There is a number on your SkiErg that changes what your training data means, and most people training on one have never looked at it.
The damper lever on the side of the flywheel cage is not it. The lever is an input. Drag factor is the measurement — and it is the thing that has to be written down if you want this year’s test to mean anything against last year’s.
What drag factor actually measures
Between strokes, nothing is driving the flywheel. It spins down on its own, slowed by the air it is moving. Drag factor is the rate of that deceleration. The monitor watches how fast the flywheel loses speed while you are recovering, and from that it knows how much air the fan is having to shift.
That is why the number is useful: it is a direct measurement of the machine’s resistance, taken on your machine, in your room, right now. The damper lever only controls how much air gets into the cage. How much drag that produces depends on the lever and on air density, altitude, temperature, and how much dust and lint has collected in the flywheel housing.
Which leads to the sentence worth remembering:
A damper setting of 6 on one erg may be a 4 on another.
Two SkiErgs in the same gym, levers set identically, can be measurably different machines. The lever position is not a shared unit. The drag factor is.
The PM5 already corrects for it — and that is the confusing part
Here is where people go wrong. The Performance Monitor recalculates drag factor continuously and uses it to work out how much work you are doing. So your watts and your pace are accurate at any damper setting. A 1:45 split is a genuine 1:45 whether the lever is at 3 or at 8. Nobody is cheating by cranking the damper.
So if the measurement self-corrects, why does drag factor matter at all?
Because it does not change whether the number is accurate. It changes what test you just took.
At a low drag factor the flywheel is light. It comes up to speed easily and loses it fast, so holding a pace means a high stroke rate and a fast, snappy pull. At a high drag factor the flywheel is heavy. Each stroke moves more air, the wheel carries speed between strokes, and holding the same pace means fewer, harder, longer pulls.
Same displayed watts. Completely different physiological demand — one biased toward rate and elasticity, the other toward raw force. Ask a skier to do a 2000m test at drag 5 in October and at drag 9 in March, and the difference between those results contains at least as much drag factor as it does fitness.
How to see it on your PM5
Take twenty seconds and find out what your machine actually reads:
- From the Main Menu, select More Options.
- Select Display Drag Factor.
- Start skiing. The monitor shows the drag factor after a few strokes.
Do this on the machine you normally use, at the damper setting you normally use. Write the number down. That is the number that belongs in your training log — not the lever position.
What should you set it to?
Concept2’s own guidance for the SkiErg is, in effect, to experiment and find what suits you. That is not a dodge; there genuinely is no single correct answer, because the right resistance depends on your body mass, your upper-body strength, and what the session is for.
What is worth being deliberate about:
- Pick one and stay there for a training block. The specific value matters far less than holding it constant across the sessions you intend to compare.
- Use the same drag factor for every repeat of a test. A 2000m test at a different drag factor is a different test. If you cannot reproduce the exact number on a different machine, get as close as you can and record what you actually got.
- Check it again in a different season. Cold, dry air and warm, humid air produce different drag factors at the same lever position. If your December numbers look flattering compared to August, check the drag before you credit the training.
- Clean the flywheel housing. Accumulated dust changes drag over months, slowly enough that nobody notices it happening. It is the most common reason a machine “feels different” than it used to.
- Do not chase a high drag factor because it feels harder. Heavier is not more productive; it is a different stimulus, and one that loads the shoulders and lower back more. If you are training double-poling for skiing, rate matters.
Why any of this matters for reading your data
Everything downstream of the erg inherits this problem. Personal bests, test-over-test comparisons, squad rankings, any chart with a trend line on it — all of them silently assume the tests are comparable. If the drag factor moved, they are not, and nothing on the screen will tell you.
That is why drag factor is captured with every session in skiergonomy, not left to memory. A 500m best set at drag 5 and one set at drag 9 sit in the same list and mean different things, and the only way to keep them honest is for the number to travel with the result.
Related
- SkiErg pace calculator — split, watts and finishing times
- SkiErg pace chart — the full conversion table
- The 2000m test protocol — how to run a test that stays comparable
Sources: Viewing drag factor on the PM5 · Damper setting and drag factor