Your monitor measures more about each stroke than it shows on its own screen. This page explains the numbers on the Stroke stats card, and what the notes above it are getting at. None of it is a verdict on your rowing. They are observations, and you are allowed to disagree with them.
The drive is the part of the stroke where you are pulling. The recovery is the part where you are coming back up the slide. The ratio compares the two, so 1:2 means the recovery took twice as long as the drive.
Around 1:2 is the usual shape for steady rowing. It gives you time to come forward under control and arrive at the catch settled rather than still moving. When the recovery gets short, the catch gets rushed, and rushing the catch is the single most common thing that makes a stroke feel harder than it needs to.
The ratio naturally tightens as the rate climbs, because the recovery has nowhere to go: at 34 strokes a minute there is only so much time in each stroke. So the device expects a longer recovery at 20 than at 32, and only says something when yours is short for the rate you were actually rowing.
Drag factor is how quickly the flywheel slows down between strokes. It depends on the damper setting and on how much dust is in the flywheel housing, which is why the same damper number can mean different things on two machines, and on the same machine a year apart.
Most people row somewhere between 100 and 140. Below that there is not much to push against and the rate tends to climb on its own; above it each catch lands heavy and the stroke gets slow. Neither is wrong, and plenty of people pick a high or low setting deliberately.
Drag factor is the gearing, not the score. The monitor works out your pace from the flywheel's own deceleration, and that calculation already accounts for the drag. A 2000 m at drag 100 and a 2000 m at drag 130 in the same time are the same piece of rowing. A higher number is not a harder workout and does not flatter your times. What it does change is what the stroke feels like, and which muscles get tired first.
The one thing worth watching is whether yours moves when you have not moved the damper. That usually means the flywheel housing needs a clean. The Stats tab tracks this over time.
Strokes per minute. Steady pieces are usually rowed somewhere between 18 and 24. Rowing the same pace at a lower rate means more of your effort went into each stroke and less into moving your own body up and down the slide, which is generally the cheaper way to hold a pace.
None of that applies to intervals or sprints, where a high rate is the point, so the device does not comment on rate for interval workouts.
How much energy went into one stroke, in joules. It is the other half of power: your average power is roughly your work per stroke multiplied by your stroke rate, divided by 60.
That means two people holding the same watts can be doing quite different things. One might be taking 24 strong strokes a minute; the other 32 lighter ones. Same power, different stroke. If your rate is high and your work per stroke is low, dropping the rate and pushing harder usually holds the same pace.
How much the work per stroke moved around during the piece. Some variation is always there, especially in the first and last few strokes. A lot of it usually means the rhythm changed part way through, which is worth knowing about a piece you meant to hold evenly.
Interval workouts are supposed to vary, so this is not reported for them.
The force curve shows how hard you were pulling at each point through the drive, averaged over every stroke in the piece. The shape says more than the peak does.
A good drive is a single smooth hump: force comes on quickly after the catch, peaks somewhere around a third of the way through, and stays up until the finish. Two separate humps usually means the legs and the back are taking turns instead of working together. A peak very early with a long fall means the finish is being given away. A late peak often means the legs went down before the handle started moving.
The shaded band around the line is how much your strokes differed from each other. A narrow band means you rowed the same stroke over and over.
How far the handle travelled during the drive. It is shown because it is worth watching over time: length tends to shorten as you get tired, and a piece where it dropped off is a piece where the last part was rowed differently from the first.
No advice is offered on the absolute number. Bodies are different lengths, and what counts as a full stroke for you is not what counts for someone else.
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