The TranyaGO Sports Watch

Ever since moving to California I have been ambivalent about the usefulness of a heart rate monitor. My main use for one back in Texas was for my MAF test rides. Those rides were done on the Rice University Bike Track. I can not do MAF tests here in California because there is nothing near me at all equivalent to that Bike Track. Thus, it would appear that I have no use for a heart rate monitor, so when mine broke, I wasn't very motivated to replace it. Contributing to my reluctance to replace my heart rate monitor is that I don't really like wearing the chest straps that were a feature of all the heart rate monitors I had used up to that point. And yet, I kept finding myself asking questions about my training that could have been answered with heart rate data and and I kept finding that I was relying way too much on the one California ride where I did have heart rate data. I looked longingly at the Apple Watch: heart rate data without a chest strap. However, this solution had two potential problems: 1) Although it would get rid of the chest strap which I dislike, for that very reason I was not convinced that its heart rate measurement would be accurate and reliable. 2) It is crazy expensive. So back and forth, back and forth, month after month, until finally, the other day, I decided to just do something spontaneous, to purchase a cheap ($40) sports watch. Perhaps I would learn how accurate and reliable wrist-based (as opposed to the chest-strap based) heart beat detection is. More generally, it has been my life experience that often the best way to figure something out is to just play with it, there is often no substitute for real world experience. Perhaps by playing with a sports watch I would have a clearer idea of what I wanted. Perhaps it would even be useful in its own right. After browsing the ratings on Amazon, I settled on the TranyaGO.

Given the price, my expectations for this device were low, though I was hoping to be surprised. In particular, I was hoping it would be able to be interfaced with Strava. When my bike computer (and thus my heart rate monitor) stopped working a few months after I arrived in California, I switched to using the Strava app on my cell phone to track my rides. It has very similar functionality to the Garmin, doesn't require any equipment other than my cell phone, and is free. There is a paid version with enhanced functionality, and although I don't object in principle to paying for Strava, I have not felt a need for any of the enhanced functions so continue to use the free version. If the TranyaGo had been able to interface with Strava, the biggest missing piece of functionality, heart rate data, would have been seamlessly added to my current tracking system. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get that to work. Should that change, I will at least add a comment to this post or maybe even write an all new post but for now I am assuming that functionality is not available. What the TranyaGo will interface with is their own cell phone app which they name GloryFit (I kid you not.) So for the remainder of this post I will be reviewing the TranyaGO/GloryFit combo.

The TranyaGO is nice piece of hardware, astonishingly so given the price. When my son first saw me wearing it, he mistook it for an Apple Watch. On the other hand, in terms of functionality, it is closer to what I imagine a FitBit to be. (I have never used a FitBit but I have seen it being used by my son.) The TranyaGO has an odd, hodgepodge of functionality primarily directed towards the folks who are working on their fitness by accumulating "steps" (walking), e.g. the FitBit crowd, but with odd additions presumably designed to attract other users. For example, text messages from my phone appear on this watch, an Apple Watch-like bit of functionality. And, although the TranyaGO seems to be focused on counting steps, it does have the ability to track a large number of different sports, outdoor (normal) bicycling and stationary bicycling being the ones of interest to me. I have tried both and actually don't know what the difference between the two might be, the outputs look the same to my eye.

The critical piece of functionality from a hardware perspective is the ability of the TranyaGO to measure my heart rate. One of my main justifications for purchasing this watch was to compare the ability of a wrist-based sensor to that of the more conventional chest-based sensor. In terms of that, I could not be more delighted. Ideally I would have tested it by wearing both the TranyaGO and a chest sensor and compare the outputs, but I do not currently have a functional chest strap and am not willing to purchase one for such a test, so my evaluation is not very rigorous, I have based it on "plausibility", does the heart rate data I get from the TranyaGO seem reasonable, and a few spot checks where I compare what the TranyaGO reports to what I measure by putting my fingers on an artery (the conventional, old fashioned test.) With the chest straps I have used, reliability has been an issue, some days they would not work and eventually all of them stopped working altogether; the only solution was to replace them. So far, I have not had even one single issue with the TranyaGO. To be fair, I haven't used it that long and with the chest straps problems seemed to have developed over time, so we will see, but so far, so good. And finally, its wrist based heart rate detection is totally comfortable. I now wear the TranyaGO on every ride because it only takes a second to put on and I don't even notice I am wearing it.

So what is the functionality that is available to me? It was more or less what I had realistically expected when I purchased the watch and can be divided into two parts:
1) Real time functionality.
2) Downloadable (after the ride) functionality.

Real Time Functionality: Back when I was using my Garmin heart rate monitor, I purchased a standalone Polar heart rate monitor as a backup. The way I used the Polar was to strap it onto my handlebars where I could see it and keep my eye on my heart rate as I rode. That allowed me to keep my heart rate between 130 and 140 beats per minute (BPM) while riding a MAF test. I hoped to use the TranyaGO in the same way during my Alpine rides to see if I could complete them while keeping my heart rate between 110 and 135 BPM, Coach Hughes' version of Zone 2. It turned out I could do that but just barely, the Real Time functionality of the TranyaGO was less than that of my old Polar. The problems are three-fold: First, unlike the Polar, which used a chest strap, because the TranyaGO contains its detector which measures heartbeat from my wrist, it can never be moved to the handlebars like the Polar. Second, the TranyaGO turns off the screen after 15 seconds (presumably to extend battery life). I can reactivate it by lifting my arm, not impossible but annoying. Third, the visibility of the TranyaGO screen is lower than that of the Polar. This prevented me from wearing my cycling sunglasses, I simply cannot read the screen with them on. Although I can barely read the screen without glasses, I can both provide a little eye protection and improve my ability to read the screen by wearing my normal, prescription glasses. (My sunglasses are not prescription because my distance vision is fine, I wear prescription glasses for reading.) From a riding perspective, this is not as good as wearing the sunglasses but is not unacceptable and in fact I completed a 2 hour ride this way and in the process accumulated some interesting information (which I will describe in a future post.) However, it is sufficiently awkward that I do not expect to do this very often. Rather, I expect to mostly use the downloadable functionality.

Downloadable Functionality: My Polar watch did not have any download capability. At the end of the ride there was some kind of summary on the watch face which I basically ignored. The TranyaGO works with the GloryFit app on my phone to download a summary of the ride. That summary consists of two screens: one displays how long the ride lasted, minimum, average and maximum heart rate, and estimate of calories burned. This can be uploaded to my computer as a screenshot but it is easier to simply transcribe any of those numbers that are of interest from the app. The second output has turned out to be much more useful. It is a graph of heart rate over the course of the ride:

The procedure I have developed, using my favorite image manipulation application, Graphic Converter, is to add guidelines to indicate the boundaries of Zone 2:

All by itself this is useful because I can see at a glance how I effective I have been at maximizing the Zone 2 training that should be the foundation of my training. But for a little extra effort I can use this same software to estimate the percent of my ride spent in, above, or below Zone 2. (Extending this into other Zones is straightforward should I ever want to do so.) This process is a little labor intensive but not so much so that I can't do it as part of my general process of ride logging; I can easily complete it right after finishing a ride.

So is TranyaGO everything I need, am I done with my heart rate monitor quest? Maybe. Arguably, even the TranyaGO is more than I need, that is the debate I had been having with myself before its purchase. However, at the time of this writing, I have used the TranyaGO on 22 rides and already I am addicted; I feel that I have both a better understanding of the intensity of my rides and better control over the amount of time I spend riding in different intensity zones. It would be nice to have more detailed heart rate data and to have the Time In Zone information calculated automatically rather than having to be dragged out of an image, but I see this solution being good enough to keep me from putting in the effort to acquire anything better, so yes, I am done with the heart rate monitor quest, at least for now. I can't wait until I have accumulated enough data to be worth another blog post.