Recumbent Bike vs Rowing Machine

This comparison is usually settled on calories per hour, which is the least useful number either machine produces. The questions that actually decide it are physical and specific: can you get onto it, can you hold onto it, and can your back take the stroke? Three honest yeses and a rower is a good machine. One no and it is the wrong purchase, regardless of how good the workout would have been.

One disclosure before we start. We do not rank rowing machines. This site covers recumbents, walking and balance equipment, and we have not measured a rower or collected published specs for one, so you will find no rower numbers on this page and no rower in our picks. What follows is about the movement— which is the part that decides this for an older body — plus the published figures for the bikes we do track.

Getting on is the whole decision for a lot of readers

A rowing seat sits a few inches off the floor. Getting on means lowering yourself most of the way to the ground under control, and getting off means standing up from there, usually while the handle is swinging somewhere behind you. That is a deep sit-to-stand, and it is one of the first movements people lose after 60 — the same movement that makes a low sofa or a low toilet seat a problem long before walking is.

A recumbent bike asks for something entirely different: a sideways step over a low frame, then sitting down onto a seat that is roughly chair height. That is why step-over height is the measurement this site cares about most, and why almost nobody publishes it. The seat heights we can cite run from the low twenties of inches upward, which is dining-chair territory.

Be honest with yourself about this one rather than optimistic. If you need a hand on something to get out of an armchair, a rower is a machine you will use twice. There is no technique that fixes it and no fitness level that removes it, because the problem is the height of the seat, not your conditioning.

What a rowing stroke does to your lower back

Rowing is a chain: the legs drive, then the hips open, then the back and arms finish the pull. Done properly it is a powerful, efficient movement. Done for twenty minutes by somebody whose technique fades when they tire — which is everybody — it becomes repeated loaded flexion and extension of the lumbar spine, several hundred times per session.

That matters more after 60 than before it. MedlinePlus is clear that sciatica is a symptom of another problem rather than a condition on its own, and lists a herniated disk, spinal stenosis and piriformis syndrome among the causes. Loaded, repeated bending is the movement most people with disk trouble are told to treat carefully, which is a conversation for your physical therapist rather than for a product page.

There is a nuance worth stating, because we would rather be accurate than tidy. NIAMS notes that with lumbar stenosis, pain typically worsens with standing or walking and eases when leaning forward, because flexion opens up the spinal column. So a seated, slightly forward position is not automatically bad for every back — it is the repeated loaded flexion under resistance that is the concern, not sitting forward as such. Which is precisely why this belongs with the person who knows your imaging.

A recumbent bike sidesteps the question. Your lumbar spine rests against a padded backrest and stays there, and the only thing moving is your legs. That is the reason it is the machine most often recommended when the back is the constraint, and we have a whole page on what a recumbent bike does and does not do for back pain.

Grip: the limit nobody mentions

Every rowing stroke is a pull on one handle with both hands. That makes grip strength the ceiling on the entire workout: if your hands fail at eight minutes, the session is eight minutes long no matter how much your legs had left. Arthritic fingers, neuropathy and post-stroke weakness all show up here first.

A recumbent bike requires no grip at all. There are handles, and they are for steadying yourself getting on and off, not for working against. If what you want is upper-body work and your grip is unreliable, a rower is the wrong purchase and so is anything else that asks you to hold a bar under load. The route that actually addresses it is a table-top arm exerciser— one of those publishes a pair of non-slip gloves in the box specifically for a weak grip, which is the only acknowledgement of the problem we found anywhere in the category.

Neither of these builds bone

This is the most common misconception in the comparison, and it cuts both ways. NIAMS describes bone as living tissue that responds to exercise by becoming stronger, and names weight-bearing exercise — activity that produces a force on bones that makes them work harder — as the kind that does it, giving brisk walking, stair climbing and dancing as examples.

You are sitting down on a rower and sitting down on a recumbent bike. Neither carries your body weight through your skeleton, so neither is the answer if bone density is why you are exercising. Choosing between them on bone grounds is choosing between two zeros. What you need is something upright added to whichever one you buy, and our page on recumbent bikes and osteoporosis says so in more detail.

Balance is the same story. Both machines seat you, back supported, for the entire session, and the CDC asks adults 65 and over for balance activities alongside the 150 weekly minutes and two days of strengthening. Neither of these contributes to that part of the target.

When a rower is the right buy

We are not here to talk you out of a machine that suits you. Buy the rower if you can get down to that seat and back up without help, your lower back has no history that a therapist would want to know about, your grip is solid, and you want your upper body trained. In that situation it covers more ground than a bike does, and it covers some of the muscle-strengthening side of the weekly target as well as the aerobic minutes.

Buy the recumbent bike if any one of those four is shaky. And note what the bike gives up — the upper body — is partly recoverable: the bikes with arm exercisers move your arms while you pedal, and exactly one of those publishes handles that move independently of the pedals, which is the version that actually lets your arms work at their own pace.

The Arthritis Foundation points out that cycling’s continuous motion moves the joint through its range, which is the part that helps a stiff knee, and the National Institute on Aging lists riding a bike among the moderate-intensity activities that are safe for most people when built up slowly. That is a quieter recommendation than a rower’s full-body pitch, and it is the one that is still happening in March.

One more thing worth checking before you buy either

Capacity. Rowers and bikes both publish a user weight rating, and the rated figure is easier to find on a bike than on a walking machine. Two of the recumbents we track publish 450 pounds, which is well above anything in the walking category — and if you are shopping near the top of a machine’s range, our high-capacity recumbent shortlist and the high-capacity walking shortlist both rank on the published number rather than on the marketing.

And if what you actually wanted from a rower was the arm work rather than the rowing, read the arm page before you spend rower money. A table-top unit costs a fraction of a machine, needs no floor transfer and no grip strength you do not have, and it sits on the table where it will actually get used.