HYROX rowing

Grouped by finish time rather than by labels like "competitive" or "intermediate". Find the row for the finish you are chasing and read across — then notice how little the column moves.

Doubles medians are close to solo ones here, and that is not an error. Partners split the 1,000 m between them, so each rows roughly half — but they row it harder and swap mid-piece, which gives back most of what the split saves. It is the one station where the doubles and solo columns nearly agree.

A sub-60-minute finisher and a 90+ finisher are separated by at least half an hour on the clock, often far more. On this station they are separated by 1:24 — 4:07 against 5:31, a factor of 1.34. That is the whole story of the rowing machine.

Even the tail is well behaved. The 99th percentile is 7:16, only 1.4× the median — on burpee broad jumps the equivalent figure is 2.6×. Machines are hard to fail at. You can row a slow 1,000 m, but you cannot really have the kind of catastrophe that the floor stations produce, because the flywheel does not care how tired you are and there is no rep to no-rep.

Which leads somewhere slightly uncomfortable for a page about this station: this is not where your race is decided, and training it harder has a low ceiling. The entire field is inside 1:24. Even a large improvement in your rowing returns a fraction of what the same effort spent on burpee broad jumps or on running would return. Row it competently, do not wreck yourself, and go and train the things that actually separate people.

Fast athletes are fast at everything, so raw station-to-station comparison tells you nothing. Removing each athlete's finish-time trend first leaves the question worth asking: does being relatively good at one station predict being relatively good at another? Across this whole course the answer is almost always "barely". Here it is not.

The rowing machine and the SkiErg correlate at +0.603. Nothing else on this course comes close — this station's own second-strongest link is sled pull at +0.193, about 3.1× weaker, and the strongest pair anywhere else in the matrix is weaker still. If you know an athlete's SkiErg time you can make a genuinely useful estimate of their row. That is the only place on the course where a sentence like that is true.

The negatives are worth reading carefully rather than tidily. The three stations rowing predicts worst are sandbag lunges, sled push, wall balls, which invites an obvious "ergs versus floor work" story — and that story does not survive the rest of the row. Sled pull, a floor station, is rowing's second-strongest positive at +0.193, and farmers carry is positive too. So the split is not machines against floor; it is something narrower than that, and we cannot say what. We hold split times, not athletes — no mass, no training history, no body composition.

1,000 m, in every division. No load, no scaling, no difference between open and pro or men and women. Together with the burpee broad jumps it is one of only two stations where nothing at all changes between divisions.

The monitor must read the full distance before you leave, and the handle has to be returned to its cradle — a station that ends with the handle dropped and the athlete already moving is the most common avoidable penalty here. We do not publish a damper recommendation: it is not in our data and we have no citable source for one.

This station carries no load, but the five that do are listed in the weights, reps and distances guide.

Accepted practice rather than something we have measured. We separate the two on every page so you can weigh them differently.

The station arrives directly after the burpee broad jumps, which is the widest-swinging station on the course, and it is followed immediately by a 1 km run. That sandwich is the whole pacing problem: you sit down already compromised, and whatever you spend here is charged to the run out rather than to the rower.

Because the field is packed into 1:24, the asymmetry is severe. Rowing ten seconds faster than you should gains you ten seconds and can cost considerably more on the following kilometre. Rowing ten seconds slower than you could costs ten seconds and nothing else. When the downside and upside are that lopsided, the correct bias is conservative — which is not a popular thing to say about a station where the monitor is showing you a number the whole time.

The number to plan around is your split after 4 km of running and four stations, not your fresh 1,000 m. Those are different by more than most athletes expect, and the fresh one is the one that gets people into trouble here. Fortunately this is the single station where you have a shortcut: your SkiErg time predicts it at +0.603, so if you know one erg you already have a reasonable estimate of the other.

Want to see what this station is allowed to cost inside a goal finish? The pace calculator splits a target time into per-station and per-run budgets.

Mistakes and takeaways

The short version, if you skim nothing else on this page.

Common questions

What is a good HYROX row time?

Solo median is 5:10 for 1,000 m, or about 2:35 per 500 m, with the middle half of the field between 4:47 and 5:37 across 39,247 results. Athletes finishing in sub-60 minutes post a median of 4:07; those finishing 90+ post 5:31. That is only 1:24 between the fastest and slowest brackets on the course — the field is closer together here than at almost any other station.

How long is the HYROX row?

1,000 m, identical in every division. There is no scaling and no load difference: men, women, open and pro all row the same distance. Along with the burpee broad jumps it is one of only two stations where nothing changes between divisions.

Can I predict my HYROX row time from my SkiErg?

Better than any other pair of stations on the course. Removing each athlete's finish-time trend across 39,247 solo results, the SkiErg and the rowing machine correlate at +0.603 — against a next-strongest relationship of +0.193 for this station, roughly 3.1× weaker. If you know one erg time you can make a genuinely useful guess at the other. That is unique: for most stations on this course, nothing predicts anything.

Is the row where I should try to make up time?

Probably not, and this is the clearest "no" in the dataset. The station swings just 1.34× between the fastest and slowest finish brackets — burpee broad jumps swings 2.65× — and only 0.03% of athletes take more than double the median, effectively nobody. The whole field is packed into 1:24. Time is not won or lost here in any quantity that matters; it is won on the floor stations and the runs. Row it competently and spend your training attention elsewhere.

What damper setting should I use for the HYROX row?

We do not publish a number, because we have not measured it and we have no citable source for one. What is widely agreed is that the setting you have trained on beats the setting someone recommended, and that race day is the wrong time to experiment. Whatever you choose, the sequence — legs, then back, then arms — matters far more than the damper.