Jupgod Rowing Machine Review: A £60 Hydraulic Rower, Honestly Assessed

Sixty pounds buys you a rowing machine on Amazon UK, and the Jupgod is one of the more popular ones at that price, with around 220 ratings on its listing. It isn't a smaller version of the magnetic rowers we usually review, though. There's no flywheel, no belt and no magnet: you sit on a sliding seat and pull a single lever arm against a hydraulic piston, which is why the whole thing weighs little and stands on its end in a corner.

That design explains most of what's good and bad here. It's quiet, compact and costs a third of a decent magnetic machine, yet the stroke feels different from real rowing, and the listing contradicts itself on two specs that matter. We'll go through both.

Check price on Amazonaround £60

Who it's for

Buy it if your budget stops well short of £100, you want 15 to 25 minutes of low-impact cardio a few times a week, and you've nowhere to leave a 2m rower out. It's also a reasonable first machine for someone rebuilding fitness who isn't sure they'll stick with rowing at all.

Skip it if you care about proper rowing technique, want to follow 500m split plans, or weigh close to the stated limit. For roughly £160 to £190, the Sunny Health and Fitness magnetic rower or the Superun 32-level rower gives you a flywheel and a far more natural stroke.

How a hydraulic lever rower actually feels

A flywheel rower uses a handle on a chain or strap. You drive with your legs, swing back, then pull the handle straight into your ribs, and the flywheel keeps spinning between strokes so the next one picks up where the last left off. The Jupgod replaces all of that with a lever arm hinged near the footplates. Your hands move in an arc rather than a straight line, and with no flywheel carrying momentum between strokes, each one starts from dead still.

In practice that makes the workout feel more like a seated pulling exercise combined with a leg press than like rowing. You still use legs, back and arms together, and your heart rate will climb. But rhythm is harder to find, and the habits you'd learn here (pulling early with the arms, stopping at the finish) won't carry over well if you later move to a Concept2 at the gym. Our rowing machine technique guide explains the stroke sequence a flywheel machine rewards.

The cylinder is also why it's so quiet. Nothing spins, so the main sound is the seat rolling along the aluminium track.

Twelve levels or sixteen?

The title says 16 levels of quiet resistance. The feature list says 12-level adjustable hydraulic resistance, and the photos show a rotating collar on the cylinder numbered up to 12, grouped as 1 to 4 for basic training, 5 to 8 for cardio and 9 to 12 for endurance. We'd trust the hardware in the photo. Four missing levels hardly matter on a £60 machine; the mismatch matters more as a sign of how carefully the listing was written.

One quirk to know before buying: the resistance a hydraulic piston produces depends partly on how fast you pull, and on oil temperature. Pull faster and it gets heavier; row for half an hour and the warm oil lets it ease off a little. That's normal for the category, not a fault, but it means level 8 today won't feel exactly like level 8 at the end of a long session.

The weight limit problem

Jupgod's title quotes 160kg (350lb). A graphic in the same listing, the one headed "Compact & Lightweight", gives a max user weight of 330lb, which converts to about 150kg. Those can't both be right, and the product doesn't publish its own weight or frame gauge to settle it. Treat 150kg as the ceiling. If you're heavier than about 120kg, we'd rather see you on a machine with a steel beam and a clearly stated rating than on a lever arm pivot of unknown spec.

Monitor, seat and storage

The small LCD cycles through scan, time, count, total count and calories, and the feature list adds steps per minute, which we take to mean stroke rate. There's no distance and no split, and nothing connects to an app. One bullet calls it the monitor "on the squat trainer machine", which reads like copy lifted from a different product. It's enough to time a session and count strokes, and little more.

The seat is a wide, flat cushion on rollers, and Jupgod says you can lock it in place with a pin if you want to row with your arms alone. The footplates pivot, which takes some pressure off stiff ankles, and they have straps. Resistance cords with handles clip to the back of the frame for curls and presses, a small bonus rather than a reason to buy.

Storage is the strong point. The frame tips onto its front wheels and stands upright against a wall, and at roughly 150cm long it's shorter than most flywheel rowers even before you stand it up.

Will it get you fitter?

Yes, if you use it. Rowing-style training loads your legs, back and arms together, and regular sessions measurably improve aerobic fitness: in one trial, older women doing three 30-minute indoor rowing sessions a week for ten weeks improved their peak oxygen uptake (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2023). That study used a flywheel ergometer rather than a hydraulic machine, so treat it as a guide to what regular rowing-type effort does, not a test of this product.

Five 30-minute sessions at a pace where you can talk but not sing covers the NHS guideline of 150 minutes of moderate activity each week. Keep your back neutral and drive with your legs first; low back pain is the most commonly reported rowing injury (International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, 2023), and a lever arm that tempts you to yank with the arms doesn't help.

Check the Jupgod price on Amazonaround £60

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