He hasn’t been on that many podcasts and the Tymewear ideas were relatively new. He is talking about respiratory muscle training and breath rate during efforts. He used to have his athletes use an expensive Swiss medical device called a Spirotiger which has been discontinued. He’s found now that with the Tyme vest (I guess they don’t sell the vest anymore) and cheaper breathing devices he could produce similar results.
I know some may think this sounds like BS. I think there is something to it. It’s basically endurance training the diaphragm and intercostals and any other involved muscles. I know the Swiss mountain bikers (Shurter and co) used the Spirotiger. I’ve read about XC skiers also using it. Ancillary muscles fatiguing has been showing in studies using NIRS. But like I said, it’s probably the last 2% of performance.
I have no reason to doubt that there’s some possible gains there. I just don’t think it matters for most people. The more I wrap my head around this, I think, the value is giving you a more complete picture of where you are strong vs not. FTP says here’s your number and leaves it up to you to guess at what that means for your training. It works but Tyme lets you see that you can use some work in these specific zones and are already strong here. I see some value there although I wonder how it compares to the Wahoo 4D thing.
I think it’s just a different tool. People love to be able to spout an FTP number but it’s often not really representative of the power numbers/durations around that. And even, say, a 4DP test provides numbers depending on how fresh you are that day.
I think the power numbers you can hit in training are affected by how tired you are. Train to a particular VE number and it will have the same effect each day regardless of how tired you are. The power numbers will change (could be more or less) but hit the right VE number and you will be training the right physiological effect rather than blindly trying to hit power numbers.
Completely agree although that did send me a down path of do you even need to rest based on that philosphy? Obviously you do but if it basically just auto adjusts, why?
Good point I think you would still get to a point where the legs will just hurt too much to even turn pedals at a sufficient rate. And all the other bodily systems and parts that need to recover.
I ended up getting a bit of a lesson in this but slightly unintentionally. What happened is that I wanted to target my mid-week rides to endurance zone which for me was 43-50ve. Because it’s cold and rainy I did a 100km Zwift ride on Sunday that was upper tempo to Vo2 max. Garmin said 96 hour recovery. Monday I rested then Tuesday I did endurance range VE which translated to 110 watts. Wednesday the same workout was 118 watts. Thursday I did Vo2 max. Friday I did another endurance zone and it was 155 watts. Each of those three had an avg 47ve but the power jumped dramatically.
I think you would still get to a point where the legs will just hurt too much to even turn pedals at a sufficient rate. And all the other bodily systems and parts that need to recover.