommended workouts for beginners, a five-minute workout that walks through proper technique. From your knees-bent position with arms extended, the basic steps are: 1) push with your legs, 2) lean back while engaging your core, 3) pull the bar to your chest, bending your arms and pulling your elbows back. Then, reverse it. Straighten arms, sit up, bend legs. The goal is to hit all of these beats, but smoothly (and quickly and consistently).
This emphasis on proper form was underscored by the next thing the coach said: while the Hydrow Arc has the ability to adjust resistance, it automatically defaults to the resistance of water. And unless you’re training for some very specific goals, most people are best served by leaving the resistance alone.
Gains don’t come from upping the resistance; they come from putting more explosive energy into each step of the row–pushing harder with your legs, and deep core and arm engagement. Cycling through reps faster helps, of course, but the emphasis is on improving and perfecting each stroke, not packing more into a shorter period.
This is where the AI-powered HydroMetrics can help. Workouts end with a score–an aggregate of your precision, power, and endurance, so you can track your performance improvement even across workouts of different lengths and intensities. HydroMetrics also makes recommendations about how to improve your score and suggests future workouts you might like.
I found the insights about improving super helpful. After a glowing first workout review (she’s a natural!), HydroMetrics started noting that my strokes were breaking early, that I was engaging my core and arms too quickly to compensate for a less-than-ideal push with my legs. My only frustrations with the limitations of the AI came after I got this same note on four workouts in a row. Even with conscious effort, I could not get HydroMetrics to suggest anything other than focusing on pushing with my legs first. A human instructor could likely have talked me through my mistakes in more detail (but also, a personal rowing instructor? In this economy?).
Even without pushing past this barrier, which I have absolutely not given up on conquering, I would not shut up about my workout scores. My husband had to hear a recap of every workout’s split, the average amount of time it would take to row 500 meters. Mine remains abysmal, but lower every workout thanks to the encouragement of the Hydrow Athletes–the Olympians, Paralympians, and world record holders whose pace and advice you follow as they navigate famous waterways. I bragged about my blisters-turned-calluses (but still bought some workout gloves to stop them from getting worse). I even quoted some of my favorite coaches.
Generally, I found myself impressed with the Hydrow Arc machine, and have found myself adding a short, 15-minute row to my regular routine. The cons are minimal and easily overcome. I wish the large screen could accommodate some of my couch-rot apps like YouTube or Netflix—more and more workout devices are offering this to help people make bad habits more productive. The classes and most features are unlocked with a subscription (again, more and more workout devices are trying to get those sweet subscription dollars), so while you can still use your Hydrow without a subscription, the experience will be much, much more limited.
My final complaint may be personal, but I also found it difficult to reach the touchscreen once my feet were strapped in. To keep your feet locked and stop your push from rocketing you to the end of the machine, you strap your feet down. It’s simple to unbuckle, but tedious, so when my wi-fi needed to be reconnected, or when I wanted to change the music playing, I had to either lunge forward every time I needed to poke the screen, or totally unbuckle. More flexible or thinner people may not have the same issue.
Will any of that stop me from dominating future dinner conversation with the words of wisdom that Hydrow Athlete Dani dropped that pushed me to a lower-than-ever split? Absolutely not.
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