Controlling your treadmill, bike, or rowing machine from Parameter

Pair the machine

1. Open Settings, Machine control, Add machine.

2. 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.

3. 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. The four appear under Functions once the master toggle is on.

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 retries once. If that fails too it drops to monitoring only and tells you on screen, rather than assuming it worked silently.

Stay-in-zone

Parameter can ease the machine up and down to hold you in a heart-rate zone. It takes two things, and the first one is not on this screen:

1. The segment needs a heart-rate zone target. In the interval builder, open the segment, tap Add target, set the metric to HR zone, and pick a zone chip from Z1 to Z5. The building workouts guide walks through the whole segment editor.
2. Turn on Adjust for heart rate, in Settings, Machine control. It sits below the four function toggles, it is separate from them, and it is off until you turn it on.

Without a zone target on the segment, the toggle does nothing, because there is no zone to hold you in.

Your heart rate is read every few seconds, and the setpoint is nudged at most once every 30 seconds, or every 60 for a treadmill speeding up, so it never overcorrects. 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 adjust a requested value to match 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 is a separate toggle from machine control, because most consoles that pair a chest strap have no FTMS.

1. Open Settings, Machine control and turn on Broadcast heart rate. It is the second toggle, above Your machines.
2. On the machine’s console, open its own heart-rate or chest-strap pairing menu and look for Parameter there.
3. Keep the phone nearby with its screen on. Broadcasting runs during your workouts, and you can also pair from this settings screen at any time without starting one.

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 mechanism

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.