I have been using Tymewear for the last month. Hard to draw any hard conclusions yet as I did my first test straight after a 4 week off post race season.
I’ll get some updates in here when I get some new testing in.
Side note: I always notice that I’m sensitive to respiratory diseases after doing some high intensity sessions.
My first thoughts:
- I’ve noticed my BR (breathing rate ) can be quite hard from the start, even on recovery rides, so it’s hard for me to stay below VT1 without lowering the power too much (what I supposed to be Z2 RPE)
- My VE numbers (minute ventilation) seem to be very dependent on bike position for the same power output (TT bike aerobars, TT bike basebar, road bike)
- Running VE is much higher than Cycling VE
- There seems to be no correction / suggestion yet about retesting. If Tymewear says you are over an hour of VO2 respiratory intensity, there are no alarm bells going off (faulty data? please retest?)
It’s hard on what I have to base my training on: The test gives you a power output, a heart rate and a VE but sometimes they are not well aligned. I try to lower the power output if my VE is on the higher side, but sometimes it just feels like I’m freewheeling just to get below their suggested ventilatory targets.
The charts provided by tymewear show that I’m sometimes over half of my weekly training time above ‘TEMPO’ effort, while my power and heart rate profiles show a completely different distribution.
Final thought: Maybe my RPE has always been a bit off and I should actually be training with a lot less intensity for most of my rides. Maybe I should embrace the ‘go slow to ride hard’ philosophy even more…
Final thought #2 : How does one compare all of those value-spitting ‘performance prediction | zone setting’ platforms ? I stopped to care about FTP tests too much and look at the whole PD curve to see improvements, but there are just so much cherries to pick from:
- Athletica PDC curve
- WKO 5 outlier testing
- FTP test (ramp / 20 min protocol / Kolie Moore protocol / … )
- Zwift baseline test
- Tymewear ramp test
- Lactate ramp test
- …