Rowing VO2 max and Training Status?

Just did that, thank you. I was actually considering to purchase the BikeErg, so this makes the decision much easier! Have you tried the rowing a boat? It is so much more fun.

I never understood why people even care about Garmin VO2max estimates. It's basically a vanity metric and only weakly correlates with athletic performance. Objective measures are more useful, like the time to complete a max effort time trial over a set distance. 

Philosophically speaking, competition is vanity too. However compared to that, having a metric calculated on your device requires less logistics.

Because the VO2max is the way Garmin determines a bunch of health and recovery metrics. The only way Garmin gets a VO2max estimate is if you run (which, there is not any running for me - none) or if you cycle outdoors with a power meter. And if you don't do that twice a week you're out of luck. I love cycling, but for reasons of weather and road condition, I don't always want to ride outside and erging is almost always convenient. And there are weeks where I would like to train exclusively on the erg because getting the right intensities and durations of workouts is MUCH easier on the erg than on the bike (I live in essentially an alpine area where there are NO low intensity bike rides possible).

It's just silly for Garmin not to use the erg data. And if you understand it now, great. And if you don't understand it still, no problem. I understand why I care about it.

In fact both my Garmin watches are having hardware issues and I am searching the web today to find a fitness tracker that will do the whole thing - sleep, stress, etc. - and ALSO allow the use of a Concept 2 erg for data. Extra points for also allowing an armband. I'm sick of the watchbands messing with my skin overnight. At least with an armband I can move it around from night to night.

So today I am searching the web for a Garmin alternative - mainly because of lack of Concept 2 integration and armband option.

Rowing a boat might be more fun but about 900 times less convenient than the erg.

The Whoop arm band has sleep tracking and will use data from rowing and every other type of activity to calculate a recovery score. But I don't think it can estimate VO2 Max. Concept2 has their own VO2 Max calculator but I have no idea how accurate it is.

www.concept2.com/.../vo2max-calculator

The Concept 2 VO2max is not so bad. The real problem is that VO2max is activity dependent, so for example my cycling VO2max is usually 20% higher than my rowing VO2max. However that is not really my problem. The real problem is that erging generates the same heart rate/wattage data (which is accurate) as cycling with a power meter. So why can't that be incorporated in Garmin's other health/stress/fitness/recovery calculations, where it can use the cycling HR and wattage data?

I don't really care so much about my VO2max as it is a required input twice a week for most of Garmin's other calcuations, otherwise training load, effect, recovery, etc. all just stop working.

Exactly. The accurate data is there, so why not to incorporate it. It they do incorporate the data from BikeErg, what is the difference? Same interface.

Training load and effect still work fine, but the Training Status stops. 

Agree. Why not just pretend it's BikeErg power data?