Concept2 Forum

This is a goofy question but I often wonder what the total indoor rowing population is. One must average 1500 meters per day to make the rankings but I'm sure there are many more zealots who fall below that number which is currently about 6900. Is there a source somewhere for that data?

poppi
Proud member of the Ancient Mariners

Only a fraction of the total indoor rowing population even knows about the Concept 2 logbook and rankings.

I have been told that there are between 4000 and 6000 indoor rowers in this country alone and yet there are only 79 people rowing more than 1500m a day from New Zealand using the online Logbook.

I would say that you would be lucky if 2 to 3% of users bothered to upload their results, which is a shame because if there was a fully automated system that used the smartphone as a monitor, the results would be fascinating as you would have a huge sample to get some really useful data from and you would see where your performance really stacked up.

That does and doesn't surprise me.

I have only in the past 12 months always updated my logbook, and I have been erging on and off for 17 years. Admittedly it's only been for the past 8 or 9 years that I have been really dedicated and erged regularly enough, and with enough distance, to consider myself an indoor rower.

Without modern technology, i.e. ergdata I was very lazy and random in updating my logbook as it is always a gym erg and i often forgot to note down the session. I must have missed off many millions of metres over the years. I assume that this is the same issue for a lot of other people

It is a real shame though as it would be very interesting to see how many people do use the indoor rower over the world.

Going by what I've seen happening at the two gyms I use there are very few that use the erg for anything other than a warm up or down. The erg I use the most I have looked through the memory to see what goes on and it's very rare to see anything greater than 10 mins. I have seen one other person take a pic of the screen after a session even though mostly their session is like 5 mins. Even when i was at the crossfit gym no-one did any serious work on the erg.
I suspect that most people here (NZ) that are regular ergers either have their own or belong to a rowing club

Dreadfish wrote:Going by what I've seen happening at the two gyms I use there are very few that use the erg for anything other than a warm up or down. The erg I use the most I have looked through the memory to see what goes on and it's very rare to see anything greater than 10 mins. I have seen one other person take a pic of the screen after a session even though mostly their session is like 5 mins. Even when i was at the crossfit gym no-one did any serious work on the erg.
I suspect that most people here (NZ) that are regular ergers either have their own or belong to a rowing club

Yeah same here. I ocassionly see longer than 10 mins on the rower but the pace is usually over 3 mins. I very rarely see anyone erging who knows what they are doing, or at least appears to

Carl Watts wrote:
I have been told that there are between 4000 and 6000 indoor rowers in this country alone and yet there are only 79 people rowing more than 1500m a day from New Zealand using the online Logbook.

Does that 4000-6000 figure refer to the number of people using indoor rowers or the number of machines available? If it's the number of ergers themselves, approximately 1/10 of one percent of the population of a country close to 5 million people where Mahé Drysdale is a national hero seems like a surprisingly low estimate. And if the estimate refers to the number of ergometers in use, it still appears to be very low. I would have expected the percentage of indoor rowers and people using them in New Zealand to be much, much higher.

I am a member of a Danish rowing club which is much into ergometer rowing. We have 10 C2 model C and D, and they are often all occupied simultaneously when we have one of our 5 weekly "row spinning" classes.

So we have a lot of members rowing quite seriously in those ergometers. I think that only me and one more member have made an account on the C2 online logbook, and the other member stopped logging several years ago.

Based on this, it would not surprise me if the ratio of active online logging ergometer rowers vs. active non-logging ergometer rowers is quite low.

4000 to 6000 is the total number of Concept 2 indoor rowing machines in New Zealand and that would include all the Gyms and home Ergs.

Concept 2 would have to move to full implementation of the Smartphone to capture the true number of Ergs as well as users, after all pretty much everyone has a smartphone over here now. Its the only way your going to get the data is to make the smartphone using an App part of actually using the Erg. All the information could then be uploaded in the background. Even then this could be a problem as just about every current Logbook user has their user profile security settings all maxed out so even registered Logbook users cannot see the results. Kind of strange when everyone is okay with splattering their whole life on Facebook.

And most who do row .. do so with too high DF..... bad tech etc

This is a very interesting question. In just looking at rankings for 2k sessions there is just over 8,000 members who have submitted ranked 2k workouts so far this season.

Now that is just the ranked workouts. Not everyone ranks their workouts.


The number above is only showing 2k rankings

However in looking at the Honor Board and tallying the numbers in each threshold I came up with 15,326. This again is only tracking this seasons active rowers who log their entries. This is an impressive number.

Maybe Concept can provide a number of users who have submitted workouts in this season. I suspect that is a very large number.

Another intersting statistic would be to know the total number of rowers sold by model type since Concept 2 started.

For me when asked I would say there are at least 15,000 documented active rowers this season. As others in this thread have suggested this may only be a fraction of the real number.

pes949 wrote: ↑

December 15th, 2018, 12:03 am

Another intersting statistic would be to know the total number of rowers sold by model type since Concept 2 started.

I'd be interested in this number. The number of people doing it, on the other hand, is a guess at best and is constantly changing.

Almost all oarsmen use the erg, so to get a best estimate, the number of boat clubs might be a good start. My guess is there are around average 100 in all the major rowing countries (30?) and if each club has 50 active members, that's 150.000 people. Add as many oldies who warm the seat on occasion, so 300.000 people total.

There are over 2 million cyclists just in Italy, say 50M worldwide; so even half a million ergers would not be surprising. An erg is a lot cheaper than some bikes these; maybe C2 should get some bike mfrs to give away a free erg with every 5 or 10.000$ bike in lieu of discount.

What an erger is, needs defining. Minimum 500 k a year?