“Daily Suggested Workouts are workout recommendations made by your watch to provide a level of challenge to help you maintain or improve your current fitness level.”. This is the description of this feature from here https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=oYknGZ910l1pfBNzkDHX6A.
During last years I’ve been working with a trainer several times when I wanted to get a PR on a running or cycling race. Every single time I worked with him, I was able to greatly improve my fitness and all personal records, so working with a trainer totally worth it.
In the last year though, due to my schedule changes, I no longer had time to commit to 3-4 days/week running workouts so I stopped working with him. During this time I not-very-often went running alone and did whatever I wanted, aka running at any convenient pace or mood.
Since watching my kids running as part of their extracurricular activities, they got me motivated and I started running more or less regularly with breaks for moving to a new house or crazy times at work. Since I used Freeletics app for home strength sessions (by the way, using this link you should be able to get a 30% discount on your Freeletics subscription), I started using it for running too. I used it for few weeks, maybe a month or more, but I don’t like few things about using it for running.
- While you can choose not to post on app’s feed your strength workouts, there seems to be no way to do this with running workouts or I did not find a way to do it. So every run is automatically posted on your app’s feed. Like it or not.
- Upon starting a run, you have 5 seconds countdown to put your phone somewhere, pocket or belt bag etc. I don’t really like this short countdown and there is no way to increase it.
- At one time I had like 16 intervals to do. 400m, recovery, 100m, recovery – 16 times. Unless you look at the phone, there is no audio prompt as to how many intervals are left so that you know to get closer to home or to just manage your stamina.
- Lastly, one minor thing that bothers me always, not only when running, after each workout step there are applauses to cheer you up. I did not find a way to remove/disable this.
Anyway, leaving everything aside, while navigating my Forerunner watch many months ago I found this Daily Suggested Workouts feature and although I enabled it, I have never used it. Reading more about it yesterday, it seems like it creates a periodization plan behind the scenes, especially if you have any future event added to your Garmin Calendar.
Looking through YouTube, I found this nice and funny video on The Running Channel about using this feature for a month. I liked the idea and thought of giving it a try.
I’ve always trained like 3-4 days a week, so trying something daily kind of scares me, from a time-management perspective. I will see if I can stick to daily runs, but I’m curious how it will go.
For now, here are some details as of today, after the first time I ran using this feature. Info taken from Training Status on Garmin Connect page. Under Reports – All activities.

Running VO₂ max: 51. “VO₂ Max is a good indication of your cardiovascular fitness and should increase as your level of fitness improves.”

“Exercise load measures how much oxygen your body consumes for recovery after an activity. The longer or more intense the activity, the higher the score.”

“Acute training load is a weighted sum of your recent exercise load scores. It’s rated low, optimal or high based on your fitness level and training history.”

To avoid creating separate posts for each day, I think I will make a post per week, so this will be a living post for week 1.
Week 1 | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
Planned | Base. 30 min @5:55/km | Base. 30 min @5:55/km | Rest | Anaerobic 6x400m @3:45/km | Base. 30 min @5:55/km | Base. 40 min @5:55/km | Base. 40 min @5:55/km |
Completed | 32 min @5:47/km | 31 min @5:43/km | Rest | 44 min @5:41/km | 31 min @5:50/km | Skipped. Hiked instead | 40 min @5:51/km |
Monday: trail running. Primary Benefit: Tempo. Avg HR: 147. Total Ascent: 94 m.
Tuesday: asphalt running (I don’t like asphalt!). Primary Benefit: Base. Avg HR: 143. Total Ascent: 36 m. I never looked at this while on trails, but I paid more attention on it today: although I’m running constantly, my pace seems to oscilate between 5:10 to 8:40! Crazy

Wednesday: Rest day. Good!

Thursday: Kinder surprise! I got intervals today. 6 intervals of 400m @3:45.



I did run a little faster the intervals, around 3:30 to 3:35 on average but the recovery was definitely faster than planned. I just could not do the embarrassingly slow pace of 6:45/km. Maybe this is the reason it ended up saying Tempo as primary benefit.
One interesting thing I found, you never know what you will have tomorrow. Neither in regards to time or effort, so you cannot plan when to wake up in the morning (if you do the runs early morning). I searched a little and found that Forerunner 955 does show the trainings for future 7 days: “View your entire week of daily suggested workouts, which adapt after every run to match your performance and recovery as well as the races coming up in your Garmin Connect™ smartphone app calendar.”. I found a good deal yesterday so I bought one. Waiting for it to arrive.
Friday: I got the Base 30 min@5:55 /km and I did 5:50. Sorry, forgot take the picture.
Saturday: was also a Base day but with 40 min. I did not do it because I did a 20km hike with 1100m total ascent; more on this in a separate post.
Sunday: Apparently, the suggested workouts does not consider hiking when planning the workouts and the recovery time. I got yesterday’s Base, 40 min with 5:55 /km. This was the first time I ran with my new watch, Forerunner 955. Interesting enough, after the workout there is a screen about how closely you followed the workout.


“Some Garmin Connect workouts have target zones, in which your ability to maintain a specific range of pace, power or another metric is measured. Your execution score tells you the percentage of time that you spent in the workout’s target zone. If you stayed in the zone for 30 minutes during a 60-minute workout, your score would be 50%. Keep in mind that execution score measures how closely you followed the workout, not how well you performed. If you run or ride faster or harder than the prescribed target zone, you will receive a low execution score as a result.”
There are other new screens/features too on this watch but I will not get into too many details. YouTube already has lots of reviews available for this watch, in case you’re interested.
With this, I ended my first week of using Garmin’s Daily Suggested Workouts feature. I felt better than I was expecting. I thought I would feel more fatigued. The only thing that still kind of bothers me with doing something daily, is the planning as I don’t have much free time every day.
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