Garmin ANT+ Profile Changes now in beta

There are now changes to the ANT+ profile that have been defined and accepted and which are now in a beta state.

This does NOT mean that you or I will be able to use these features yet, rather that companies like Garmin and Wahoo can start to implement them in their own development environments.

Specifically, I know that the Core Temperature profile is now at this stage and there may be other changes too that I don’t know about. The fabled, lesser-spotted running power would be one that I am more interested in.

What This Means

The Core Temperature profile is a niche standard and will initially only be used by the CORE Sensor that I reviewed a while back. It seems a foregone conclusion that Garmin will implement the standard and I also understand that at least one other company, Wahoo Fitness, is also planning to natively support the standard.

Core Temperature monitoring is perhaps only ever going to be taken up by more committed athletes who are concerned about performance in more extreme temperature conditions.

By coincidence, I had a prolonged and very gruelling time in the heat yesterday for a very hard effort and I had my CORE sensor strapped onto my Garmin HRM-PRO alongside a CIQ Data Field on my watch. I felt good almost all the time despite feeling ‘hot’, yet the data from the CORE sensor in Garmin Connect told me that I regulated my temperature within a range of 38.05 to 38.51 Celcius. That is quite an interesting discovery for me as CORE generally recommends that trained athletes use 38.5 Celcius as a threshold to stay below. I actually forgot to look at the Core during the workout (whoops!) but my data tentatively suggests that 38.5 would have been a good threshold limit for me….in hindsight I was probably at something like a 97% effort, so 100% would probably have taken me up to and over 38.5 Celcius.