Have you signed up for the Concept 2 Online Logbook yet?

It's an online logbook designed to keep track of all of your indoor rowing workouts.

You can also see how you rank against other people from around the world who are in a similar weight and age category.

Concept2 have setup an affiliation profile for Lakeland Rowing Club on their online log book.

Which means, that whenever a member signs up for an online log book they can affiliate themselves with LRC and the system will tally up the total number of metres rowed by the club for that season.

A few members seem to have found the affiliate link, so the club rankings for the last year look like this, with David Pratt leading by a few hundred miles!

Once you sign up to the Concept 2 Logbook website then there are several methods of logging your workouts, which I have tried to explain below.

You will see that most of the automatic methods of logging your workouts are dependent on how old the rowing machine you are using is, and therefore how old the technology in the monitor is (the monitor versions go from PM2 to PM5 usually indicated on the top right hand corner of the monitor).

So, in terms of logging your workouts on the site you can either:

a) Enter them manually on the Concept2 Logbook website at https://log.concept2.com/

b) Purchase an iphone or android connection kit to make a wired connection between a PM3, PM4 or PM5 monitor and an iOS device, in conjunction with the ErgData app.

c) Make a Bluetooth connection between the ErgData app and a PM5 monitor.

d) Purchase a Concept2 Log Card to insert into the PM3 or PM4 monitors. I couldn’t find a card reader on the website for uploading the data to the online logbook, so I spoke with someone at Concept2, and they have said that there aren’t any compatible cardreaders anymore, so the only way to upload your data from the card is to take your laptop to the gym, plug the monitor with the card in, into your laptop directly and upload the information from there. Apparently people do this all the time and the gym owners shouldn’t have a problem with it – bit weird though!

Manually added workouts can be compared to the online rankings but are marked as ‘unverified’ for obvious reasons, so only the automatically uploaded workouts can be ranked in the online rankings.

Anyway, hopefully that’s of interest to some people.

We’re currently looking at a number of tools to help with the organisation of crews and training at LRC, and utilising the online logbook from Concept 2 should help feed into this and also be an invaluable source of data for the club captain and other coaches.