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 / … )
Just been reading about this new chest strap. Interested to see how users get on with it. I tend to use breathing / RPE to limit the top intensity of my aerobic development rides ,and the fish breathing out of water breathing for VO2 sessions. But the more nuanced objective numbers from this sounds an interesting way to go.
Personally Im wait and see at the moment. Maybe a cheaper breathing sensor to mount on an existing HR strap will come about, like the custom one Visma use?
Just got my VitalPro earlier this week. Did their ramp test on Thursday (somewhat fatigued) and some back and forth with support got decent values for VT1, BP, VT2, and also the Vo2max estimate out, even if the test VT1 and VT2 are both higher than what I believe to be true – if I consider them to be the same as the upper end of Z2 and FTP… I had also slightly changed the protocol to be comparable to earlier ramp tests I did, which might be behind (some of) the inflation of values. More testing to be done.
However, yesterday I then did an athletica.ai prescribed workout (12 x 4 min threshold"), but I knew before that I would not manage this in my current state, incl. fatigue from the last 8 days…
After 2 intervals I slightly lowered the power output with the goal to make this a 6 x 4 min only-just-theshold workout. Which I did, I could probably also have done 7 or 8… But I want to be ready for my regular Saturday resistance-strength training today.
Now, what’s cool about the breathing data: VE recorded with the tymewear strap in parallel to the workout clearly showed that I was in the VO2max VE range for all these intervals, really fitting my feeling… Gives some confidence to the approach.
Now, how and when will AAI utilize the breathing data for workout analysis and thresholds?
How could one, for a start, manually update VT1 and BP and possibly VT2? Should we consider VT2 to be identical to CP (which it is not, strictly) and set it that way? Or how could one fully define our zone limits in AAI based on the breathing data?
And I would really be looking forward to utilization of breathing info for workout prescriptions, for instance, Z2 rides. But, obviously, I can also do that myself (make sure I stay in VE-Z2 for prescribed Z2 rides;-)
Following up – I did a ramp test strictly following the tymewear (calibrated) protocol and the VT1, VT2 and VO2max values come out at very expected values;-)