Rowing exercise machines are the popular fitness goods with training the whole body, warm-up, and stretching. They have the advantages of promoting cardiopulmonary function, training muscles, and burning calories. The purpose of this work is to develop a systematic design procedure for the linkage-type rowing exercise machines. First, to investigate and discuss the rowing exercise machines and the rowing motion to induce the requirements and design tasks of rowing exercise machines. Then the design targets of this research are decided further in order to establish the design specification. Second, to carry out the creative design of rowing exercise machines by using the procedure of creative mechanism design. Third, to complete the kinematic design of rowing exercise machines. Computer software is utilized for the work of dimensional synthesis and kinematic analysis. Finally, to perform the embodiment design and to establish 3-D model drawing of the design solutions.