Triathlon wetsuits in the test
Test results and background information
For over 25 years, Roy Hinnen ran a trading company for triathlon equipment and even then one thing bothered him a lot: How wetsuits were marketed. He began to question the manufacturers’ advertising slogans and the basis on which such claims were made. As a coach, he wants to be able to provide facts. When athletes asked him: “Roy, which wetsuit should I buy?”, he never had a good answer.
So Roy decided to carry out the world’s largest neoprene test in a swimming channel together with Sebastian Weber from INSCYD and Markus Nussbaum from BESTZEIT in September 2019. 38 suits from 13 different manufacturers were tested.
“You can’t win the race in swimming – but you can lose it!”
In the first step, six swimmers (three male and three female) were diagnostically recorded. In order to be able to calculate potentially occurring fatigue over the course of the test, they had the swimmers swim a so-called “baseline” or reference before the start of each test day without neoprene, i.e. only in swimming trunks/swimsuit. Each swimmer swam in each of the 38 suits for a defined time during the test. The raw data obtained, the respiratory gas analysis and the lactate values were then used to calculate the energy expenditure of each swimmer and each suit.
The neoprene test was not primarily about finding an “over the top” suit, but rather about finding the best suit for each individual swimmer with their individual swimming style in terms of energy.
The following document is intended to give a rough overview of how a wetsuit affects swimming performance and how you can make a data-based decision in the process of buying your next wetsuit.
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