This page will walk you through the force curve screen, only available to rowers during an active interval.
Navigating to the Force Curve Screen
- Connect the RowHero app to the PM5.
- Set up the PM5 to start an active time, distance, or calorie piece. RowHero should turn into a landscape view showing you one of many screens. If you already see a screen which looks like the screenshot below, you’re on the right page. Otherwise, keep going.
- Swipe left or right to toggle between screens until you find the Force Curve Screen.
Elements of the Force Curve Screen
There’s a lot going on on the force curve screen, so here’s how you can make the most of it. Every stroke the rower pulls, the screen will refresh with the latest force curve, as well as some accompanying statistics. The guide below describes each of these statistics and visuals.
- Smoothness. A proprietary RowHero measure that indicates how smoothly the rower applied force to the erg handle during the stroke, because smooth force application translates to better boat speed on the water. The metric goes from 1 to 10. Strokes which maximize the area under the curve by maintaining a shape close to a parabola will be closer to 10, while those that show disconnection (e.g., between the legs and the arm draw in the example above) will not be as high.
- Peak Force Position %. The % of the way through the stroke (as measured by time, not distance) the rower exerted the peak amount of force during the stroke.
- The Force Curve. The blue line represents the force curve of the stroke the rower just pulled. (This is the same as the force curve shown on the PM5 monitor.) The orange dashed line represents what the stroke should have looked like if the rower’s force application was as smooth as possible for their force profile. In other words, the closer the blue line is to the orange line, the closer to 10 the Smoothness metric will be.
- The Peak Force Line. This gray dashed line represents the position at which the rower applied the maximum amount of force during this stroke. This line corresponds to the Peak Force Position % metric.
- Streak Counter. This is a fun way to keep rowers engaged during longer workouts. Every stroke gives the rower an opportunity to build a streak of “good strokes.” A good stroke is any stroke with a Smoothness number of 9.7 or above and a Peak Force Position % within 5 percentage points of the rower’s target. The rower can set a target peak force position % by tapping, holding, and scrolling on the force curve graph. This will show a line under the rower’s finger to set that peak force position. See photo below:
