Counting Calories

If you are like a lot of people out there, your main motivator to exercise may be the almighty calorie, and finding ways to get the most calorie burn out of your workout. With this in mind, we now 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, visit the Calorie Calculator page on our website. The Performance Monitor uses a formula based on a 79.5kg 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 workout.

The Performance Monitor’s calorie formula is repeatable and accurate from workout to workout and between Concept2 Indoor Rower models. This makes it a helpful tool for weight loss. While it’s difficult to compute the actual calories that an individual “burns” to accomplish an amount of work 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. The Performance Monitors are self-calibrated, allowing you to compare your efforts. Calorie rows are helpful because they measure effort and power, as opposed to speed.

Note: If you use the Concept2 Utility on your computer and calorie based workouts on your PM5, please be sure to update to the Concept2 Utility version 7 or higher. Prior versions may delete any Single Calorie or Calorie based interval workouts. If Calorie workouts are NOT available on your PM5, update the firmware in your PM5 to version 22.