Garmins Fitness And Healthtracking Metrics Explained Understand What Your Smartwatch Is Telling You

There are all kinds of wearable devices that provide information about our heart rate, breathing, recovery, exercise, and health. Of the competing brands in this space, Garmin is one of the biggest and most popular, but what metrics do Garmin smartwatches actually track? And what do these measurements really tell you?

I trained with the Garmin Fenix ​​7, one of the best smartwatches we've tested and one of Garmin's best models. Here, I'll walk you through Garmin's monitor biomarkers and help you better understand what all these numbers mean for your training and recovery.

resting heart rate

Your resting heart rate (RHR) is the number of beats per minute (BPM) your heart beats while at rest. A high level may indicate a loss of fitness or that you are sick, tired, or sleep deprived. The normal RHR for a healthy adult is 60 to 100 beats per minute. However, some of the best endurance athletes have RHRs below 30!

A lower RHR may indicate that your heart is stronger and/or that you are better at absorbing oxygen from the air through your lungs, blood, and tissues. With a high stroke volume, fewer strokes are required to deliver the same amount of oxygen. With better oxygen utilization, less blood needs to be pumped, so it can be a useful indicator of aerobic fitness.

The Garmin Fenix​​measures this with a row of green LED lights at the bottom of the watch. It appears on red blood cells and can tell you when your heart is beating. Some studies have questioned the accuracy of wrist heart rate monitors, but Garmin's line has been shown to be over 95% accurate when measuring heart rate at lower intensities (with some variation at lower intensities).

heart rate variability

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a sign that your body's sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are working well. Simply put, "parasympathetic" refers to the system that lowers the heart rate, while "sympathetic" refers to the system that increases the heart rate as part of the fight or flight response.

Ideally, we want to be active and influential in our bodies at the same time, rather than one system being more dominant than the other. When you have a good balance between the two systems, there is actually more variability in the time interval between your heartbeats, hence heart rate variability (HRV), which is measured in milliseconds.

There is usually a good range for each individual, often between 50 and 100 ms. If your HRV is lower, it indicates a high level of stress, impending illness, or lack of sleep. Garmin Fenix ​​​​​​can also measure your overall "stress" by performing a three-minute test of holding still and measuring your heart rate variability. The stress score determined by the smartwatch is on a scale of 1 to 100.

The Garmin Fenix ​​​​only measures HRV during sleep or stress tests and requires wearing the device for three consecutive weeks to obtain an accurate baseline. The watch will then show you the 7-day average in green (HRB in range), yellow (HRB slightly higher or lower), or red (HRB significantly out of range).

However, it's worth noting that our HRV article by Marco Altini suggests that instead of automatic measurements, we take manual measurements in the morning when we sit down to get an accurate daily HRV comparison. This is where a stress test can be most useful for us.

Battery box

Combined with HRV, the Garmin Fenix ​​​​can also give you a "body battery" reading. This is done using a combination of HRV, stress assessment, sleep quality, and training data. The rating goes from 0 to 100, each level has 25 points and goes from low, medium, high and very high energy reserves. This is a useful feature for everyone as it balances training stress, general stress and rest.

A professional cyclist can drain his battery after 6 hours of pedaling because he can rest all day and not worry about going to work. For someone who works 9 am to 5 pm, intense 1 hour interval training at night can be exhausting.

Knowing when your body's battery is depleted can help you make informed decisions about your training, instead of overexerting yourself and getting sick or training without enough rest.

sleep

We know that we need to train to improve our performance because training stress is the stimulus that allows our body to adapt through training adaptations. However, these adjustments only occur when adequate rest is achieved, and sleep plays an important role in this rest equation.

The amount of sleep you need varies from person to person and depends on the level of exercise or life stress you are experiencing. It can also change depending on the season. However, Garmin recommends a blanket for 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep per night. I followed Garmin's sleep recommendations and tracked my cycling performance; here I describe the difference that I think really made.

Monitoring your sleep and making sure you're trying to stick to a sleep schedule are good ways to make sure you're getting the right amount of sleep. Your Garmin Fenix ​​has a nice feature: Setting a sleep time turns off push notifications, so you spend less time looking at your phone and exposed to blue light, which can interfere with sleep.

sleep assessment

If we assume full sleep, we have a "sleep estimate." Not all sleep is the same: there's deep sleep, light sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, wakefulness, and restless sleep. When you wear the Garmin Fenix ​​​​at night, you can see how well you sleep, as well as your overall sleep score.

This sleep score is based on a combination of total sleep time, sleep stress, time spent in different types of sleep, and time spent awake or restless. This is useful because you can identify patterns that may be affecting your sleep performance so that you can correct them and hopefully improve the quality of your sleep and rest. When it comes to sleep, both quantity and quality matter.

VO2max/training status

A Garmin watch can give you an idea of ​​your overall "training status" through a combination of your VO2max, your HRV, and the exercise you've done. VO2max is calculated by tracking heart rate and power during several minutes of moderate-intensity cycling. Gives a scaled value from low to high adjusted for heat and altitude.

The training status summary shows if your VO2max is decreasing, increasing or staying the same. Of course we want to grow. HRV is then measured to see if it remains at an optimal level, increases or decreases, while Acute Training Load (ATL) tracks the load of recent training sessions using volume and intensity.

If ATL is correct, your VO2max is increasing, and HRV is in the correct range, you will have reached a productive training state. If your VO2max is falling, your ATL is lower or higher than optimal, and your HRV is not in the correct range, you'll get one of the following descriptions:

• Weaning (insufficient physical activity)

• Recovery (less training stress, but necessary to recover from a difficult block)

• Maintenance (sufficient stress to maintain but not improve fitness)

• Productive (progress and improve, don't forget to plan vacation trips)

• Peak (by reducing the training load after the training block, the form will be high)

• Too much exercise (requires a lot of exercise and rest)

• Unproductive (good training load but fitness declines, focus on rest and nutrition)

• Exhausted (more recovery, less training load. Normal state after a hard event or training)

The Training Status feature allows you to monitor your training plan and make sure you are training enough, resting enough, and preparing for important events and/or your cycling goals.

preparation for teaching

Switch from training state to "ready to train". It can be tempting when we realize our fitness is such that we exercise and then increase the intensity and volume of training to try to compensate for this loss of fitness. However, the reason we exercise may be because we experience higher levels of stress and lower levels of recovery. This is where training preparation comes into play.

Using a combination of data from sleep tracking, heart rate variability, and previous training load, Garmin determines if you're in the right state for a workout that improves your Fitness Status.

You will be placed in the following categories: Low, Poor, Moderate, High, or Excellent. If you've had good sleep, good heart rate variability, low stress levels, and no heavy training load, you're probably set. If you haven't slept well, your HRV is out of range, your stress is high, or your training load has been abnormally high, your fitness is probably lower.

Menstrual Cycle Tracking

Tracking the menstrual cycle is especially useful for female athletes. There is a large body of recent research on the effects of the various phases and subphases of the menstrual cycle and their impact on exercise and nutritional needs.

Although many of these studies found no statistically significant differences between the stages of the participants, they were often associated with large differences between individuals. This suggests that each person's menstrual cycle is affected in different ways, which is why monitoring is so important.

For example, if you know you are cramping during your ovulation phase and you don't feel particularly strong, it may be best to adjust the recovery phase of your exercise plan to coincide with that phase. On the other hand, if you're feeling especially strong at the start of the follicular phase, you know it's time to put off your toughest workouts.

By following your cycle, you can also see if there are changes such as: B. Fluctuations which can indicate problems such as relative energy deficit in sports (RED-S), a sign that you need to eat and rest more than you currently do. do.

Here you can learn more about how to adapt your diet to each phase of the menstrual cycle.

Dashboard Instructions: Create a Fitness Analytics Dashboard Using Garmin Data