Related

Garmin Run Coach newbie questions

8831154
1 month ago

Hi all, I recently switched from Vívosmart 4 to Forerunner 265S, and I'm excited to try the running coach plans.

For context I'm in my mid-30s, fat and very short, so despite running twice a week for 2.5 years (and in general exercising for a decade), my 5k PR is still just over 44 mins. I've been running+walking 2x 5k / week for a year now.

My current goal is to be able to run 5k without walking, but I don't really want to do runs longer than 5k. So I set up a Run Coach plan with the "Achieve a Milestone" goal of running 5k with no walking, but also no specific finishing time, by Christmas.

On Wednesday Garmin told me to run 1 hour 4 mins at 139 avg. HR, which ended up being 6.26km (my longest ever distance by 25%) and earned me 75 hours of recovery Dizzy face

But checking my Coach plan now, it still wants me to do both a short run and a body weight exercise today, even though I still have 37 hours left of my recovery.

It also wants me to do an 1 hr 21 mins run on Sunday at 139 avg. HR, which would be around 8 km if I'm around Wednesday's speed. That feels like an extreme ramp-up in 1 week's time from my usual 5 km.

So the actual questions:

  • Is there a way to tell Garmin Coach to limit my runs to 5k? Or at most 6k?
  • How often does Garmin Coach update its training plan? It doesn't seem to take recovery into account. My Training Readiness is also 42 - "You may need to recover more to fully benefit from additional training." So by all means I shouldn't be exercising today...?
  • On the Garmin Connect website I see they offer the Coach in the big top section, adaptive training plans below, and many other (I guess non-adaptive ones) below that. Do you think it's worth to switch to the 5k adaptive plan? I see that it allows 3 workouts a week which is much closer to my comfort zone than the 5 mandated by the Coach.
  • What is the actual difference between the Coach and these adaptive plans? I mean if I pick the same 5k goal in the Coach.

Thanks for reading this far :)

Top Replies

All Replies

  • 0 1 month ago

    I'm so happy you are here. I got a FR265s about a month ago mainly to try out their "adaptive" Garmin Run Coach offering.

    I'm on week four of a plan I created. Mine is mainly to give it a try and figure out how it works, so I created a 13-week plan with "Fitness" as a goal.

    I hope to use it, if I can grow to trust it, for a 2026 attempt at a half-marathon.

    Three issues I'm still grappling with

    • Having asked to include "strength" workout...this just seems broken.  They appear, disappear, move around, stay bodyweight only.
    • Having picked 7-days of running, it slammed me with multiple hard runs after hard runs the first two weeks.
    • The Calendar of runs for the week is unreliable as every day the whole rest of the week workout plan switch and move around.

    My FR265 just captured my HRV from wearing it to sleep for three weeks. That might now be included.  The calculated VO2Max is now calculated too.   I'm thinking that all might be used in the 'adaptive' part.

    I intentionally switched off "Friday" as a rest day, so there is that.  In three weeks now it has not given me a rest day that I didn't force it to give (Fridays)   Even though I originally picked seven days a week of availability I assumed if I was hammered, and readiness was low, it would adaptively schedule a rest day. I was surprised it would give me a scheduled rest day after two weeks.

    I'm sticking with it for the 13-weeks, and I hope it'll get more intelligent, and I learn more so it doesn't surprise me so much with it's suggestions.

    The added strength workouts are completely unfathomable. It seems broken.  I'm going to go into my plan and switch off the "include strength workouts" and just do them separately on my own.

    Stick with your plan. Maybe we can dial these in so they make sense.

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to chris_in_cal
    chris_in_cal said:
    The added strength workouts are completely unfathomable. It seems broken.  I'm going to go into my plan and switch off the "include strength workouts" and just do them separately on my own.

    Strength add-on is now set to 'off' the rest of the weeks runs seem appropriate. I believe the 'adding strength' to a Garmin Run Coach plan on my fr265 is broken.

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to chris_in_cal

    Thanks for sharing your experiences, sorry I got no notification that there were any responses!

    Yeah, Garmin's Coach seems VERY hardcore, so for now I'm trying out the various human coaches to see if there's one that works well or if I should just stick to Daily Suggested Workouts. (At least those respect my Recovery needs.)

    I'm holding out tentative hope that Garmin will make the adaptive Coach more flexible over time, since it's only a year old feature(?) From what I've read online, 2 of the 3 human coaches started out as only offering 4-5 workouts / week, while nowadays they all offer 3-5/wk, so maybe Garmin will make their fancy Coach more accessible to regular people too and not only pro athletes? Sweat smile

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to 8831154

    I am sticking with this 13 week "fitness" plan.

    I turned off strength addons, and  selected a second forced rest day.

    Through three weeks strength suggestions were a mess and it had me running heavy runs even the day after a big run and poor sleep.