I'd like to see some minior changes to both the watch and the app/Connect to give me more feedback post-workout. That's what lacking comparing to other brands and services like Polar and Strava.
Same goes with tracking development over time and presenting feedback for us, the users. Strava gives progress over time, user-defined date intervals and activity & data (distance, time/activity) type and also uses "Athlete Intelligence" to compare current activites with past and gives feedback like:
"Well above weekly range / You've made a substantial jump compared to prevous weeks. Be careful not to overreach [...]".
Garmin Forerunner 265 / Post-workout
We've got "Training Effect" available on our device, the Forerunner 265 (and more) which is brilliant, but explanations is hidden very deep in the watch and Garmin Connect., I'm suggesting making it visible to us post-workout so that we get more feedback on how the activity was.
Today here's what we get:
- Primary Benefit: VO2 Max. I don't get more information than that. I can't click on "VO2 Max".
- Training Effect: Aerobic and Anaerobic with corresponding values. Good, but sadly we don't get more feedback than that. I can't click on any value to read more about it.
- Training Load: We see a value but it tells us nothing. I can't click on it to get more feedback.
Hitting the menu button and selecting "Training Effect", here's what we get:
At least here we've got some more data; we can see that this certain activity was overreaching my Aerobic TE and that I've had some Anaerobic TE benefit.
Thinking hitting "All Stats" on the watch would show me everything that's in Garmin Connect... nope. Very lack-luster experience. I see a table with much less data, no graphs, no explanations whatsoever. I can't even see number of steps for walks, runs etc.
What's even worse - custom data fields doesn't show at all. I need Garmin Connect to see that kind of data.
Garmin Connect / Post-workout
Opening Garmin Connect to view the activity I'm met with an app that's not aged very well. There's so much data, but the presentation is awful. I don't now where to begin. For starters, I think the workout benfit, Training Effect and Load should give feedback on the "Overview" tab, but I need to select the "Stats" and scroll down to "Training Effect" to even get some details about it... Same lack-luster details as the watch itself, which would be okay if we had a nice summary under the "Overview" tab, but it looks like this:
To get more feedback I've to click the tiny blue dots and I'm taken to the the "Training Effect" view:
- Primary Benefit: Way better feedback. This is what I want to read on my Forerunner, but also see under the "Overview" tab on Garmin Connect.
- Aerobic: Same as above.
- Anaerobic: Same as above.
- Load: It's not here; inconsistent - we can see Load on the watch under "Training Effect", but not here.