Turn a 1 km SkiErg or RowErg time trial into easy, threshold and race pacing bands — worked in watts, the way the machine actually behaves.
Enter a 1 km SkiErg or RowErg time on the left and your bands will appear here.
The empty stretch between easy and the hard bands is deliberate. Nothing is prescribed there — that middle ground is where most people spend their erg minutes, and it is the reason this tool exists.
| Band | Pace / 500 m | Watts | % of CP | What it's for |
|---|
The empty stretch between easy and the hard bands is deliberate. Nothing is prescribed there — that middle ground is where most people spend their erg minutes, and it is the reason this tool exists.
| Band | Pace / 500 m | Watts | % of CP | What it's for |
|---|
These are ballpark bands, not targets to chase. They exist to stop members training every session at the same intensity. Treat them as a starting point and adjust by feel.
Transitions. Bands are erg-screen pace. A race split also contains the run-in, dampener setting and run-out, so it will read roughly 10–15 s slower over 1 km than the pace held on the handle. Do not compare a race split directly to these numbers.
Start slow. Begin at the slow edge of each band and earn the fast edge.
New to the SkiErg. A technique-limited time trial under-reads critical power and makes the easy band too easy. Retest after a few weeks of handle time.
Test freshness. A time trial older than about eight weeks will misprice every band.
Run test surface. Treadmill and outdoor 2 km times differ by 15–20 s. Use the same surface when you retest.
| Step |
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Power and pace are not interchangeable: on a Concept2, power varies with the cube of speed. Taking 65% of a pace and taking 65% of a power give completely different answers, and only the second one is right. Every band above is worked out in watts and converted back to pace at the very end.
A one-page sheet for the gym wall. Nothing leaves your device.
The SkiErg is station one. You arrive at it fresh, and the rest of the race is still in front of you — so it should be raced at threshold, not above it. Going harder buys a handful of seconds and mortgages the next fifty minutes. That is why the ski shows a single combined race-and-threshold band rather than a race band sitting above it.
The row is station five. It lands with the sled push, the sled pull and the burpee broad jumps already in your legs. Racing it at the pace you can hold on a fresh threshold set is not realistic, so the row keeps a separate, deliberately slower race band underneath its threshold band.
Two athletes can post the same 1 km erg time by completely different routes. One is strong and powerful over four minutes; the other has a large aerobic engine. Their time trials match, but the fraction of that power they can hold for forty minutes does not — so the same band percentages would be wrong for at least one of them.
Comparing a 2 km run against the erg time trial separates the two. We take the ratio
run 2 km ÷ erg 1 km and compare it with a reference ratio
(1.93 for ski, 2.04 for row). A runner who is quick relative to their erg
scores above 1.00 and gets a higher share of time-trial power as critical power; a
power-dominant athlete scores below 1.00 and gets less. The index is clamped to 0.85–1.18 so an odd
test can't produce an absurd band. Leave the run blank and it sits at exactly 1.00.
Critical power is the highest power you can hold more or less indefinitely — the boundary above which fatigue becomes a clock rather than a feeling. It is the single number every band here is a percentage of.
A 1 km time trial is roughly a three-to-four minute effort, so it sits well above critical power.
We estimate the gap with a multiplier: 0.78 × AI^0.4 for ski,
0.72 × AI^0.4 for row, clamped to 0.72–0.84 and 0.66–0.78 respectively. The ski
multiplier is higher because a 1 km ski is a longer effort than a 1 km row, so it already sits
closer to critical power.
The multiplier above is an assumption. It can be replaced with a measurement: add a 4 km time trial on the same machine and the two efforts solve critical power and W′ directly from the power–duration relationship, with nothing estimated. That is the upgrade path for this tool, and the single-test route will stay as the default because most people will only ever do one.
Less than you'd trust the running calculator, and the difference matters. The pace-to-power conversion is Concept2's own and is exact. Everything after it — the reference ratios, the multipliers, the band percentages — is fitted on a single athlete and is provisional. The reference ratio in particular is an n = 1 estimate.
So these are starting points for prescription, not measurements. They are built to stop you training every session at the same middling intensity, which is the actual problem most people have. If a band feels plainly wrong once you're on the handle, it probably is — move it, and trust the session over the spreadsheet.