Race-Day Warm-Up for Indoor Rowing: The Dose, Not the List

The context

The traditional rowing warm-up is about sixty minutes of continuous low-intensity rowing with short hard efforts mixed in ([1] McGowan 2015). It is the most entrenched ritual in the sport, and it is defended on two grounds: that it is what has always been done, and that you cannot race a cold ergometer. The evidence is more interesting than that, and most of it comes from rowing itself.

Here is the trial that matters. Fourteen highly trained male rowers rowed two ten-minute all-out time trials, twelve days apart. Each trial was preceded either by the traditional warm-up or by a thirty-minute, lower-intensity alternative, and the order was randomised in a crossover design so that every rower did both ([2] Mujika 2012). Mean power across the trial was substantially higher after the short warm-up — 322 watts against 316 — and the rowers generated substantially more power in the first seven and a half minutes of it.

The long warm-up produced the higher pre-race heart rate (134 against 121 beats a minute), the higher rating of perceived exertion (10.2 against 7.6 on the CR10 scale) and the higher blood lactate (1.7 against 1.2 mM). It bought none of it back. During the time trial itself there was no substantial difference in heart rate, in stroke rate, or in the lactate still in the blood at the end.

So the ritual is not free, and it is not especially good at what it is credited with. This article is about the dose.

The core idea

Warm-ups have been justified for a long time by four loosely defined effects — temperature, metabolic, neural and psychological ([1] McGowan 2015). The same review is blunt about the evidence behind them: warm-up strategies developed largely on a trial-and-error basis, from coaching and athlete experience rather than from science, and early studies were small and mostly measured physiological rather than performance outcomes.

Collapse those four into something a rower can use, and a warm-up buys three separable things.

Heat. Warm muscle is stronger muscle, and it is the oldest and least conditional effect in the literature. It is also the only one you do not have to row for: passive warm-up can raise body temperature without depleting the energy substrate stores that active warm-up burns through ([1] McGowan 2015).

Priming. A bout of hard work shortly before a performance bout can make the following bout faster. The effect is knowable in advance, and it is modest: across 47 studies and 1,954 participants, effect sizes ran from 0.23 for upper-body ballistic work to 0.51 for sprinting, and the effect was larger in stronger people and in those with more resistance-training experience ([7] Seitz 2016).

Rehearsal. Running the actual movement at something approaching actual intensity. This one is specific to rowing, and it is the reason a race-pace piece belongs in the warm-up at all.

Keeping the three apart matters, because they want opposite things. Heat wants time and low intensity. Priming wants intensity and a short gap. Rehearsal wants the right movement at the right rate. The traditional warm-up is an excellent heat delivery system and a mediocre primer, and the price of that heat is not free.

They are not even the same mechanism. A review of the priming effect sets out five candidate explanations and concludes that lactic acidosis and increased muscle temperature are most likely not the key determinants ([8] Goulding 2023). The two things your warm-up obviously produces — heat and lactate — are not what drives the priming gain. Which is why "warm up properly" is not a plan. The mechanism is also more specific than "it gets you going": which phases of the oxygen-uptake response get altered decides whether priming pays. A smaller slow component or a larger fundamental phase raises the work you can do above critical power, while a faster fundamental phase raises critical power itself ([8] Goulding 2023).

One more piece of logistics belongs here: the time between finishing your warm-up and the start gun is the transition phase, where equipment access and queue length usually get overlooked, and heat is what you lose during it ([1] McGowan 2015).

The how-to

Here is the shape, in order, with the reason each stage is there.

1. Get warm, cheaply, before you leave home. Five to eight minutes of easy rowing, or a hot shower, or a heated jacket in a cold room. Heat is the one component that does not need rowing to produce it, and passive warming gets it without spending substrate stores ([1] McGowan 2015). Do it before you travel: it is the one stage that does not need the erg.

2. Move; do not hold. This is the change worth making, and it is the most reliably replicated negative finding in the whole warm-up literature. The numbers are not subtle. A meta-analysis of 104 studies found that pre-exercise static stretching reduced strength by 5.4% and explosive performance by 2.0% — the effect on power was 1.9%, with a confidence interval that crossed zero — and the smallest negative effects appeared when total stretch time was 45 seconds or less ([10] Simic 2013). The authors' conclusion is direct: static stretching as the sole activity in a warm-up should generally be avoided.

The head-to-head comparison is starker. Static stretching cost 3.7% of performance and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation 4.4%, while dynamic stretching improved it by 1.3%. The dose matters more than the habit: 60 seconds or more per muscle group cost 4.6%, against 1.1% below 60 seconds ([11] Behm 2016).

The practical rule falls out of the same review. If your warm-up includes stretching, follow it with dynamic activity and the net effect on performance becomes inconsequential ([11] Behm 2016).

3. Rehearse the opening, then put the hard work early. Specific rowing pieces, rising in intensity. And then the strongest single result in this area, which is also the easiest to misuse.

Ten Australian national-level rowers rowed a 1,000 m time trial after either an ordinary rowing warm-up or a potentiated warm-up in which they added five sets of five-second isometric pulls against an immovable handle — two seconds submaximal, three seconds maximal, fifteen seconds of recovery between sets — in counterbalanced order ([3] Feros 2012).

Over the first 500 m the potentiated warm-up produced 6.6% more mean power at a 5.2% higher stroke rate, and cut the 500 m time by 1.9%; both were significant. Over the whole 1,000 m it cut the time by 0.8%, which was not statistically significant ([3] Feros 2012). The entire benefit was spent in the first quarter of the race and then gone.

That is not a failure of the method. It is what the method is. If you are racing 2,000 m, the priming piece belongs early in the warm-up, not in the last two minutes before the start.

And before you build a habit out of it, weigh the wider evidence. In the meta-analysis of 47 studies, maximal isometric conditioning activity produced an effect size of −0.09 — essentially nothing — while plyometric conditioning produced 0.47 and traditional high-intensity conditioning 0.41 ([7] Seitz 2016). Those outcomes were jumps, sprints, throws and upper-body ballistic work, not rowing, so the two studies are not measuring the same thing. But the gap in size is worth respecting: the rowing trial is ten rowers and one race, the meta-analysis is 1,954 participants and dozens of studies.

4. Breathe, if the race is short and hard. Rowing is one of the few sports where a respiratory warm-up costs nothing, because breathing against resistance needs no equipment. It also has the most sport-specific evidence in this area, and the evidence is equivocal.

In fourteen well-trained club rowers doing a six-minute all-out Concept II simulation, adding a respiratory warm-up to a specific rowing warm-up improved mean power by 1.2% over the specific rowing warm-up alone ([6] Volianitis 2001).

A different group asked the question in the other direction. Ten competitive male rowers did a submaximal test at 90% of maximal aerobic power with and without an inspiratory muscle warm-up at 40% of maximal inspiratory pressure. The only measure that changed significantly was breathing frequency, from 52.2 to 53.1 breaths a minute, and the authors concluded the protocol had no significant influence on submaximal endurance performance in highly trained male rowers ([4] Arend 2015). A later study from that group applied the same intervention to oxygen uptake kinetics at the same submaximal intensity and found no significant effect there either ([5] Arend 2021).

Read the two together and the pattern is not the one most people expect: the gain showed up in the maximal six-minute test and not in the submaximal one. If your race is flat out for six minutes, there is a small measured benefit available; if you are holding something closer to threshold, the best available evidence says do not bother.

5. Finish with the race, not with the warm-up. One short piece at or just below the pace you intend to hold, and then race. Its job is to leave you in the rhythm rather than to add more load. The order of the last two pieces is the point: going out too hard and paying for it is a pacing failure, and a rehearsed opening is a pacing intervention as much as a physiological one.

The trade-offs

Three limits worth naming.

The samples are small. Almost all the rowing-specific warm-up evidence comes from small crossover trials: fourteen rowers in the warm-up dose comparison ([2] Mujika 2012), fourteen in the respiratory warm-up study ([6] Volianitis 2001), ten in the potentiated warm-up trial ([3] Feros 2012), ten in the inspiratory muscle work ([4] Arend 2015). These designs have good internal control and short-term outcomes, which is why they are trustworthy about direction and weak about magnitude. A one or two percent effect estimated from ten people is a real effect of uncertain size.

The evidence is not all rowing. Of the rowing-specific trials above, only the two respiratory studies match what you will do on race day. The potentiation meta-analysis measured jumps, sprints, throws and upper-body ballistic work ([7] Seitz 2016); the high-intensity warm-up comparison was done in ten soccer players, the only source here that is not rowing at all ([9] Zois 2011); the stretching reviews pooled trials from every sport going ([10] Simic 2013). The Zois result is worth keeping anyway: after the small-sided games and the leg press, countermovement jump height improved by 6% and 2% while the conventional warm-up produced an unclear change, and core temperature was lower after the leg press than after either of the other two ([9] Zois 2011). The better warm-up was not the warmer one.

A warm-up is not a workout, and it is not insurance. A discussion paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine makes the case on principles rather than on new data: warm-up programmes have been asked to do ACL injury-prevention work they were never built for ([12] Nimphius 2026). The stretching evidence points the same way, because static and proprioceptive neuromuscular stretching had no clear effect on all-cause or overuse injuries ([11] Behm 2016). If you hold those stretches to prevent injuries, the data do not support it. And if you add a hard conditioning set to get fitter, that is what training is for.

What to do tomorrow

Run the whole thing once, on an easy day, and time it.

• Heat first, before you leave home: five to eight minutes of easy rowing or a hot shower. It is the one stage that does not need the erg.
• On arrival, dynamic movement only, nothing held. Keep any stretch short — the smallest negative effects appeared at 45 seconds or less ([10] Simic 2013).
• Two or three rowing pieces, building from about 60% toward race pace, so the shape you rehearse is the shape you will race.
• One hard piece, placed early: five or six sets of three to five seconds of hard pulling with a short rest, before the race-pace pieces, because the benefit is spent by the halfway point ([3] Feros 2012). Treat it as one promising trial, not a settled method: maximal isometric work produced no potentiation in the wider evidence ([7] Seitz 2016).
• One short settling piece at or just below the pace you intend to hold.

Then race. The one thing to stop doing is holding static stretches before you start: it is the part of the warm-up with the clearest evidence behind it, and the evidence points the other way.