Breathe, Measure: Tymewear, Part I

I’ve been wanting a real time breath-rate sensing for a long time, probably over a decade ago when I read Body, Mind & Sport and started actively working on nose breathing in my training and racing. So I was excited when Tymewear came along. There have been several articles about Tymewear and use by elites, including here (Outside magazine, Jumbo-Visma focus), and here (youtube, UTMB focused).

Before the device arrived I downloaded the app, set up my profile, and also added the data field to my Garmin units. It’s accessed via the ConnectIQ app, which is Garmin’s ecosystem for third party developers. It has a lot of minimally useful things like different watch faces but it’s also how you incorporate really novel devices like Tymewear and Stryd to your Garmin devices.

The out of the box experience with Tymewear was quite good, definitely felt more polished than I expected. The strap itself is essentially a normal HR strap with an additional strain sensing piece on the back, giving rise to the distinctive “puck” you see under the jerseys of riders with the Tymewear. I worry about the durability of this part, I replace my HR straps at least yearly, and the Tymewear strap is not cheap. Time will tell.

The app guides you to get the proper tightness so you get enough strain to measure correctly.

The strap has a unique clasp which I find a bit harder to use than it should be, I don’t know why they couldn’t make it like a normal HR strap but it’s comfortable enough once you get the right notch selected.

Here’s the data on my Garmin Edge 530. One major gripe before I even started the test - this UI is horrible. I’ve never been a fan of greyscale graphs on a tiny head unit screen, and it makes the actual numbers small for my aging eyes…yes I’m at the point where I need the numbers big. Getting old sucks. This is an easy fix, I hope they just make the breath rate another metric that I can embed in other screens.

Running the Tyme threshold test off my iPhone was easy enough, I just paired to my Wahoo Kickr and the phone ran the test in ERG mode. You can configure the starting power and increments. You spend 3 min at each power level and keep going until you can’t go anymore.

The data appear in Garmin Connect after you sync the workout:

If you’re wondering what Respiration Rate is…that’s the breathing rate derived from heart rate variability. It’s been there all along, but its accuracy is dubious especially as the intensity goes up, because HRV goes down (a lot) at high intensity, for example this slice in time where respiration rate was off by >50% (43 brpm vs. 68). So that measure has never gotten much love from performance minded athletes and coaches.

In TrainingPeaks you go to Beta Charts to get the data, and it indeed does look Beta…no summary level data are available (yet) on the Dashboard.

OK that’s the basics on the setup and execution, in Part II I will cover my actual thresholds, some of the measures like minute volume and how they compare to other testing methods. In the meantime, AMA and subscribe if you want to get content like this in your Inbox.