The Best Way to Use Your Wearable’s Readiness Data

I have been wearing the Oura ring for 2-1/2 years now. I am also a fairly serious amateur athlete, training not only for fun and health, but also to get better and win competitions in my chosen sport. I find the data my ring gives me useful, but I also use it in basically the opposite way.

I have already written about my early experience with Ora . I’ve also spent some time with the WHOOP strap , which provides similar data as other gadgets – Garmin has a “body battery” and Fitbit has a “ready” meter. They all aim at the same thing: tell you how well your body responds to the stresses of training (and life). Professional athletes and celebrities use gadgets: Oura is more popular among biohackers, Whoop among athletes, and Garmin among runners. (Despite all this, I chose Oura because wearing a ring is less annoying than a bracelet.)

The marketing for these gadgets always puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that they can tell you when it’s time to skip a workout or go easy. I think I understand why – this is an easy way to connect the ideas of hard work and good recovery. Armed with solid data, the theory goes, you can make smart decisions about how hard to train and how to support your recovery. If you’ve never thought about recovery or training stress before, this might make sense. But it’s actually a little different from how you should think about these things.

Don’t skip a workout because the score tells you

If there’s one thing I could yell from the rooftops, it would be this: never skip a workout or do athletics just because your smart gadget tells you to. (If you are feeling sick or hurt, it may be appropriate to skip this, but you would have known about it without grading.)

Why don’t you listen to the app on it? This is a matter of short and long term planning, and if you have serious fitness goals, you should definitely think about the long term . A day at the gym is not just a day at the gym; this is part of a training block that will last weeks or months, and each block has a goal. Sometimes you’re building a baseline fitness level, and other times you’re preparing for a competition. If you play team sports, you will have pre-season, off-season, and off-season training.

If you were managing a team, you wouldn’t expect your star player to wake up on game day and say, “Sorry coach, my watch says I’m only 50% recovered so I can’t play today.” And as a recreational person, you are both a player and your own coach, and you deserve to be taken seriously. It’s one thing to take a vacation in extreme circumstances (you’re sick, or you need to travel, or you’re having very severe menstrual cramps today). But if you’re feeling good, there’s no good reason to skip or skip a workout because of an app score.

Short-term decisions, such as skipping or changing today’s workout, are for contingencies that require a short-term solution. But “I skip a workout if my readiness score is below X” is a series of short-term decisions with long-term consequences. If you’re less than stellar on a regular basis (which you probably should be if you’re working hard), you’ll miss out on a significant amount of training and won’t complete your training block as planned.

Instead, your problem should be solved through long-term planning . Either your training program is too difficult and not suitable for you, or your training program is designed so that you have to do it when you are a little tired, and instead of doing the work, you are just a coward. In any case, you need to fix something (training program, recovery, attitude) that cannot be fixed by skipping one workout.

Training stress is part of training

Let’s go back to the idea I mentioned above: it can be good to have low “recovery” or “ready” scores. If you only think about the short term, this may seem strange. Wouldn’t you like to be at the top of your game all day, every day?

That’s the problem. Exercise is work. This is stress on your body. That’s the whole point. Your body responds to this stress by becoming stronger. Without stress, you will never get better. And as a result of this stress, you get tired. If you’re a runner, it’s normal to feel exhausted after a long Saturday run, no matter what you do to recover in the evening. On Sunday you will probably want to relax. This does not mean that the long term was bad for you or that you did something wrong. It simply means that you have done the hard work and your body is going through a strengthening process.

This is how smart programming differs from knee-jerk decision making based on recovery scores. Your gadget will probably tell you to relax on Sunday if you just ran a long run on Saturday. You must? It depends on who you are and what your goals are. The beginner running program will give you a rest day on Sunday because you’ve done enough in the week. An intermediate program might instead give you a light “recovery” run to help you get more miles without putting too much strain on you. And if you’re an ultramarathoner, you can add more mileage on Sunday to practice running on tired legs. In such a training program, fatigue is not a necessary evil, but a valuable training tool.

Your recovery gadget does not know what program you are using. He just sees that your performance indicates that you are tired. What to do with it depends on how you want to train. Like ChatGPT , fitness wearables aren’t smart enough to be your trainer.

Compare your recovery rates to what you expect from your current learning stage.

If you only train when you feel 100%, you will miss many training days. To be fair, the algorithms of these recovery devices understand this at least a little. You will get an “optimal” or “green” score on your best days and a “good” or “yellow” score on days when you still expect stable performance. But that doesn’t mean you should stay at home just because you’re tired or think your workouts are going to be hard. It makes more sense to compare your recovery to what you should expect at the current stage of training.

For example, if you have a training week that is supposed to be hard and you are getting optimal recovery every day, this could be a sign that your workouts are too light. If you’re supposed to shed fatigue during pre-competition tapers but your recovery is constantly going down the drain, it might be time to rethink your plan and make sure you’re really reducing your training volume enough to allow yourself to recover.

Recovery data that is really useful

So far I have told you what to ignore. So let me tell you what data from my Oura I actually use.

First, I ignore the readiness and sleep metrics themselves and look at the raw data. Each of these scores is determined by an algorithm that takes into account many different variables. Some of these variables excite me and some don’t. For example, I find that long, slow bike rides on a rest day are better for me than sitting on the couch all day, but this means that I don’t follow Ura’s idea of ​​what a rest day should be, and so she disapproves and lowers my score.

Heart rate

I find heart rate variability , or HRV, to be the most useful number. I used to pay more attention to resting heart rate (HR), but after I traced those numbers a bit on a spreadsheet and compared them to how I actually felt and how I performed in the gym hall, I now believe that the heart rate is better. indicator of how my recovery is going.

Resting heart rate is still useful for identifying more serious problems, such as if I got too little sleep that night, or if I was sick and didn’t fully recover. (Some people think Oura tells them when they’re about to get sick, but I don’t; I recover quickly in the first few days after a cold, even though I feel terrible.)

If my HRV is high most days, I’m probably recovering well enough to keep my workouts going. If it’s average, it usually means I’m on a heavy training block and I need to focus on getting enough sleep and taking care of my body and mental health. And if I have a low HRV and a high heart rate for more than one or two days a month, that’s a sign that I’m either struggling with training intensity or staying up late and/or drinking more than I should. .

Time in bed (but not sleep phases)

I don’t trust my sleep stage data at all. In my first review of Oura , I wrote that it underestimated my REM minutes. This is still true, although Oura is beta testing a new algorithm that seems to work better. However, I would still not trust wearables to accurately measure sleep stages.

But I appreciate that I see all my time in bed . I don’t make training decisions based on how much sleep I get, but if I find myself sleep deprived for several nights in a row, I make sure to go to bed early the next couple of days. I could make this decision based simply on how tired I feel, but I’ve found that a solid number helps me drag my midnight ass into bed even when I don’t want to go.

Have a plan of action

The most important thing to know when tracking data is how you intend to use it . I reject the idea that I should use recovery data to make everyday decisions about how to train. So how should I use it?

For real checking sleep time

Sleep is one of the biggest levers we can use when it comes to getting more energy at the gym or just in life in general. Wanting to sleep is not the same as actually getting enough sleep, so it’s important for me to make sure that my efforts are paying off. The “time in bed” metric is most useful here.

To adjust the intensity of training

Sometimes I make decisions about my training in the longer term – week by week, not day by day. This is not the case when I am following my trainer’s very specific program (although I will discuss any issues with him if necessary). But there are times when I have the freedom to decide how hard I train.

If the workout is hard, but I feel good and my recovery rates are good, it tells me that I have the opportunity to slightly increase the intensity if I want to.

Pay more attention to recovery

If my recovery rates are dropping, it’s a sign that I need to pay more attention to what I’m doing outside of the gym. ( You could lower the intensity of your workouts, but this is usually not necessary.)

The first thing I will do is sleep. If I wake up early for a morning workout, I can get some sleep by scheduling that workout later in the day. I will also do my best to go to bed earlier – easier said than done – and I might consider using melatonin and reviewing my sleep hygiene habits .

Along with my sleep schedule, I could work on other areas of recovery. Eating more and doing more low-intensity cardio helps my body deal with stress during workouts. (I swear, cardio is a cheat code for performance.) These factors don’t always lead to better recovery rates, but they do seem to help me feel better and get more work done.

By using my recovery data in this way, I am still in control of my workout and still know how my body is responding to that workout. The little bundle of sensors I put on my finger is not my coach, my boss, or my mom. I consider it for what it is: one of the many tools that help me in my learning.