The title of today’s post is spelled correctly. It wasn’t supposed to be the question, “What’s Indoor Rowing?” – it’s just a focus on the units used to measure and regulate today’s rowing. The unit today, like yesterday, was Watts. You can find reading material of the driest sort on watts at this Wikipedia link . There’s a fitness testing model, using a rowing machine and watts at this ergrowing.com page . There are many web pages addressing the subject of watts as a unit of power to measure rowing effort, and you can search for more but the last one I’ll provide a link to is on this fitwerx.com page where a person who was a rower in college wonders aloud about “who has the most power, rowers or cyclists?”
Today’s plan was to row 15,000 meters and to row the first 5K at a slow enough pace so that it would last between 25 and 30 minutes which was the duration of a chess lecture I wanted to watch while warming up. After the first 5K, I increased the rowing effort to 100 watts for the 6th 1,000 meters, then 110 watts, 120 watts, etc until raising the effort to 180 watts when the distance had counted down to 2,000 meters remaining. When the distance remaining counted down to 1,000 meters, I increased effort to to a set of “power 10” strokes and then eased off to warm down for the remaining few hundred meters.
The entire workout was mentally absorbing because I was concentrating on chess during the first 5K and then concentrating on keeping rowing effort within a few watts of target level during each subsequent 1K.
Happy rowing watts to you.