The decision of choosing what wetsuit to use is always a hard one. They all seem similar and everyone seems to have their own favourite. This was no different when chatting to our team to decide what suits we wanted use for the 2019 race season.
To settle this, we tested each of our favourite suits to see if we could be more objective than “this feels the fastest/best” and “my suit is better than yours”. The suits that we had used previously used and liked were the Blue Seventy Helix, 2XU X3, Yonda Ghost, and HUBB Archimedes. There was one other but we couldn’t get hold of the suits in the right size to directly test them against each other so decided to keep things fair and not include the suit in this test.
To ensure it was fair, all testing was done in a pool so that distance and pace could be easily compared. Each suit was also tested twice in a “mirror” fashion to offset for fatigue through the session by each athlete and at two different paces,(Olympic and Ironman) over two sessions.
During the first session all suits were tested for 2 x 300m efforts @ 1:24 pace with HR (Heart Rate) and RPE (Ratings of Perceived Execution / How hard it felt) taken at the end of each effort. The results below show the average HR and RPE for each suit over the athletes.
The results of the test were quite surprising with the YONDA Ghost having the lowest HR and RPE values for all of the athletes making our decision quite an easy one, The YONDA.
Kind Regards
Craig Stevenson, BSc (Hons), MSc
CSO, Performance Director and Sports Physiologist
