Fitness wearables are extremely common these days. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses. None of them are 100% accurate since the tech uses optical light sensors that shine through the skin. We still value them because ghey DO measure, some with quite good accuracy. The truth us what gets measured gets tracked and that is what helps inform your training and recovery decisions.
For performance I generally recommend either Whoop or Garmin. The Apple Watch Ultra is also pretty useful with its new Vitals update.
But this article is not so much about which wearable you should choose. This is all about how to interpret the colorful data you get. Many athletes come to me asking why their recovery is low when they feel fine. You may feel fine because you actually are fine in general, so don't worry about it and crush it today. Or it is possible that you just don't know what it is like to feel good and something is missing in your recovery. To know the difference, understanding the data helps!
Most wearables measure resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, and respiratory rate. When you combine all of these you can get an idea if your recovery status, or your readiness to train and push yourself to higher fitness levels. But how much should you let the data tell you what to do or who you are?
Your wearable will tell you your recovery score, your body battery or some other version of recovery language, but the truth is if you are in competition, then you have to perform to the best of your ability no matter how recovered you are. What the recovery score can help you do is inform you on how well you managed your recovery the previous day and how much focus you need to give to recovery behaviors today. What could those recovery behaviors be?
Sleep - going to bed early if needed. Athletes typically need a MINIMUM of 8 hours of sleep per night. That means about 9 hours in bed usually.
Sleep quality - setting yourself up for the best sleep
Hydration - water + electrolytes
Nutrition - protein, fresh fruits and veggies, sufficient carbs and fats for energy.
Breathing - managing stress with breathing practice, specifically practices such as nasal breathing, physiological sigh, or yoga nidra
Relationships - connecting with meaningful relationships or resolving conflicts
Active recovery - getting outside and walking, playing a different sport for fun, low intensity exercise that doesn't feel like "work".
Sauna - getting 20-30 minutes in the sauna at a temperature at least 175° farenheigt (79° Celcius)
Ice bath - get 3-5 minutes in an ice bath at a temperature between 35-55° F (2-12° Celcius).
Manage exercise intensity - if you are in a training block, consider having a shorter duration of training, lower intensity, or a mix of both, so you can bounce back tomorrow.
Find which behaviors work best for you or stack these behaviors in a single or multiple days.
Here's the deal, though. All of these wearable devices have their own algorithms for giving you an idea of quantifying a recovery score, but that recovery score DOES NOT tell you who you are that day. Some people may look at a low recovery score and think, "Oh no! I can't perform today because I have a low recovery score!" That is completely NOT true. You can probably perform at a really high level and do super awesome things, even if you have a low recovery. Don't believe the lie that the color on your app (usually red) that said you just don't have it in the tank today.
Like I mentioned above, a recovery score DOES mean that it would be a good idea to work on self care and recovery behaviors like I mentioned above. If you work some of those in, then you may find that your rebound back into a higher recovery the next day because you took care of what you needed.
Now if you find that you are having a trend of 3 or more days with a low recovery, then I do recommend you take the opportunity to rest and recovery with minimal physical and emotional stressors till you bounce back.
That's the basics of a recovery score from your wearable. Take it for what it is, a number on a screen that is a data point meant to be taken in the big picture of life. It is not an authority telling your yes or no on whether you can go for it. Put it in context and make more informed decisions.
Now, if you want to take a deeper dive into some of the key metrics you may find on your tracker, keep reading...
HRV
The most confusing of these to people is HRV. Why is that? It is honestly the first metric a professional like myself looks at. Most people don't even know what it is. Here's a quick and simple explanation:
HRV stands for Heart Rate Variability. This is your body's nervous system's ability to regulate itself between relaxing and restoring or gearing up to prepare for action. The relaxing and restoration state is activated by a side of your nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system. This system slows your heart beat, slows your breathe, allows your digestive system to work better, and relaxes your muscles. This system is also necessary for the process of falling alseep. The other side of the nervous system is called the sympathetic nervous system. This system activates your mind and body to be ready to peform, whether that is being ready to fight or run away mentally or physically. When this system is active, you tend to have increased focus, your mind gets super active, your body gets braced and tensed for motion, you breath more from the mouth, and blood is diverted away from digestion to your muscles in your extremeties and core to brace for battle. HRV represents how well your body is doing at managing the balance between these 2 sides of your nervous system. When you are beaten down from stress from physical, mental and emotional stressors, your HRV will be lower than your typical average. When you are feeling good and managing life and physical health well, it will tend to be higher.
Now, you can look at that explanation above and see how things in life may make your HRV sensitive to a number of things in life. LOTS of things could make it lower on a day to day basis. Things that could lower your HRV may be:
Dehydration - this is water intake and electrolytes both.
Poor sleep duration or sleep quality. You need both quantity and quality.
Poor nutrition that is disrupting your gut or promoting inflammation. This is typically really processed food, greasy or fried food, sugar or sweets, alcohol, or other unhealthy foods and easy access snacks. Many athletes do not eat well and walk around with deficiences that can be easily solved with better eating and targeted supplementation.
Stress in relationships. You know your biggest stressors.
Anxiety - this can come from a lot of things, but it is often related to dwelling excessively on things that are out of our immediate control or what we are allowing to inform our personal value or identity. Another recent source of anxiety we have been discovering in our coaching is that people are often too busy. They are hurring too much in life and need to condense and simplify, even if that is just being on social media less.
Excessive training - you hit it hard or had a really intense competition. Expect to have a lower HRV and recovery during or after.
Not moving enough - yes, even being too sedentary can cause a lower recover and HRV. We are designed to move!
No zone 2 training - yes this is a buzz word in the health space these days, but the heart of it is essentially getting a lot of regular, low-intensity movement all week long (about 300 min). This maintains and boosts cardiovascular health. Many athletes we work with are busted up because all they do is high-intensity all the time. One of the first tips we typically give coaces is to have some lower intensity days or sessions built into the week.
Life is too serious - laughter and fun are seriously good for recovery!
Scarcity mindset - if you feel like life is just taking from you all the time and you are just surviving and struggling, rather than having a positive growth-mindset that sees life with purpose and positive direction, then it will affect your HRV from the mind and body stress of a scarcity mindset.
These are just a few things that can lower HRV, but think of the opposites of each of these to consider what will increase your HRV.
Respiratory Rate
This is a really valuable metric. This is average number of breathes you take per minute while asleep. Elite endurance athletes may be as low as 12 breathes per minute, but the American average is typically around 18, which is not super awesome. We usually want athletes to be around 15 breathes per minute or less to show decent cardiovascular health and breathe control. Now, this is a good measure of recovery because it represents more of a trend of recovery rather than being super sensitive from day to day. Generally higher than your monthly average is not good and lower than your monthly average is a good sign of recovery and fitness. If it is dropping from month to month, then that is a sign of increasing cardiovascular fitness. If we see a 5% or higher jump in respirtory rate from week to week or month to month, then we know that you are in a lower state of recovery and fitness. It can also been you are just stressed out with life and need to build in some margin and recovery behaviors to decrease your overall stress in life and improve health. If respiratory rate is trending high during the week, that means your body has been loaded heavily and is trying to recover. If it is treanding high as a monthly average, then that is a decrease in fitness or readiness for challenges and adapting because there has been a trend of high load or stress. The monthly trend may be intentional to get a compensation of increased fitness if you have a deload week after a heavy off-season training block.
Resting Heart Rate
This one is similar to respiratory rate. It doesn't change a lot day to day, so significant changes are something to take note of. This is your resting heart rate in beats per minute while you sleep. In general lower is better, a sign of fitness and recovery. Higher than your weekly or monthly average is a sign of decreased recovery or fitness. This will often get elevated in unison with respiratory rate if you are dealing with allergies or illness.
Sleep Data
This is amazing that we have access to so much sleep date now! I want to simplify this for you so that you can see the most important metrics in an order of priority:
Total sleep - I encourage you to aim for total sleep of 7-8 hours of total sleep. Depending on how well you STAY asleep or how fast you fall asleep, this may require around 8-9 hours in bed.
Restorative sleep - this is the sum of Deep Sleep and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep. Picture deep sleep as what helps your body physically recover and REM sleep as what helps you mentally recover by processing emotions and logging memory and skills into long term memory. In general, you want about 40-50% of your sleep at night to come from restoractive sleep. If you get less than 40%, then regardless of how much total sleep you got, you may not feel super rested or recovered and the other metrics from above will probably reflect that.
Sleep latency - this is how long it takes you to fall asleep. This tells you how well you did at winding down to prepare your body for sleep. Best practices to do this are low light, shutting off the screens, wearing blue light blocking glasses in the evening, lowering the temperature in the room, taking a shower, or other behaviors that help you relax and unwind rather than gear up and get your mind thinking.
Waking events - this is the number of times you wake up at night, even if you are unconsciously doing it. You will see spikes in heart rate for this. If your room is too hot, your bed isn't comfortable, your body is super stiff and sore, light is coming at you from outside or devices, or sounds can wake you up at night. Co-sleeping or a kid walking in the room will also obviously increase your waking events.
Sleep consistency - consistent bed and wake times helps our body create a rhythm with sunlight and activity that our body likes, which will help you sleep when you want and need to.
Strain
Ok, we are ending with a challenging one to write about. What is strain, or body battery, or whatever the wearable comapny is calling it? How is it measured? Each company has it's own proprietary algorithm, but in general it is measured by time in different heart rate zones and changes in your speed and fluidity of movement. If you spend more time at higher heart rates, that generally strains your body more and slowing down in your speed and fluidity of motion throughout a workout generally represent a sign of struggle and fatigue. This is why it may take forever to build up a higher strain level (a representation of fatigue) when you are walking or doing low-intensity exercise (like zone 2). But high-intensity training, whether cardio or weight training or a mix of both, tend to increase your fatigue and body strain faster.
Wrapping It Up
All these metrics are useful data to help you see the big picture of how you are doing today and how you are doing as a trend at managing your overall health and fitness. They are super powerful to use as a performance and athlete management tool, but also anyone can benefit from using them. The busy boss or CEO, the stay at home mom, the weekend warrior, the professional or upcoming athlete. All can benefit from wearing them, at least for a time, to learn what works and doesn't work for you. What I do hope this article does for you is empower you to understand what you are looking at and be freed from letting an app or score keep you from crushing it today.
Comments