Rowing, on the other hand, it's low stress, low risk, it scales with you.

But, but, but, but, but, can you row too much?

And what would happen if you were to row every single day for 30 days?

Seeing as how I am a rower and a rowing coach to non-rowers, specifically by trade, it seems like I'm uniquely positioned to answer this question.

But I do have a concern about if you were to row for 30 days straight, or perhaps even seven in a row, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Rowing, the long-standing champion of collecting the dust in the corner of every single gym, unfortunately, is a valuable tool.

But the question remains, would 30 days in a row be useful or harmful?

And why and what would be the actual benefits of doing it versus choosing something else?

Before we go down that rabbit hole though, we really need to know what we're up against and what we're comparing it to.

Now, when it comes to what you could choose to get fit, there are a number of different routes you could go.

You could go the monostructural, rowing, the cycling, the running, swimming, what have you.

Then you've got team sports, soccer, baseball, football, and then you've got the gym, the dreaded gym.

I'm kidding, I love the gym, but the gym can be a dangerous place.

The trouble with a gym is that nothing in a gym is really clear-cut if it's a coachless situation.

How do you write a workout?

How do you progress a workout?

How do you know how many reps and sets to choose?

How do you know what kind of tempo to use in the movement?

Second, the technique behind each of those things, even the machines, the understanding of are you doing the thing correctly or not in order to make sure that you're staying in the right place?

And then finally, how do you know if you're doing it right or not?

Are you doing the thing correctly or not in order to make sure that you're staying safe and making the kind of gains you want to see, whether that's strength, weight loss, cardiac endurance, mental acuity, flexibility, whatever it may be.

You need to have all of those things turned on, queued up, ready to go to make sure that you're improving the way that you want to.

The gym industry as a whole, to be frank, is kind of this like squishy sponge of just so many bits and pieces of information.

And there are so many different people telling you what to do and how to do it.

It's a lot to think about and it's a lot to manage for somebody who isn't doing it as a profession or at least a high-level hobby, which is where rowing comes in as I like to think the white knight of exercises that you can choose.

And why is that?

Well, because it's monostructural.

It's a singular movement, meaning you can focus on one thing.

And because rowing has the ability to scale up on both strength and endurance without the worry of the risk of doing it incorrectly and that risk causing injury, rowing is uniquely teed up to be a very reasonable choice.

Now, back to the question at hand, 30 days.

What would happen in that 30 days if you were to choose rowing and how would it go?

Now, the sample person I'm going to choose is somebody who is starting at zero and they're going for 30 days straight, four straight weeks.

So we'll break it into one week blocks.

We'll take a look at how this would go.

Now, week one is going to be a doozy.

You're going to need to invest a good amount of time into onboarding information, technique, watching videos, absorbing as much as you can about how the rowing stroke works, because you want to make sure that you're learning to do it right in week one so that you don't develop a ton of bad habits over the entirety of these 30 days, which is going to overtake quite a bit of brain capacity as your brain takes in information and is then going to try and attempt to turn that into movement.

That would lead to what I call the digestion phase.

Let's say you watch all of my videos.

You watch every video on this channel.

It doesn't mean you're automatically going to be able to move that way because your brain needs to connect and take time to tell your body how to move in space and time.

So you're digesting the information.

In week one, I call this positional compliance.

You should expect about 20% of the time you are achieving positional compliance.

That means if we took 10 strokes, every two of them, you would maybe do correctly.

The other eight, the body just falls apart.

The brain can't keep up with the pace of the movement and how you're moving.

And then every once in a while, you get this stroke and you go, oh, there it was.

Remember what I did there.

Now to aid in that digestion process, the things that you would be doing in that first week are going to be doing workouts that lack intensity and instead are high in reps where you can be constantly thinking, analyzing, and processing.

That would be a lot of drill workouts where you're doing drills that help to reinforce the positions of the stroke.

And then you may be just doing some volume workouts with very low intensity so that your brain can keep up.

When you try to go fast or intense, you cannot make adjustments.

Your brain is overwhelmed with just trying to go hard and survive.

It cannot slow down to adapt.

And right now it's heavy adaptation phase in this first seven days of your 30-day period.

Now, while rowing doesn't often induce soreness, you're probably going to be feeling some new muscles that are having to work.

The back, for example, all the muscles along that are called your erectors that go along your spine to support your spine, you're going to be feeling those.

Maybe your quads, maybe your glutes, maybe your calves, maybe your anterior tibia, the muscle in the front of your shin, maybe your shoulders from keeping those arms supported.

But needless to say, you may be finding some soreness in these first seven days.

And again, it's important to enforce that during that seven days, you should be focusing on technique rather than intensity.

If you go to intensity, you're going to develop all sorts of bad habits in that 30 days.

And so while you're in this stage, it's important that you slow down and think about mechanics.

Also in this first seven days, you can probably get away with pretty normal sleep patterns.

Although you may be realizing that at the end of the day, you're pretty worked from doing it.

But because our workouts have been low in intensity, you may not be feeling incredibly tired from the process yet.

So at this phase, still thriving.

We're in week one and we're about to close it out.

Now you move into week two.

40% positional compliance that you can expect.

The soreness is going to reduce a little bit.

You're not getting as sore anymore because the body is starting to adapt.

What that means is you're going to be able to start adding in a little bit of intensity into the workouts.

But now you're going to be alternating intensity with endurance.

And the endurance can be thought of as endurance slash recovery.

And that's because we still need those days where we're thinking about the mechanics.

The other days on the intensity, we're going to start to practice what it's like to start to drive more force into the machine, which is going to drive greater adaptation.

The inbound information, however, does need to continue.

So you should still be trying to process information, re-watching videos to help you understand concepts.

Energy is going to start to change here.

What you're going to expect is that you're probably not going to be able to get away with poor sleep patterns, staying up late, or maybe you still wake up early.

Maybe you're somebody who usually sleeps six hours a day, things like that.

If that's what you've historically done, you may notice that you start to get tired earlier in the day.

And that's because your body is having to adapt now.

It's starting to learn, all right, hey, I have this energy need.

And in order to refill my cup with the energy requirements that you're putting out every single day, so two things are going to happen.

You're going to start to crave more rest, as in you should be going to sleep earlier, or maybe you need a nap in the middle of the day.

But you're also probably going to start to get a little bit more hungry.

And that's because your body is now in this stage where it's gone, oh, hey, this thing is real.

We're going to keep doing this.

We need to resupply and we need to figure out how that's going to happen.

And so the body is going to start to send signals.

You're going to get more tired and you're going to get more hungry.

Now in this week, still drilling some workouts.

Maybe you warm up with drills this week instead of the workout being drills.

But the way I like to think of it is that it takes a thousand strokes to fix a bad habit.

And that's about 10,000 meters.

So for every 10,000 meters you put in, you're able to be working on correcting because you're going to choose focus points as you do that.

And that's going to help improve that positional compliance in the coming weeks.

Now let's move on to week three and see what that's going to hold.

I've been talking about positional compliance.

In week three, you're moving up to 60%.

Huzzah!

Great things are going to happen here.

Well, if 60% of your strokes now feel like they're hitting the sweet spot, you're going to start to enjoy the process more.

And now you're taking more good strokes than bad strokes.

You're like, I felt it.

I felt it.

I felt it.

Screwed that one up.

I felt it.

I felt it.

I felt it.

Another bad stroke.

And that's how it's going to go.

But you're going to be feeling more confident.

So confidence is going to start to improve.

Now it's important that when confidence improves, you don't just take off on a tear and move all the way over to intensity workouts.

Intense workouts every day is a surefire recipe to just burn out way too quickly.

And so in this week, you're going to start working on the balance between making sure that you push and nudge the needle a little bit and then understanding, hey, it's time to back off.

But because I'm doing this for 30 days straight, those back off days are going to be my recovery slash endurance slash mechanics days.

In this week, you may actually start to notice some physical changes happening.

When you look at yourself in the mirror every day, you've been at this for two weeks, 14 days straight.

There are going to be changes that begin to happen.

Your body is going to undergo some growth.

You may start to notice some weight loss.

You may start to notice that you look a little bit less puffy, or you may start to notice a little bit more definition in an area.

Because of those energy demands that you've now put on your body in week three, you are hopefully resting more as a result and feeding more.

That means that your body is starting to change over in its energy consumption needs.

Your body is going to start to change because it's starting to rewire at this phase now.

Now in week three, it is important that you start to add in mobility work because here is where we start to see our first risk of what I would consider to be some repetitive use injury things.

So it's important that you address areas that could begin to get sensitive to being overused.

That doesn't mean that things are going wrong.

It just means, hey, those muscles are really working a lot right now.

So you should be taking a little bit extra time now.

You're going to start to need to add in some stretching in order to make sure we don't drive too much adaptation and cause an itis of some kind, a tendonitis of a certain joint or any area in particular.

Mentally, however, in this week, you're going to start to feel some mental success.

You may notice an uptick in mood and improvement in the way that you want to approach this because now you're thinking I'm in the home stretch.

And that brings us to week four, the final week of your 30 days of rowing.

We're at 80% plus on positional compliance because you've been doing it so much.

You cannot help but be improving at the technique.

Your body has well learned how to maintain positions.

The only thing that's going to limit you at this point is whether or not you're staying focused enough to maintain those good positions when you're in your harder workouts, you should be alternating intense, hard sprinting sessions with some recovery sessions and then some mid range sessions.

So you are starting to experiment with the capacity that you have to go.

So at this point, an hour of rowing probably shouldn't feel that crazy because you've put in so many strokes.

It feels a little bit natural to do so.

You're definitely noticing some body composition changes at this point.

You're definitely tired because you've been going at this for a while.

Sleep and mood should have improved significantly by now.

Hopefully putting good foods into your body.

Now at this point, hopefully you may just need a couple videos here to watch some technique and refresh a couple ideas, but you should feel fairly confident that you are executing the stroke well.

And you'll notice that you have improved how fast you can move on this machine not as a byproduct of your fitness improving, although it has, but now because your mechanics are so finely tuned, you're looking at this and going, oh wow, I don't have to spend nearly as much energy to achieve the same results as I used to.

And therein lies where intense workouts start to get more intense and you start to drive greater adaptation because now the mechanics allow you to do that.

And then in the recovery workouts, you get to be very cognizant of what you're doing and how you're doing it.

And as you come into your final days of this, you're going to start to feel an overwhelming sense of success because you just went for 30 days straight, which is not an easy task.

And at the end of the day, that's why you eventually end up chasing something like a 30 days straight challenge because it drives a ton of adaptation in a very tight window of time.