Bob Ross would be proud :)

I found the same!

Good question. Yes the shape of your power curve should be relatively steep on every stroke, even at UT2. The fact you only see this at 17/18 spm is a good sign that is where you should be. Rowing at a 24 for your ut2 will not effectively develop your power, and speed is best (and easily) developed through other means. Check out my video about flat ratio. That is a good way to practice relaxation and precision at the high rates. Short builds of 12-15 strokes will full rest are helpful for training your legs to move fast. But rowing ut2 at 24 is not the way to go. 24 is appropriate for ut1 and low end AT/TR, depending on the drag used and effort.

I've heard high performance coaches say that before as well. I can say with all honesty that I neither understand how one would achieve such a curve and have also never seen it (just heard it discussed). It is also possible, that this shape requires the more advanced equipment of an RP3 to produce. All that being said, I've watched a lot of athletes of all levels row on a C2, and I've never observed a curve like that.

Travis Gardner thanks! That is possible. Haven‘t really seen it on an RP3 either, Though. Maybe it is a training cue.

Hi Robert, I have a couple ideas but can't say for sure without seeing you row. If you want to send a short video to me @gtsrowing on Instagram I'll take a look and see if we can figure it out.

@@TravisGardner Great thanks. Might do that.

@@TravisGardner Think I figured out what the cause is. Just finished a 12k row were I used the force curve, experimented a bit and was more focused. Seems like it's when I transition between the lean back and the arms I get a slight dip in power which then picks back up again. Found it hard to fix. Managed it some times though. Tried to think of focusing on "connection", tension and acceleration of the handle in the transition. When the inflection point didn't appear the curve was smooth. It wasn't completely symmetrical though. My curve climbs rapidly and then falls in a less step angle.

This is tricky. You are right to increase the drag factor if you are shorter, but if you go too high you lose quickness (and thus the ideal power curve). Holding all other things constant, the curve will peak more if you either lower the drag factor or stroke rate. That being said, my suggestion is to make changes in small increments, once a week or so until you get where you need to be with both power, application, and sustainability. Good luck!

@@TravisGardner Thanks! I'm on the tall side, with what I'd call the polar opposite of fast-twitch muscles (if that's still a thing). Next attempt then, I'll bottom out the damper setting (= DF 85 currently in my cold garage), and see what my legs think about that.

Note the last part of my previous reply. Don't change your drag by more than 5...maaaaaaaybe 10, per month or you are opening yourself up to injury.

@@TravisGardner I originally went up by 5 every couple weeks. Didn't think going down was a risk. Doh! Probably why my legs protested so much dropping from 128 to 100 trying to make mountains instead of molehills. Ok. Baby steps, then.... Happy New non-2020 Year!

hi Jay, I'll link a video below that may be helpful. If you are seeing an M shape you are probably too explosive off the front end and to harsh through the back end. Think about the drive as pressing on the gas pedal on an icy road. You should be firm, but if you slam it you will spin out. In the case of an erg, spinning out means a lot of impact on the supportive muscles/skeleton of the lower back. Which you want to avoid. Rather, ensure you have a good body position at the front, press your hips back and knees down while holding that body angle forward and long relaxed arms (like they are a rope under tension). As you move through the middle of the leg drive, you can begin to draw the body back to supplement the power of the legs as they move beyond their optimum position. Then as the body move through vertical begin to draw the elbow back past the ribs. If you sequence that properly, the flywheel should accelerate smoothly and produce the curve you want to see. Good luck! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/kNt6fNKG0se1knU.html

Sure. The area under the curve is going to represent your force, but velocity is what moves boats. You can get a lot of force by moving slower over a longer period of time, which is what a flatter curve represents. If you can reshape your curve (i.e. be more efficient with the force you are producing rather than just produce more force) then you can increase your [peak] speed without increasing your energy output. Moving a lighter load quicker or shortening your drive length can both help with this (the latter only if your drive is too long of course). Ensuring your drive is sequenced properly can also maximize your peak. Hope that helps!

Thanks. Great explanation!

As someone who also took half a physics degree, I don't understand this at all. I'm just back into rowing as of a week ago, after many years of never sitting on an erg. Maybe my last gym had an older erg, but I don't recall it having a force curve display. So this is new to me. What instantly shocked me is that the _x_ axis appears to be time, rather than chain distance (or sprocket radians). Work equals force × time? Yuck. If my perception was right, the area under the curve is physically meaningless. I put 200 lbs of force on my office chair for eight hours straight. No wonder I'm so hungry at the end of the day. That's 1600 lb-hours! In electronics, if peak force (voltage) was inherently better, DC would be non-existent in power transmission systems. But Three Gorges is bipolar 500 kV HVDC with a capacity of 3 GW over 940 km. There has to be something else about human physiology involved. This is easy to imagine on the water (oar angles are a thing). It's harder to image on the erg. We're in a squared drag regime. In such a system, with a fixed power capacity, you always want constant velocity. In an ideal sports car under v-squared drag, it takes 8× the power to double your speed (which you only need to apply for half as long to complete the same trip). Having the flywheel make large speed changes during your stroke translates power to velocity less efficiently. Clearly the flywheel will slow during recovery. But it could mostly be constant speed during power application, with the right force curve. That curve would have a very high initial force to accelerate the flywheel back up to speed, and then just enough force for the rest of the stroke to combat drag. Then you would have a short recovery to do it again. Holding power constant, this would achieve the most distance for the amount of power invested. Now that I think this through, the table from Concept2 that links watts to pace directly is kind of borked. There must be an awful lot of momentum in that flywheel to make this approximation workable. But you can hear the speed change under maximum effort, and it doesn't sound small. I just watched a video where a Finnish guy rowed one minute at a 1:12 pace. It used a short stroke, with a short recovery, and what would be normally be called "bad" technique. But there's nowhere near enough momentum in the C2 flywheel at that force level to moderate velocity swings, and you really need to adopt a technique that comes closer to constant wheel speed. What the C2 should have is one graph of force over chain distance, and another graph of wheel velocity over time. Those are the two interpretable figures. (Wheel velocity and chain velocity are equivalent with the chain engaged.) Probably they don't do this because it would highlight the aspects of the C2 that are non-physical with respect to rowing on water, where you probably want peak power as your oar becomes roughly perpendicular to the shell (blade shape would affect the precise location). You might get some of the peaky nature of power delivery back again due to the effect of lifting your shell out of the water at peak velocity. (Note also that the shell's center of mass is lower during the lean-back at the end of the stroke, which should help to lift the boat even more at peak velocity. Having a fast initial hand return while maintaining the lean and then a slow lean return keeps you in the preferred center of gravity for a bit longer, as your peak velocity runs out.) Am I missing something here? The core equations seem pretty straightforward. Of course, the devil is always in the details, and the next layer of the model can countermand what the core equations seem to say. But I don't see it. What am I missing here? What I see is that you want a near instantaneous peak force at the catch (on the erg) until you've got the wheel back up to cruising speed, and than a maintenance effort for the rest of the draw. Human physiology won't make this possible, so the initial part of the curve must therefore be a fairly smooth ramp. I just found a discussion of _Kernschlag_ and _Schubschlag._ As I see it, the first of these really ought to work on an erg. The fact that this has been subject to a long debate suggests that the symmetrical parabola is not embedded in the core model of power transfer, but gets grafted on at higher levels of the model, and the emergent symmetry is mostly an artifact of many complex factors playing out.

Okay, I'm pretty sure now of my previous comment. It also explains why I was seeing stupidly high wattage associated with my best power strokes, as a 6'5" non-athlete. I got up to 700 W on my best strokes, but I was practically exploding back to the catch (also exhausting, but apparently not as bad as letting the wheel speed oscillate at this power delivery level). Apparently, the C2 formula is making some assumptions about stroke mechanics in how it translates pace back to wattage. With my (putatively horrible) technique, I could achieve higher paces with less power than a rower who maintains more of a standard 1:2 power to recovery ratio. (As a novice, we often trained at 1:3.) Because of the momentum in the flywheel, the C2 fudge factor isn't a big deal at normal power levels (say less than 400 W). But up at peak explosive power for three strokes from a 6'5" rower doing mostly HIIT (which boosts explosive power more than sustained power), the fudge factor really breaks down. I could never understand how I was hitting 700 W peak power, back when anything under 8:00 for a 2 km felt like a good time. Yes, I had built up my explosive power. But no, I wasn't that caliber of athlete. I was only hitting 700 W on the assumption that I had a normal drive/recovery ratio, rather than heading back to the catch faster than I pulled the drive. I gamed the algorithm without understanding it. By the way, today I tried to maintain my Zone 2 pace at 10 spm, based on another video from this channel. Yeah, it wasn't super easy, but I managed it with some practice: my target 110 W training pace at exactly 10 spm on the display, so as to also gain strength conditioning. I've only been back on the erg for a week now, I'm nearly 60, and 100% of whatever fitness I've presently got comes from pickleball. I'm okay with 110 W as the comfortable middle of my Zone 2 pace for the time being.