I gotta say, the sound effects are a little disappointing.
(It doesn’t have sound effects.)
Our new cardio room at work has two new row machines, and they are the fanciest I have ever seen! Each one sports this fancy display, a belt drive in place of the customary chain, and servo-actuated resistance internal to the unit. Perhaps its best feature is the seat, which is slightly cushioned. That’s a big bonus when doing longer sessions.
I decided to try it out today, with the intent of grinding out a 10 km row, since I couldn’t make it to CrossFit again. It was just the sort of long, slow cardio I needed to help burn off some of the Christmas goodies I’ve been enjoying over the past couple weeks.
I ended up doing two rows of 2500 meters instead. I spent the first row just trying to figure out the interface and the programs, before starting a second row using the Pacer feature. It’s a neat idea, and a good motivator to maintain pace through your workout. The display tells you how far ahead or behind the pacer “boat” you are, along with a graphical depiction of the race.
I steadily worked up to about a 40 meter lead through the first 1500 meters, before getting a little lazy and letting the computer catch back up a little. But I turned it up again for the last 500 and ended up beating the computer by about 60 meters.
Compared to the standard Concept 2 rowers I’m accustomed to using, this LifeCORE model seems fancy almost to excess. The display is visually attractive, but not as customizable or easy to read as the Concept 2. The padded seat and handle on the LifeCORE did result in less hand and butt fatigue than I’m accustomed to, but something about the seat caused my hips to be a little uncomfortable, too.
I’m undecided on the rowing mechanism itself. Adjusting the resistance level requires you to spin the Select wheel on the display, which isn’t easy to do on the fly. And the resistance itself is just different. The initial pull feels a little closer to what water actually feels like, which is good, but the pace I was able to maintain was substantially lower at a given level of effort. It almost felt like rowing uphill. The caloric output estimate seemed low, although I’d need to do a longer, sustained effort to say for sure. Most confusing, the Watts meter seemed to fluctuate unreliably, sometimes getting stuck at 117, and other times jumping over 300. I know that not every one of my pulls is identical, but that’s a huge variation.
But in all honesty, that’s mostly nitpicking. I’m still happy to go use it, I’ll just need to recage my expectations a little. I do wish it made some nerdy sound effects, though.