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My 645 says unproductive despite two back to back PB's over a race weekend

paultom21
over 4 years ago

This is a bit of a rant about the Training Status tab...

I took one rest day this week in preparation for back to back 10k & 5k races this weekend, and my Garmin instantly marked me down as unproductive after the day's rest. And now, despite smashing both my 10k and 5k recent pbs on consecutive days, it's still saying unproductive. 


I was almost a minute per mile faster than my runs over the last few months, and over sustained race distances and the Garmin algorithm seems blind to this. All it apparently sees is that I missed a day this week. The aerobic training effect for yesterday's run was 4.5 with a 'Way to go!', but this hasn't filtered through to the Training Status tab.

Surely it can't be hard to code the algorithm to spot a clear race pattern – with a taper before and then a faster than usual performance – and just let the Training Status take a chill pill and not try to over-react to the rest day.

The last thing I want to see after two good performances is my personal Garmin telling me I'm unproductive. I've just moved the screen to the bottom of the list on my homepage, because it's just not useful – seems a very blunt tool.

  • 0 over 4 years ago
    paultom21 said:
    I took one rest day this week in preparation for back to back 10k & 5k races this weekend, and my Garmin instantly marked me down as unproductive after the day's rest. And now, despite smashing both my 10k and 5k recent pbs on consecutive days, it's still saying unproductive.

    The watch learns your training history over time.  When you took your rest day, the watch recognized this as you not training as you normally would so it's informing you that the lack of activity was unproductive based on your previous training workouts. Same goes for your two PB races. You don't normally run at those paces and the watch recognizes it as pushing yourself to much from your normal training and marks those events unproductive in your overall training.  Training status and load is built over time and not individual events or workouts. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    "Unproductive" often means that you've been active but your VO2max estimate has decreased. It likely has nothing to do with the day off, since inactivity doesn't generate a VO2max estimate. It probably means that your heart was working a little harder than normal for the pace you achieved. Increased HR could be due to a number of factors such as inadequate sleep, excessive caffeine intake, high temperature or humidity, or measurement error, especially if relying on the wrist oHRM. A slower pace could be the result of a breakdown in form or due to GPS inaccuracy. The 645 will take elevation into account, but you would need a newer watch like the 245, 945, or Fenix 6 to take temperature into account.

    You're right that it's a crude tool. I think most of us have learned to discount or ignore it. Still, if you understand how it works, you can interpret what it's telling you, so it's not completely useless. Garmin Connect will only show you integer VO2max, but if you use Runalyze, you can see it out to two decimal places, so you know if it's gone up or down just a tiny bit.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    For a more thorough explanation of Training Status, see Garmin's Running Science page:

    https://www.garmin.com/en-US/performance-data/running/#training-status