If you’ve ever walked past a big, sweaty mess, writhing on a gym floor, you’ll know there’s probably a rowing machine, or ergo, not too far away. This low impact exercise uses 86 per cent of the muscles in your body and torches calories – meaning you don’t need to get your wellies wet.
Indoor rowing has benefited from the smart fitness boom recently and there are now plenty of connected rowers on the market, offering more than just a monitor’s worth of feedback stats. These machines provide immersive content and live or online classes to help you achieve your goals.
But whether you’re a first time rower or a regular, you’ll want a machine that can keep resistance as uniform as possible throughout the stroke to recreate the river rowing experience – even if you’re just sitting on a machine in your living room watching EastEnders.
Technique is everything in rowing, so you need all the component parts of the machine, from the sliding action of the seat on the rail to the resistance mechanism to be smooth, fluid and stutter-free. Build quality is also very important and it needs to be designed to stay anchored, even when you’re at maximum output – after all, you don’t want to start your rowing session in the living room and end up in the kitchen.
Of all the moving parts on a rower, the seat and rail are crucial and you need a comfortable perch that slides smoothly through the catch and release phases of your stroke, so that there’s no undue pressure put on leg muscles, particularly your hamstrings. To back this up you also need solid foot plates that are easily adjustable to power you through your time on the machine.
Finally, one of the biggest downsides about rowers is that theyare notoriously hard to store, as you usually have a large resistance cage attached to a long sliding seat mechanism. With that in mind, we were on the lookout for machines that tried to solve the problem, via folding mechanisms, splits or wall anchors.
How we tested
All our rowers were put to the test by an amateur club rower who competes in national tournaments and is used to the experience of actually rowing on water, so that we could get good insights into how well each machine recreates the river experience. Ultimately, we needed to know whether a machine would keep you coming back, which would give an indication of how much of a value product it was compared to a purchase that would be gathering dust after just a few weeks.
We tried (or went to visit, in some cases) a range of different models that relied on magnets, air and water to mirror the resistance of pulling your blades through the wet stuff. And when we weren’t being shouted at by an online coach, we were looking for comprehensive data from a monitor that was easy to read – even when going all out to maintain an impressive split time. These are the ones that really float our boat...
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The best rowing machines for 2023 are:
- Best connected rower – Hydrow wave rower: £1,595, Hydrow.com
- Best competitive rowers – Concept 2 RowErg: £990, Concept2.com
- Best value rower – JTX freedom air rowing machine: £459, Jtxfitness.com
- Best resistance set up – NordicTrack RW900: £1,499, Nordictrack.co.uk
- Best live set up – Echelon row: £949, Echelonfit.uk
- Best water rower – Water Rower original series S4: £1,099, Waterrower.co.uk
- Best premium rower – TechnoGym skillrow: £4,150, Technogym.com
- Best budget water rower – Xterra ERG600W: £499, Sweatband.com