Using Garmin’s Daily Suggested Workout for running – Week 2

“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.

This is week 2 of what I will try doing. As mentioned already in Week 1 post, I’ve always trained like 3-4 days a week, so doing something almost daily wasn’t easy from a logistics point of view, but I’ll try.

Here are the training stats details after one week of training. Info taken from Training Status on Garmin Connect page. Under ReportsAll activities.

Running VO₂ max: 51, no changes here. “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.”. The green tunnel seems to be heading up now.

Week 2 planning below:

Week 2MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
PlannedRestThreshold 15:00 @4:45 /kmBase 30:00 @5:55 /kmRestAnaerobic 6×1:00 @4:05 /kmBase 33:00 @5:55 /kmBase 33:00 @5:55 /km

Monday: Woke up by something in the middle of the night and saw my watch says to rest today. Good, I actually wanted to rest today.

Tuesday: Got the threshold run today with 10 min before and after (warm up, cool down). Also starting today my watch started showing me the workouts for 7 days ahead. Now I can plan my time better 🙂

Wednesday: Base run today. Easy. For tomorrow the plan had a short recovery run with very slow pace. After finishing today’s workout, the plan changed and added a rest day for tomorrow. 1h more sleep for me 🙂

Thursday: Rest day

Friday: 1 min intervals today. 6×1:00 at 4:05 /km. I think I did the intervals slightly quicker, around 3:55 and 4 but anyway, this is my second interval workout that it should Anaerobic and I end up in high aerobic. Not sure what I’m doing wrong; don’t think those 5-10 seconds on the intervals is the cause…

Saturday and Sunday: Base 33 min on both days.

Ok, so learnings from Week 2:

  • Plan can change from one day to another. For example. if today (Sunday) the plan say 15 min Threshold run for Tuesday. Depending on how Monday’s workaround goes, on Tuesday I can get 2×8:00 instead of 1×15:00.
  • So far, the plan takes into account only running and cycling activities to plan your calendar. If you do a super hard hike, well… the plan for tomorrow will not change a lot. Basically, only running and cycling are directly impacting plan schedule. Everything else is only indirectly impacting the schedule through the use of Stress. This is somehow described here: “NOTE: Non-running/cycling activities that are performed on your Garmin watch do not directly affect the Daily Suggested Workouts. However, these non-running/cycling activities will affect your stress and therefore your recovery time, which does have a direct impact on your Daily Suggested Workouts.

Let’s start Week 3 🙂

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