You’ve added your rowers to your team, and you’re ready to start your first workout. Most RowHero setup occurs at the beginning of practice. Afterward, rowers can safely put their phones away, and the workout can run like how you normally run it.
Step 1: Helping rowers connect to the PM5
Once rowers sit at an erg, they’re ready to connect to the monitor. This step is covered in more detail on the Connecting to the PM5 page.
Please be aware there are two different types of PM5 monitors, and the steps to put each of them into Connect mode is different. The link above explains this in more detail.
You may also find the following information sheet valuable to explain the entire process, including troubleshooting when the PM5 doesn’t seem to connect: Onboarding Sheet
Step 2 (Optional): Check all your rowers are connected
If you want to make doubly sure that your rowers are set up correctly before starting, you can tap on the Roster tab for your team and pull down to refresh the roster. Every athlete will have a green, red, or gray color next to them:
- Green: connected
- Red: not connected or something’s not right (potentially a poor network connection)
- Gray: rower is not currently doing a team workout
You can tap the three buttons on the bottom right of the screen to filter your rowers to the categories above.
Step 3: What should rowers do with their phones mid-workout?
It is very important that rowers keep their phones close to their Concept2 monitor during the workout. Not doing so might cause the rower to miss saving pieces.
For example, you can put them in a smartphone cradle on top of the Concept2 monitor or underneath the Concept2 flywheel cage.
If your rowers have a smartphone cradle, they will benefit one of the many live workout views on the app:
- If they have trouble maintaining length throughout workouts, they can use our stroke length view to see it throughout each piece.
- If they need to track their heart rate (and you’re using our heart rate add-on), they can see their heart rate zone.
- If you’re attempting to teach best practices on force application, they can take advantage of our force curve view to see their smoothness and peak force position.
Rowers can also set their phones into Do Not Disturb mode to avoid notifications distracting them during their piece.
You may also advise your rowers to put their phones away so they are not visible. Please tell them to put the phone close to the monitor to maintain the Bluetooth connection.
Step 4: Run the workout
Tell your team the pieces to run and have fun. 🙂
Step 5: Ensure the workout was captured perfectly
Note
Your rowers need to check that their workout was captured correctly.
To do this, have them look at their pieces to ensure that every piece was captured correctly. So if you did 4 x 1′, the following would be correct.
Seeing a red box with an exclamation mark means that the piece has not been saved or captured. In the example below, the phone went out of range of the Concept2 while the rower was in the middle of their piece. To recover the piece, reconnect to the PM5 and import the results from memory. You can use the “Import Missing Piece” button, or you can browse the rest of the Concept2 memory.
This red box and exclamation mark also appears when the phone doesn’t have sufficient network to save the workout. RowHero will continue trying to save the workout when the phone can access the network again.
Troubleshooting: PM5 can’t connect
Sometimes, a PM5 monitor will not be able to connect with RowHero. These cases are listed on the Connecting to the PM5 page. If this happens during a practice, we recommend putting the erg to the side to fix later. While most “errors” can be resolved, it will usually take more than 5 minutes, which is more time than most of us are willing to wait to get a workout started.
For specific troubleshooting instructions, please see the Connecting to the PM5 page.
Troubleshooting: PM5 disconnects mid-piece
If a rower notices that their piece wasn’t recorded for some reason, then they can still import the workout from the Concept2 memory using the instructions here.
Troubleshooting: Rower doesn’t have phone or phone runs out of battery
Coaches can add results manually for any piece. Select the piece in question and scroll down to the athlete in the result list and tap “Add Result.” You’ll be asked to enter either time or distance as well as rate, and RowHero will save the data and rank the athlete.
