VST protocol · instrumented field monitoring and integrated physiology — measurement, validity, interpretation
- cyrilricci
- Aug 22
- 2 min read
VST protocol · instrumented field monitoring and integrated physiology — measurement, validity, interpretation
This is a real monitoring report, delivered to a professional rider and his staff. I have removed the name, the dates and the locations; everything else is untouched — every value, every table, every caveat.
One training session, six measurement streams running in parallel: expired gas analysis, breath-by-breath ventilation, NIRS on three compartments including one non-locomotor site, spirometry repeated three times across the day, blood lactate, core temperature. Three exercises, each built to measure something different.
That day, the rider produced the same effort three times over: five minutes at 381 watts, opening each of the three exercises, spread across nearly three hours.
Same power to the watt. Heart rate identical to within one and a half beats.
Mechanical efficiency stable from the first block to the last.
By the third block, he moves 8 % more air to extract 9 % less oxygen from each litre.
Nothing gave way: not the heart, not muscle extraction, not tidal volume. What degraded was the relationship between ventilation and everything else — and it degraded between the blocks, never within one.
That distinction changes what can be done in a race: the lever sits ahead of the climb, not inside it.
The report covers the calibration ramp and how both thresholds were arbitrated, the iso-power comparison of the three blocks, second-by-second documentation of a ventilatory manoeuvre across ten twenty-second windows, a physiological hypothesis tested against seven markers and set aside on four of them, an index cockpit with its reference grids, and the calibration of a field sensor against the reference device.
Above all, it states at every section what the data does not allow you to conclude. Expired CO₂ and SpO₂ were not measured: two missing discriminants, flagged wherever they bear on a conclusion. One attribution is graded WEAK because five factors vary together and none can be isolated within a single day.
Every claim carries its evidence level — STRONG, INTERMEDIATE, WEAK — and every mechanistic reading is labelled as such.
That is deliberate. A report that concludes everywhere is a report you cannot rely on.
This is neither a controlled study nor a causal demonstration: it is a record of how several instrumented signals are integrated, qualified, and then converted into individualised field decisions.
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