There's so much I don't understand about the Training/Exercise Load metric. Are they the same thing? There's a screen showing my Load Focus for August 5-September 1, Anaerobic 1443, High Aerobic 4247, Low Aerobic 16. Some caveats:
A) Those assignments are definitely skewed by my Garmin's inability to make a reasonable estimate of my HR zones, and a not great estimate of my power zones.
B) I only first used the Edge 540 on August 15, so those cumulative numbers are for about half the listed time period.
C) The display shows some "optimal" range about 1/4-1/3 of what it's scoring me (well, my Low Aerobic is much lower than it recommends).
I have no idea how much work it expects me to do to stay within the "optimal range", is there any way to figure that out? Does it really think I should be working out less, or is it assigning load scores that are way too high because it thinks I'm very out of shape?
I also have a Training Load screen, which tells me my "Acute Load" of 1963 *is* "optimal" (although it's been increasing my chronic load score after each workout until the acute and chronic scores are in some agreement). And mysteriously, it's claiming that my overall work is "productive" based on my VO2 Max trend, but my VO2 Max is only "trending up" because Garmin's initial estimate for my VO2 Max was absurdly low. I'm really only maintaining, and Garmin is not improving my VO2 Max scores based on any observed improvement in my performance or anything (also it's just completely ignoring years of training data on Garmin Connect from before I had the Edge 540).
And the other thing that's confusing: in the description of "Training Load", Garmin claims that EPOC is a great thing to track to estimate how much recovery you need after an activity. Ok, maybe, but Garmin isn't using any post-exercise HR (and respiration) data to estimate EPOC, it's assigning Training Load scores immediately after the workout. What is Training Load actually based on? And why is *that* a good way to score how much stimulus and recovery to expect from a workout?
Do these metrics work for anyone, and can you explain under what conditions they might be useful?