Readiness and Recovery Time History and Constantly Crazy Numbers

Some research.  The recovery and readiness are based on HR zones which are auto set by Garmin, but Garmin's zones are not aligned with industry standards - especially not for cycling. Which then makes a mess of your training load data, a bad mess.

Best part, you can manually update your zone percentages, but you cannot apply this to historic activites, so what has recording wrong cannot be corrected and therefore you'll need to wait weeks/months for the system to learn your HR and training load in order to report readiness and recovery metrics.

To my knowledge, recovery and readiness depend on correctly set maximum HR, not the zones themselves (which could of course be set to be percentages of maxHR, but that's not relevant, and there are other options).

Thanks, my max values are correct but training load numbers are way off. My need to contact Garmin to see if they can help

Worked with Garmin support who got the engineers to look at my data..... confirmed that Readiness and Recovery Time are not personalised and therefore useless at an individual level. Tis a shame.

Apparently sleep is very important, if you don't get the general ~9 hours whilst training then Garmin marks you down, regardless of how much sleep you need as an individual.

Second is recovery time, I was told not to do activities every day, even though 50% of my days are recovery days to speed up the recovery process.

Dissapointing that Garmin has all our training data and metrics, but yet they use basic metrics with generalised values to determine this important readiness and recovery time advice.

I feel this is a potentially really useful feature poorly implemented. Shame.

I understand your frustration, but I have to say that 9 hours of sleep is definitely not needed. I've had "good" sleep scores >80 with slightly less than 7 hours of sleep, and sleep has then been on green in training readiness breakout. (But of course it also depends on how the watch thinks about your sleep quality.)

Haigh.Ian said:

confirmed that Readiness and Recovery Time are not personalised and therefore useless at an individual level

What do you mean? What did Garmin support say? I doubt they said these metrics are not personlized. Are you trying to customize the rules by which Recovery and Readiness are calculated? Because these metrics are based on individual metrics. Recovery time is based on EPOC which is based on intensity./duration of effort and your level of fitness: completely individual. Training readiness is based in addition on your sleep score and your HRV.

Haigh.Ian said:

I've had my watch months not, perhaps 6 months and every single day my Training Readiness is 80+ hours,

This means the watch is seeing a lot of physiological cost (EPOC). It could be because your acute load is too high or increasing too fast. It could also be because your EPOC is over estimated because your HR Max is too low.

How did you determine your HR Max?

Can you post a picture of your acute load graph?

Unfortunately, Garmin has put its sleep metrics at the heart of training readiness. The problem is sleep metrics do not work well for some users, so the Training readiness will be off.

Recovery is a great metric and works well provided you have the correct HR Max, to get a correct VO2 max, etc. Just following the color/guidance of recovery is enough. No need to wait for 0h recovery.

Plan B is to use your recovery, acute load and load ratio, maybe colored by your HRV trends and/or your body battery, but the latter is optional. For example, you may want to go easy if you have 12h of recovery, but your body battery is depleted or your HRV has been very low for a couple of days.

Garmin Support feedback, after passing my data to an Engineer:  

“We see that Sleep, Sleep History and Recovery Time are the most significant factors affecting your Training Readiness Score. For sleep, following the Sleep Coach recommendations can lead to a higher Training Readiness Score. The most significant contributor here is Recovery Time, so you should not record activities for 46 hours. We see that an activity is being recorded almost every day.”

Max HR - Set using Max HR from intervals.com, ie. my max HR for any given activity in the last 3-5 years.  Currently 187 and I’m 51 years old.

Acute and Chronic Training load - recently my Acute has been downtrending, almost detraining, you can see from the images, in fact my form is declining with my Acute tracking lower than my Chronic, so not over training, doing the opposite. In intervals.icu I’ve had a ‘form’ of +10 for most of the last 2 weeks, which is basically detraining.  This easing off for 2 weeks has not reflected correctly in Garmin’s readiness and recovery time.

Sleep - I’m averaging ~7 hours per night, but Garmin Sleep Coach consistently requests 9 hours sleep, in fact it wants 9 hours sleep for every day when I train/ride.  I have my sleep schedule set to 6.5 hours sleep, but reducing the sleep schedule hasn’t affected anything to do with recovery or sleep coach as I thought it would based on forum posts. On sleep, at the time Garmin analysed my data I had ‘green’ for yesterday’s sleep and recent sleep history… but support are saying I need to match the sleep coach’s 9 hours…. Sleep coach just seems to be some generalised sleep recommendation, I don’t have 9 hours free to sleep, and I can’t stay asleep that long even if I had the time.

Stress - consistently between 20-25 every day, so nothing high here.

HRV - consistently around the same, no big drops in the last 2 week

Note that VO2 in garmin looks correct.  Garmin seems to get ACL, CTL, VO2, stamina, etc al correct.  So on one hand Garmin is doing a good job, but on the other hand Readiness and Recovery Time it’s rubbish.

How do I tell Garmin that I only need 7 hours sleep even when training, and that a recovery ride doesn’t need 4 days recovery?.... Note that I’ve had the 965 since August, I was thinking it needed to learn my training habits, but it’s just not doing so.  I wonder if I just delete 4 days of activities from Connect, would this reset the recovery time?

Screenshots/images: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WPFd3FqwLHP8JAe58

Max HR is correct, I remove any erroneous data around power and HR.  187 is my max in the last few years, I actually hit 185 in a race finish yesterday, after which I thought I was going to die, 10/10 perceived effort, hard bike race indoors in 31C heat.  My 5 min max HR is 179, so adding 5 will be below my max setting and what I saw yesterday, so using that would make the readiness scores worse.

I use several fitness tools, eg. intervals, Xert and training peaks to track my fitness.  Garmin agrees with all of these in regards to ACT, CTL, stamina, FTP, etc, etc.  It's just readiness and recovery time which are seemingly out of whack.

Deleting recent activities didn't work.  I'll try not syncing activities for a few days until recovery returns to zero.... then re-enable syncing and see what happens.

I kinda feel that Garmin watches are better with running metrics and training than cycling.  Seems that most systems can do running or cycling really well but not both.

Haigh.Ian said:

187 is my max in the last few years,

HR Max decreases with age, for everybody.

Haigh.Ian said:

I actually hit 185 in a race finish yesterday, after which I thought I was going to die, 10/10 perceived effort, hard bike race indoors in 31C heat.

Lots of body movement during sprinting can get you false HR readings. Again, using peak HR is not the best way to estimate HR Max. RPE during short burst can be heavily influence by muscle exhaustion, which may not be reflected by HR: the extreme case is strength training.

That said, your HR Max doesn't look out of whack anyway.

Haigh.Ian said:

My 5 min max HR is 179, so adding 5

I was saying take your 5km personal best run (not your 5mn max), and take the peak HR. Because it is a "steady" effort, there is less risk of movement induced misreading of the HR. The HR builds gradually and there is no "thin"peak. This is why it is safer to use peak HR and add a few bpm to get to HR Max.

Haigh.Ian said:

It's just readiness and recovery time which are seemingly out of whack.

I can understand why readiness would be wrong because of poor (right or wrong) sleep metrics. But, recovery? I am surprised. This metric is based on EPOC with represents accurately the physiological cost of training. Note: accurately means with a 8% average error rate. Your error rate might be lower or higher.

Haigh.Ian said:

Deleting recent activities didn't work. 

What the watch sees, it will not forget even if you don't save or delete the activities.

Haigh.Ian said:

I kinda feel that Garmin watches are better with running metrics and training than cycling

I disagree. I do both. My cycling metrics are copacetic with Training Peak and WKO5 software: dFRC/Stamina, FTP, VO2 Max. Targets for suggested workout are consistent with the WKO5 targets. I am in Garmin metrics nirvana.