I just purchased a Stryd foot pod last week and received it two days ago. I've read nothing but raves on how good the support is for Stryd, but I've had the opposite experience. I emailed them a question about duplicate data from their foot pod and the Garmin HRM-Tri and the reply I received was how to properly attach and remove the pod from my shoe. Yeah, you read that right! Anyway, tomorrow I want to do the 3/9 critical power test to set up my power zones. The test consist of a warm up, 3 min run, 30 min walk and finally a 9 min run. My question is, do I use the Stryd Power data field with the run app and record the entire test, or just the 3 and 9 min portion of the test. Stryd's Q & A website isn't clear, emailing or texting my question only results in answers that have nothing to do with my question and I even tried joining the Stryd Community on Facebook only to have my post "pending approval" for the last 3 hours. My question may seem stupid or obvious, but any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
The CP tests are quite poorly and ambiguously documented. On top of that, it sounds like you have read an old description.
As I recall, their new recommendation for both the 3/9 minutes test and the 1200/2400 meter test is to do the long test first (9 minutes or 2400 meter), and then the short test (3 minutes or 1200 meter).
There is no requirement for how you record the test, as long as you are able to view the average power and pace for each of the two parts of the test. When you have done the test, you have to input the numbers yourself on this page: https://www.stryd.com/powercenter/settings .
Be careful to exert yourself equally in both tests. They use the two results for an extrapolation to find your expected power and pace for a longer session. So the slower you run the 3 minutes test, the higher your calculated critical power will be.
Don't worry if you don't get a reliable result the first time. If you do a new test later, and you trust that test to better reflect your actual critical power of today, you can recalculate your old sessions with the new critical power. In the calendar in Powercenter, you hover the mouse over the session, and you will see a recalculation icon appear.
AllanOlesen67 Thanks Allan. My question was finally posted on the Facebook site and others also stated the only data I need to be concerned with is the 3 and 9 min runs regardless of how I record the test. I got the order of the test from Stryd's website and none of the 5 posters on Facebook mentioned anything about running it 9/3. I'm also interested were you found the change.
No. Do 3 minutes first. For sure. Also turn off auto lap and press the lap button manually at start and end of sections. Begin the sections on a running start. Try to keep even but maximal pacing over the duration.
There is a newer 2400 meter / 1200 meter test which is the one recommended by Stryd today. In this test, the order was reversed. The original order was "first 1200, then 2400", but after a few months they changed their recommendation to "first 2400, then 1200".
I thought I had seen the same switch in recommendations for the 3/9 minutes test, but I have not been able to find it again. So I may be wrong here.
AllanOlesen67 You are correct. I just looked at Stryd's site and it's 2400 first and 1200 second. The 3/9 test still shows 3 first and then 9. I appreciate all the help everyone posted. As Steve and another on Facebook suggested, I'm going to run the test as a whole and use the lap button for each section.
If it’s your first time doing CP test we recommend 6 laps first, 3 laps second. [...] Most people don’t know how to pace themselves in the 3 laps run because it’s really fast. (Faster than your mile pace!). Lots of them end up doing mile or 3k pace in the 3 laps test, then doing 3k pace in the 6 laps test, which makes the CP result inaccurate.
What we found out is that if we ask people to run 6 laps first, they understand the intensity of 6 laps, then they naturally pick the higher intensity for 3 laps. It produces more accurate result.
If you are experienced and know what you are doing, then the order doesn’t matter much.
th3oretiker_ There's a lot to be said about that post by kun. I decided to do the 3mins, then 9. I started out very quickly and then lost my mind and pressed the stop button without realizing it about 90 secs in. Waited about 20 mins before I started the test again. After all was said and done, my 3 min portion was terrible. I started off way to fast and fell quickly. There was no steady pace. The 9 min portion went quite well. Now knowing what I did wrong, I'm going to wait a day or two and do the test over.
Set it up as a workout on the watch with auto lap switched off so there is no need for pressing buttons. In the Stryd Powercenter you can then select to view data by splits and all the information you need is right there.
This was a 3/9 minute test I did on the road some time ago. If I did it again I would reverse the order or do the 3 and 9 minute bits on different days. I was using a home-made ConnectIQ datafield which works with beeps and vibration to pace myself so during the whole test there was never a need to look at the watch. This is why I ended up with the exact paces of 3:30 and 4:00 min/km but it also meant I didn't quite push myself to exhaustion. I got injured before I had time to repeat the tests with faster paces and get my definitive CP numbers.
