Scaling concept II rowing ergometer performance for differences in body mass to better reflect rowing in water

摘要

We investigated whether the concept II indoor rowingudergometer accurately reflects rowing on water. Forty-nineudjunior elite male rowers from a Great Britain training campudcompleted a 2000m concept II model C indoor rowingudergometer test and a water-based 2000msingle-scull rowingudtest. Rowing speed in water (3.66 m/s) was significantlyudslower than laboratory-based rowing performance (4.96m/s).udThe relationship between the two rowing performances wasudfound to be R2528.9% (r50.538). We identified that bodyudmass (m) made a positive contribution to concept II rowingudergometer performance (r50.68, Po0.001) but only audsmall, non-significant contribution to single-scull water rowing performance (r50.039, P50.79). The contributionudthat m made to single-scull rowing in addition to ergometerudrowing speed (using allometric modeling) was found to beudnegative (Po0.001), confirming that m has a significantuddrag effect on water rowing speed. The optimal allometricudmodel to predict single-scull rowing speed was the ratioud(ergometer speed m 0.23)1.87 that increased R2 fromud28.2% to 59.2%. Simply by dividing the concept II rowingudergometer speed by body mass (m0.23), the resulting ‘‘powerto-udweight’’ ratio (ergometer speed m 0.23) improves theudability of the concept II rowing performance to reflectudrowing on water.