Controlling your treadmill, bike, or rowing machine from Parameter
On FTMS-compatible Bluetooth treadmills, bikes, and rowers, Parameter drives the machine. Here is the whole setup, including the honest caveats.
About 15 minutes
Pair the machine
- Open Settings, Machine control, Add machine.
- Parameter scans for FTMS-compatible Bluetooth machines nearby. Wake your treadmill, bike, or rower’s console so it’s advertising, and it should appear within a few seconds.
- Select it from the list and confirm the pairing.
Once paired, it’s saved under Your machines for every workout after. You won’t repeat this step unless you swap equipment or reset your phone’s Bluetooth settings.
Choose what it may control
A master toggle arms machine control, then per-function toggles for speed, incline, resistance, and power. Turn on only what you want handed over: incline but not speed, say, if you’d rather set your own pace.
Nothing is ever controlled without its toggle switched on, and every setpoint is verified after it’s sent. If the machine doesn’t confirm a change, Parameter tries again rather than assuming it worked silently.
Stay-in-zone
Give a segment a heart-rate zone target and Parameter eases the machine up and down to hold you there. It’s a closed loop: read your heart rate, nudge the setpoint, verify it landed, repeat, several times a minute. You can watch it work on the execution screen as the target shifts while you drift toward either edge of the zone.
Overrides and clamps
Touch the console yourself at any point and Parameter follows your override. It never fights you for control of the machine. The change is recorded as a deviation on the workout log, not silently absorbed into the plan, so your history still shows what you actually did.
Some machines clamp a requested value to their own supported range. When that happens, the machine reports what it actually accepted, and the log keeps that real number rather than the one Parameter originally asked for.
Heart rate on the console
Parameter can broadcast your wrist heart rate to the console’s chest-strap pairing menu, even on machines with no FTMS support at all. This works with many consoles, not every one: some consoles that happily accept a real chest strap still won’t take the broadcast. If yours doesn’t show up in the console’s heart-rate pairing menu, that’s a console limitation, not something to keep retrying.
The safety posture
Parameter never starts the machine and never stops it. You start your own workout and you stop your own workout. The one Stop button in the app sits behind an explicit confirmation, so a stray tap can’t end your session mid-set. The belt moves when you say so, not before.