Related
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

VO2 Max continually increasing

9049968
over 3 years ago

I upgraded from a Vivoactive 3 to FR 245 at the beginning of December. Since then my VO2 Max has continually increased from 41 to (currently) 47. Has anyone had a similar experience?

I think it is at least partly due to the HR sensor for the 245 reporting lower heart rates, particularly during exercise. I am fairly confident that the 245 is more accurate. I was always suspicious of the V3 values – they seemed high compared for the level of effort I was putting in.

But that doesn’t explain why VO2Max has continued to increase over 6 weeks rather than being a one-off adjustment, unless there is some kind of smoothing mechanism to prevent large fluctuations in the reported value.

I don’t think I have actually been getting fitter – my training load has been relatively light.

Any thoughts as to what is going on?

  • 0 over 3 years ago
    9049968 said:
    But that doesn’t explain why VO2Max has continued to increase over 6 weeks rather than being a one-off adjustment, unless there is some kind of smoothing mechanism to prevent large fluctuations in the reported value.

    And that is the case.

    I have seen that too (both going up and going down) with my own VO2Max on FR 245 which has changed from 51 to 53 in the beginning, but not in one step. Later it got back down to 51, then up to 54 and back to 51. Always taking a number of runs to change it, always just one number up or down, never 2.

    I guess they wanted to prevent one single good run on a good day to largely influence this metric and so I would presume this works on basis of „last x days“ or maybe „last y runs“

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Grumpy from dawn till dusk

    I've also noticed that it only changes by, at most, 1 after a run. It'll be interesting to see when it settles down. Maybe the smoothing rule is a simple as never change by more than 1 unit at a time.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 9049968

    Yeah, the VO2Max reported by the watch seems to be a moving average (like last X days).

    One data point is that the free site https://www.runalyze.com can sync with your Garmin account and calculate its own VO2Max value per-run which is *not* a moving average. You'll see that number swing wildly depending on how your run went (or for workouts, if you let the watch record your rest/recovery periods, the VO2Max that runalyze calculates is always lower than normal, since the rest periods bring the per-run value down.) Runalyze also shows you the VO2Max recorded in the activity file by Garmin (to 2 decimal places), and it never changes by more than roughly 1 point.

    The cool thing about runalyze is it does show the Garmin VO2Max to 2 decimal places, so you get a bit more information than usual. For example, it will tell you why Garmin says that your VO2Max is increasing or decreasing, even though the rounded whole number that Garmin displays doesn't change (in this case, your VO2Max may have changed by a small amount. like +/- 0.2, which isn't enough to change the rounded number).

    The other thing is that runalyze's VO2Max seems to be a lot more realistic, and it also provides a race predictor which is adjusted for your actual race results.