Kurt Jensen’s power profile
World-class rowers turn out to hold almost the same ratios between distances, whatever their size or sex. Enter the pieces you have and each one reports the 2K it belongs beside — where they disagree is where your profile is out of balance.
Enter any one piece and it predicts a 2K on its own. A second one lets them be compared, and five say the most.
VO₂max from the 7×2 minute step test
The same lab published a second protocol. Start at 40% of your 2K power and add another 10% of it every two minutes until you cannot hold the next step. How long you last gives a maximal power output, and that predicts VO₂max to within a few percent — no gas analyser, and far less damage than an all-out 2K.
The 2K figure below is only the estimate the steps were built from, and it does not have to be right. Step 7 is set at 100% of it, so lasting exactly fourteen minutes means your maximal power lands on that same number — that is the protocol agreeing with your estimate, not a calculation failing. Lasting longer says the estimate was low; stopping earlier says it was high. Either way the duration corrects it, which is why the paper says to give a best guess and just row.
The figure the steps were built from
Around 14 minutes if the estimate was right
Optional — for mL/kg/min
Not interchangeable. The 2023 paper put the male equation through its female group and the result was significantly wrong.
- Maximal power
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- VO₂max
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- Range
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- Relative
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Range is one standard error either side: ±136 mL/min, or 3.1%. Validated between 12 and 16 minutes. Jensen et al. 2021, 34 male club rowers.
The ratiosWhat each distance measures, and what a gap means
Jensen picked these five because they were already the common tests in elite programmes, then expressed every one as a percentage of 2000m power. He found the ratios held “almost identical for the top Danish men and women, heavyweights and lightweights”.
Read that claim with some caution. Jensen’s athletes were world-class, and his own lab later found that predicting VO₂max needed separate equations for men and women. Coaches working with masters rowers tend to give the aerobic figures as a range rather than a single percentage, with women sitting higher. Treat the targets as a centre line, not a pass mark.
- 10 seconds — 173%
- Raw power, before any of it has to be paid for. High here relative to the rest means a strong start and a strong sprint; low here caps everything downstream.
- 60 seconds — 153%
- Anaerobic capacity — how long near-maximal output survives. This is the first 250m of a race and the last.
- 2000m — 100%
- The reference every other figure is measured against. On its own it says nothing about balance — it is the yardstick, not a finding.
- 6000m — 85%
- Aerobic power at race-adjacent intensity. Sitting below the ratio here usually means the aerobic side has been under-trained relative to the sprint.
- 60 minutes — 76%
- Aerobic base, and the one Jensen treated as the foundation. Low here limits how much training you can absorb and recover from, not just how fast you finish.
MethodThe equations behind every number on this page
The ratios are Jensen’s published figures; the two regressions are the ones printed in the papers. Nothing here was fitted or solved — every constant below is quoted.
pace(P) = (2.8 / P) ^ (1/3) seconds per metre at P watts
P2K = W(piece) / ratio 10s 1.73 60s 1.53 2K 1.00
6K 0.85 60min 0.76
2K = 2000 * pace(P2K) e.g. 470 / 1.53 = 307 W -> 6:57.8
step test
step n = W2K * (0.30 + 0.10n) 2 min per step, n = 1..7
MPO = W2K * (0.30 + 0.05t) t = minutes to exhaustion
e.g. 300 W, 13 min -> 285 W
VO2max = 11.49 * MPO + 810 male (+/- 136 mL/min)
VO2max = 9.58 * MPO + 958 female (+/- 162 mL/min)Where this comes from
Kurt Jensen is an exercise scientist at the University of Southern Denmark and the physiologist behind the Danish lightweight squad. The ratios are from his World Rowing article Using the indoor rower for testing: why do we test different distances? (2019). The step test and its two regressions are from Jensen et al. 2021 for male rowers and Mazza et al. 2023 for female rowers, both in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.
Thanks to u/ScaryBee on Reddit, whose power profile widget is where the idea of putting every piece on one 2K-equivalent scale came from. Theirs does more than this tab does: it covers twelve durations rather than five, and it will read your results straight out of a CSV or a Concept2 logbook instead of making you type them in. Worth using — it is at sport-widgets.vercel.app.
Neither Jensen, his co-authors, nor u/ScaryBee are affiliated with this page, and none of them has reviewed it. This page only does the arithmetic; any error in it is mine.
Worth flagging, since both tabs are on the same site: Jensen’s 60-second figure of 153% is the same number as the 1.53 divisor on the forecast tab, and the other two divisors there look like this profile with the pieces swapped — a 7-stroke start in place of the 10-second piece, a rate-capped 30′ in place of the hour. So the forecast model may perhaps derive from Jensen’s work. That is a guess, not a finding: nothing in the source material says so, and the same ratio could have been arrived at independently. What can be checked is that the two agree, which is a reason to have more confidence in either.