Experiment.

Okay back again. I would like to say that that should be the last trip away for a while, but I am a bit wary of making that sort of declaration as last time I did it I was told I was going away again almost straight away. Let's just say that I don't think I have any trips coming up in the immediate future. Fingers crossed as it is nice to be home.

Being back I thought I would try something new last night. Before I went away I was talking a bit about anaerobic thresholds, I even did a blog about some methods of measure it. In that blog I mentioned that some Garmin's have a built in threshold test. I have seen the test, but I have never actually done it, so on Thursday night I thought I would give it a go.

In short, it is a guided step test. For me the test took 11 minutes, so from that perspective it is a lot like a Coopers test. So from a basic fundamentals point of view, the test makes seems to make sense.

The actual process behind the test is pretty straight forward and my Garmin (a 935) did a simple job of walking me through it. Basically it has four or five parts.

Part 1 is the warm up, which my watch suggested should be 10 to 15 minutes of easy running.

Part 2 was the first step. For me it was 4 minutes holding a heart rate between the high 140s and the low 150s.

For Part 3 my watch instructed me to do another four minutes with a HR between the high 150s and the mid 160s. For me this is where it started to get a bit tough.

Part 4 was the final step, 3 minutes with a HR between the mid 160s and the mid 170s. For me this was close to flat out and it sure felt it. After two minutes of this I was really hoping there wasn't a 4th step because I don't think I would have had it in me.

Thankfully 3 steps was all there was and based on that Garmin estimated my anaerobic threshold HR to be 164bpm, which I suspect is pretty accurate. I am not sure if the test would ever have 4 steps, I guess if you had quite a high aerobic threshold then it credibly could. That would require a bit more testing from me, not to mention a higher anaerobic threshold.

The final part of the test was a suggested warm down, which I did because while the test is short, it is pretty sharp.

All up I was pretty impressed with the process. It was simple, user friendly and I think it has produced some reasonable results. The critical velocity test and Coopers tests that I discussed a week or so ago are tests that I certainly trust, but based on what I saw I would be tempted to add this Garmin test to that list too. I think I would like to test it some more before I really recommended it to my athletes, but so far so good.