Mini Deep Dive: Rowing

Hi, I'm Lesa Logan, and I wanna do a deep dive, a mini deep dive on the Rowwing series. I think one of the most amazing, kind of iconic series on the reformer, it's really delicious. It's got a lot of of good stuff going on. And it's often taught a little too soon. So I think it's important for us to dive into all six rowing exercises, kind of go over what you can get out of them, what they can teach you, and how to do them.

So you wanna start on one heavy spring. And Before I get into all six Roings, I just wanna say this. My understanding from my teacher, Jay Grimes, is that you actually didn't learn Rowing right away in in Joe's studio. It was something that you definitely built yourself up to. And so signs that you're really ready to add in rowing would be that in your mat, you're nailing your roll up. You've got a decent neck pull.

You know the thigh stretch. I would also say like spine twist, and saw, and swan, and double leg kick are in your practice. And on the reformer, you have a great down stretch, a great elephant. Your stomach massage around and reach back is going really well. These exercises are not necessarily foundational, but they have key components that we need to have connections with before we get into rowing.

Because here's the deal. If you do rowing too soon, it's a weird choreography, a lot going on, and it can just feel not as juicy as it really is. And so I wanna make sure that you have access to those exercise in your practice before you add these in. The next thing I wanna say is I'm gonna teach you the order of the rowing one through six. But in an ideal world, you would learn five and six first. Then once you've nailed those, you get three and four.

And then once you nail those, you get one and two. So even though we're going from one to six, just remember the reverse is how you'd wanna learn it. Alright? So one heavy spring on, it's really important. Know a lot of people are like, oh, I can't do the heavy spring, so I'm gonna do the lighter spring. I want you to do a heavy spring because you actually need that tension to find all the good stuff that this exercise has.

So legs are through the shoulder rest. You have a little bit of space behind you and the edge of the carriage, and there's a lot of different variations of the handles. Right? So how do you do the handles for rowing one? And I'm gonna tell you I prefer thumbs together because when I've been in a rowboat, This is how you row. Right? Like, this is how your hands are.

So if you prefer a different handrail, that's totally fine, but this is why I like this one. It also really allows our elbows to be nice and wide with our shoulders down. So here we are for end of the sternum. You'll see the roll up happen right away. We gotta round back, and you wanna stay tall.

So if you're doing this to round back, you're gonna miss out on the good stuff. So you wanna be as tall as you are and then pull your waist back. So if you're someone who does the roll up and slides around, work on that before you add this in. Now once we're here, the carriage is gonna stay nice and still as I open my arms, and now my thumbs are down. My pinky side of the hand is in the handle. I'm gonna move the carriage, but I'm gonna stay in this long round shape.

And then I get to dive forward, the carriage is gonna stay nice and still as I reach back for those springs. Now, if you can't hook your thumbs here, you are okay. You are a human being, and you'll get there. But if you bend to hook, What would happen to my shoulders? It's not so awesome. Right? And we lost all the connection. So what I want you to do is get to that point where those arms are behind you, reach into the springs, reach them towards each other. See how close you can get them, even if you don't hook, hooking the thumbs is extra credit, and then you circle around all the way over your toes.

So if you can hook your thumbs, it'll look a little bit like this, you'll round back, you'll open, you'll push and die. If the carriage doesn't stay nice and still, I'm gonna hook my thumbs. I'm gonna lift him up as high as I can, lifting my ribs up, and then controlling the open, circling all the way over the toes. Now, if you are someone who rolls up too soon, you're gonna miss the good stuff. Right? Why does rowing happen at the beginning of a reformer? Cause it's here to stretch our back. It's here to connect your arms to our back.

So when you are doing this delicious circle around. You wanna keep pulling your head to your knees so you can stretch from your heels to the crown of your head. It feels so good. Rowing too, it's also called 90 degrees. The thing that tends to go wrong is a bicep curl. So it's actually a little greater than 90, but that's a long name.

So that's probably why they named it 90 degrees. But you wanna get these elbows up. So when you lean back, if the elbows go down, you already lost the good stuff. So elbows up, we're gonna lean back. The other than to stay here.

Now I see a lot of people really excited to straighten their arms back here, and then they lift. If you're strong enough, do it. But if you have tight shoulders, here's where I like to go. I reach back, and then I lift up and reach my arms to straight because If you are going to do the other version and you lose all the connection, what's the point? Right? You reach the arms down, they come back, you maybe hook, you lift, and the ending is the same as the first one. So let's do it again.

If you can do this one, or you reach them to straight without arching your back, that's great. But the pinky side of the hand has to stay on the handle. And so if when you reach back, you do this funky little hand position to get forward, you're you don't have to. Like, it's really okay. I there's so much strength in this, right, reaching forward. So here we are we reach, we reach. Now when the hands come down to the floor and they pull back, that's that tendon stretch on the reformer. The arms reaching back. There's your double leg kick. They circle around and get that extra juicy back stretch.

And the legs are pushing down so you should not feel like you have to push out into your shoulder rest. They're not hanging out. They're a nice anchor. And after you're done with your third one, you should feel nice and juicy and ready and warmed up to spin around. So now we're gonna spin around for a rowing three and four. This is the second grouping you would learn. Something that might be hard for you to do is sit in this position while your hip flexor's freaking out. If that's the case, I would rather you skip this and do some kneeling rowing, some standing rowing on your Cadillac, and then work on exercise that stretch the front of your hips and strengthen the back of your legs, because that's all you need. Right? You need to have a stronger hamstring glute connection so you're sitting out of those hip flexors.

A little easier is to sit against the shoulder rest. Something I like to challenge myself is just slide my hands back and that shoulder rest and get a little bit away, so I'm not tempted to rest into them. Then you hook the handle under the hand so the thumb is here, the straps under your arm. Once you're here from the chest is just like doing a push up but sitting, we just straighten our arms. When you lower the arms down, think about your chest expansion, get nice and tall.

And when you lift the arms up, you get to hold here for just a split second. It's gonna be a little longer for us today. You're gonna squeeze those legs together and see if your lower back can reach into those handles. And then you open the arms, they stay in your peripheral vision as they push all the way down. Sometimes people are a little too excited to bend the elbows. Again, reach it forward, I'm squeezing my legs together so that I'm not sitting those hip flexors, lift the arms forward and up, and then stay as tall.

In fact, get taller as you push down. Get taller as you push down. Get taller as you push down. It's a lot of work, but if you struggle with a tall back, this is a really big challenge for you. It also helps you learn all the different ways your arms can move from your back.

You know, you ought to remember that rowing is for the back. Right? It's tempting to think about the front side. From the hips, my favorite rowing of all. It's going to challenge your arm back connection for sure. So the hands are right by your hips. You guessed it. You round forward And then it's tempting to push with the arms, but imagine you could pull the stomach back so much that the carriage move back, and that's why your hands are reaching down towards the gear bar. You're gonna lift up. The carriage does not move.

Then you open the arms, and you try to keep the carrot as still as possible as your arm circle in your peripheral vision. Now, the feet are flexed on this once. You've got that neck pull, that roll up feeling. Right? When you have the hands here, sometimes they like to take flight a little too soon off of the carriage, really use the carriage as a tactile cue for yourself to keep those arms low. That's gonna help you stretch your back. Then when you lift up, use the spring to push your shoulders onto your back and circle the arms wide to the side. It is one of the most juicy, delicious, helps you find all the stuff, the extra stuff you can find in some of your other exercises. Alright.

Then you do this little fancy, whoop, and crisscross your legs. Okay? So here, if you're super flexible sitting crisscross is easy. If you're not, you're like, oh my god. In that case, you might wanna do some exercise that stretch the outer hips. Strengthen the outer hips and open up the front of the hips before you do this. However, you can still be here and do this exercise if you can sit tall. And what I like to do, instead of thinking the knees down, that doesn't really work for me because I'm flexible. When I think knees down, tend to forget about my inner thighs. So I actually think feet down.

And by pushing my feet down like I could stand up, my glutes turn on more, and now I'm not hanging off my inner thighs or a part of the exercise too. We take the hands behind our back. And you see how low you can go towards your neck, index finger and thumb together, and you're gonna reach up. Now I know what some of you wanna do. You're like, I'm gonna lean forward, and then reach forward.

And I'm gonna challenge you. The exercise is actually up here. And so you're trying to go up towards the ceiling with those elbows nice and wide. So it's not a tricep exercise. It's for the back, and it really helps it up or back out. So as my arms go up, I push my feet down.

Bonus extra credit if you can actually work the down. Yep. Work the close of the spring. Right? Then on your last one, this is where the fancy transition that helps you prepare for crab on the mat comes from. Reach those arms up as you switch the cross the legs. And that's important because that up, if you're really using the up to lift your waist, provide space for your legs to move. So if you're someone who's always using your hands, to move your legs.

I'm not calling you out, but I'm gonna say you will always need your hands to move your legs. So you wanna try, get yourself to the place where you can go up so much the space for the legs to move is there. Now here's where everyone you guys have fancy cues. They wanna tell you you want a drop of dew to go down your arm. That's a lot of thought. So what you want is the handles to be perpendicular to the floor.

And ideally, your hands are lower than your shoulders. Okay? And you're gonna reach your arms forward like you're trying to hug someone far away, and then you're gonna push the arms wide to the side. Reach and push. So my elbows are not locked, but they're not bent, and I'm not trying to touch my fingers together. It's not a pec press. Right? I'm it's almost like I'm trying to hug you all the way over there. Like, you're across the road.

I'm like, oh, I miss you. Hi. Right? So can you feel that coming from your back? The other thing that you don't wanna miss out on is the open. I just sit on that rep. I just kinda open my arms and let this spring do it. But can you push?

The arms apart. I used to think about pushing boulders, how would that feel? A push, push, push, push, push. Oh, and if you do all six of those rowings, that isn't self a workout. We got a tall back We got some round back, got some flexion, we had to work the inner thighs, we had to work the outer hips. So, like, just those six exercises, if you have only five minutes to work out, you could do that series a few times. Right? So hopefully that helps answer Some of the questions on, like, what is the actual choreography of the exercise? What are the little nuances I should be thinking about? And then, ideally, the order of events of when you're adding them into your practice.

You can see with shave and hug, if seal, is not in your practice, it's gonna make that series really hard. So instead of going, I'm not good enough for those exercises, that's not what I'm saying at all. We wanna ready ourselves. So if in these exercises, you notice your shoulders keep going into your ears. You're feeling a burn in your elbows or your biceps.

You're not feeling the things I'm talking about. Use that as a sign of, like, where do you have homework to do? And then you can come back to these exercises to see what connections you've gained in your practice. Use these exercises, not as, like, entertainment or to show yourself your advance, use them to show you, like, where you're nailing it in your practice, and where you have some work to do. Hope that was helpful. I hope you have some fun.

I hope it gives you a new way of thinking about your rowing, and I would love to hear your thoughts below. Thank you so much. Have an amazing day.