Every workout carries an expected effort from 1 to 5, judged by how the row feels. You don't need a heart rate monitor.
The levels
1 · Motion. Easy and loose; conversation is easy. Warm-ups and recovery.
2 · Work you could keep doing. Deeper breathing, shorter sentences. Most steady EN rowing. Fine almost every day.
3 · Comfortably hard. Sustainable, but you'd rather not talk. The threshold neighbourhood.
4 · Hard intervals. The burn builds; rests become what you row toward; you count strokes. Needs a reason and a rested body.
5 · All out. Nothing held back. A real 5 costs days, so the library has few of them.
Using it
- The effort on a workout is a forecast; the effort you log is what happened. Log the truth: a planned 3 that was a 4 is information, not failure.
- Higher is not better. Most of your week should sit at 2 and 3.