I bought a Fenix 6 pro 7 months ago to finally get some motivation to start running and life healthier. Since then, I'm still running 3-4 times a week and lost 8 kg - so thank you Garmin!
But as a beginner that wasn't aware of different paces, lactate threshold and heart rate zones, I find the whole Garmin experience confusing and sometimes even dangerous. So I decided to write down my two biggest gripes / suggestions in the hope this will make the watches even better in the future.
- The adaptive training plans are not adaptive and even dangerous - if you are a beginner and think that these plans will take care of you, adapt to your performance and help you learn about smart training, you are wrong. The paces that the plan has assigned to me after the test run were way to hard and it never adapted to my real level even though my heart rate was constantly in zone 4-5 even during easy runs. First I thought that this must be how you get fit but at one point I had to stop the plan because I started getting "heart stutters" and I forced myself into reading about proper training science. In retroperspective I might have chosen an unrealistic time goal or I entered a too strong average pace when Garmin asks you for these values, but as there were no further explanations in the app and I doubt that a beginner understands about different paces or what a realistic training goal could be, you enter what sounds right and trust that Garmin "adapts".
--> I really think that an adaptive, smart, central "Garmin Coach Buddy" that oversees all your metrics and provides you training suggestions is the way to go, but it needs to be way better than the current coaches. Why not also take sleep quality and stress levels during the day as further metrics to adapt your training or even ask to do a HRV test before a suggested hard exercise? Also in my experience, if I had a high Stress score during the day even if I'm not moving a lot, my performance when running will be quite bad. I'm sure that there is tons of science that is just waiting to be used. Also I found that for beginners, Heart Rate based suggestions are way easier to understand and follow than pace suggestions as your body might still not be ready to run even slow paces because you need to develop your running muscles first to adhere to a pace without having your heart rate all over the place. But for pace, at least use the heart rate metrics to adapt the pace suggestions.
- Help the user to understand and set their correct personalized metrics and zones - What I mean here is: All current Garmin metrics like VO2max, training effect and other statistics rely on the correct settings for heart rate zones, Max Heart rate, lactate threshold and/or training paces. The problem is, if you are a beginner, you have no idea what you are doing and the watch let's you train with completely wrong zones without making you aware or helping you understanding the importance of it. E.g. after researching the importance of low aerob (or heart rate 2) training, I forced myself to "run" with my ridiculous low default heart zones for over 3 months. Only after reading an article about Max Heartrate I setup a manual workout myself and found out, that my Max Heart Rate is 10+ beats higher than Garmins default MaxHR setting. Then I bought a heartrate strap for the (a bit hidden) lactate threshold test and look at this, my training zones are completely different with these metrics, but I wasted 3 months walking on my easy runs and feeling completely bored during tempo runs. Why is the watch not guiding me through these processes first before letting me train inefficient?
--> I really like the Lactate Threshold Test and I believe there should be more of these, like a MaxHR test, Easy Run Pace tests or maybe a combined assessment that really helps you getting your zones setup correctly. Maybe Garmin can expand the automatic gathered metrics and suggest efficient training paces in the same way as it does with lactate treashold. And in addition it could also suggest average race paces for 5k, 10k, HM, and M races. Also it would be great if there would be a page on Garmin connect that presents all (automatic) measured metrics and suggestions at one place instead of having to dig around in multiple menus. I'm sure it would also be fun to see improvements e.g. in the suggested easy pace instead of just having VO2max as the only metric that sometimes gives very different results for slow runs and tempo runs.
Again, it's a great watch but in the end I had to read through a lot of training articles to understand that the default experience on Garmin for beginners can be way off and even counter productive. I have more but this is already too long, so I leave it for now..
Not sure if you experience was different but I'm interested what you guys think...
Also it would be great to have a forum for questions and suggestions for the unified Garmin Experience and not 342 different forums for the many different watches, all having the same problems ;)
