Heart rate tells you how hard your heart is working. Train.Red tells you what's actually happening inside the muscle doing the work.
Train.Red is a small wearable sensor that sits directly on a working muscle — your quads, calves, or wherever the effort is concentrated. Using near-infrared light, it measures muscle oxygen saturation (SmO2%): the balance between how much oxygen is being delivered to that muscle and how much it's using, updated in real time as you train.
Most training data — heart rate, pace, power — is a whole-body number. It's useful, but it doesn't tell you which muscle is actually struggling, or how close it is to its limit. SmO2 does: it shows local fatigue building before it shows up in your pace or your form, and it shows exactly how quickly a muscle recovers once you back off.
Where INSCYD builds your whole-body metabolic profile and the ramp test benchmarks your functional engine, Train.Red zooms in on the muscle itself — live, during the sets and intervals you're actually training. Together, the three give a complete picture: what your body can do, how it holds up under sport-specific demand, and what's happening inside the muscle while it's happening.
Get in touch to ask about adding Train.Red monitoring to your sessions, or head back to the testing overview to compare it with the other options.