Counting Calories

If you're like a lot of people out there, your main motivator to exercise may be the almighty Calorie, especially during the holidays. So, finding ways to get the most Calorie burn out of your workout is key! With this in mind, we offer the option of setting up a Calorie-based workout on the Performance Monitor 5 (PM5).

A “Single Calorie Workout” is when you program the PM5 for a certain number of Calories (20, 50, 70, etc.) with the intention of working out until you have burned the number of Calories entered. When doing a single Calorie piece, the monitor counts down from the number of Calories programmed and displays your time to the tenth of the second at the finish.

If you’d like to see how many meters you completed during that time, you can easily do that from the Main Menu by pressing Memory>List by Date.

To understand how the Performance Monitor calculates Calories on the indoor rower, visit the Calorie Calculator. The Performance Monitor uses a formula based on a 175 pound individual. The Calorie Calculator allows you to better approximate the number of Calories per hour you burn for your weight, as well as the total Calorie burn for your row.

The Performance Monitor’s Calorie formula is repeatable from workout to workout and between Concept2 Indoor Rowers. The Performance Monitors are self-calibrated, allowing you to compare your efforts. This makes it a helpful tool for weight loss. While it’s difficult to compute the actual Calories that an individual “burns” without a lab analysis of expired gasses, the Concept2 Calorie Calculator is a valuable approximation. We recommend using additional resources to plan your weight loss training plan. 

Regardless of Calories burned, the Calorie workout can be a useful function for setting up a variety of workouts. A "Single Calorie Workout" can be helpful if you're looking to create a workout with similar "reps" (repetitions) to other weight-based activities such as pullups, pushups, lunges, and lifts. Calorie workouts are helpful because they measure effort and power, as opposed to speed.

Note: To use Calorie-based workouts on your PM5, you may need to update the firmware in your PM5.