Why I Stopped Using Garmin to Track My Metrics
Tracking health metrics is all the rage nowadays.
We see all kinds of products and apps promising to help us with it, but should you be doing it? Is it worth it in the long run?
I used to meticulously log all my metrics, but in this post I’ll detail why I stopped tracking my Garmin metrics and help you decide if you should, too.
Heart rate variability, sleep score, stress score, training readiness and a morning report.
All things I used to love tracking and seeing on my watch.
Not anymore though.
I have a Garmin Forerunner 955 and I used to love the thing to bits. I’d wear it overnight and tried tracking as much data as I could.
Our love story was cut short when I started feeling like it was doing more harm than good for me, my health and my training.
In this article, I’ll run through why I stopped tracking and using these metrics, why I think other people should consider stopping this as well, and some practical tips for you to use instead.
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I’ve had plenty of clients who’ve had some confusion or even gotten really upset with what their watch has told them, and I’m sure that others would have experienced this too.
It’s a common problem and the issues are around both the reliability and the interpretation of the data, as well as what this can mean for an individual.
Is the data reliable enough?
Have you ever had your watch tell you that you had a fantastic night’s sleep, even though you wake up and you feel like crap?
Or, you had a bad sleep but you wake up bright-eyed like you’re on top of the world?
Well, same here. I’ve also had it where my watch has told me I should take it easy but I’ve felt super motivated and not quite believed it’s true.
What displays on that little screen might not always be what’s best for you in reality, and that’s where the problem with reliability comes in.
Heart Rate Variability
Let’s start by talking about how accurate the heart rate variability metre is, because it’s a super interesting area.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. A variation is completely normal, and how big that variation is depends on the balance between your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system.
In a sports context, HRV can be used as an indicator of someone’s readiness to perform or train. It gives info about the balance between stress and recovery in an athlete's body.
Higher HRV values generally indicate good fitness and good recovery, while lower values may suggest stress, fatigue, or even overtraining although there’s more nuance to it but we won’t get into that here.
What’s worth saying is that HRV is a genuine, validated metric which can be used to help understand readiness and recovery, and has lots of scientific research behind it.
The question now is whether Garmin’s is accurate and reliable, and this is, unfortunately, where it falls down.
In terms of validated approaches to using HRV in a sports context, the plethora of data and accepted measurements is obtained by tracking HRV immediately in the morning with a high quality measuring tool.
However, Garmin’s HRV status is based on wearing and tracking your HRV through the night, and this doesn’t have a good body of literature to support it from a sport-specific, readiness point of view.
Now, Garmin does offer a health snapshot function, which is a 2 minute reading, and technically you could use this. But a drawback is it doesn’t allow you to monitor this over time which would mean keeping your own log which for most people isn’t realistic.
In summary, I’m not saying your watch can’t track your HRV accurately, but the reading it’s giving you isn’t that helpful when we’re considering training. We’re going to pick up more on this later when we talk about whether trends in the data are useful.
Sleep Score, Stress Score and Training Readiness
There is a key difference between the sleep and stress scores and the heart rate variability, and that’s that these scores are estimated.
Heart rate variability is truly measured, but the sleep and stress scores that you get are extrapolated from the data that has been recorded. As such, these are guesses and calculated estimates about how your measured data applies to you.
Your Garmin cannot actually track whether you have slept well. It can estimate how much of sleep or rest you might be getting based on movement and estimate what sleep cycle you’re in, but it can’t give you a truly reliable reading.
Like-wise, the stress score is based on your HRV throughout the day. Although it can track your stress score, it doesn’t have data to back that up.
It’s estimating from extrapolated data how stressed you might or might not be based on your HRV, again, essentially guessing how it’s truly affecting you.
Training readiness is the final score, made up of things like your HRV, stress and sleep history, training load and your recovery time.
You might already know what I’m going to say here; this is all simply guesswork. It might be right, be it might be totally wrong, because Garmin is mostly using estimates to determine your readiness for training.
That’s a whole lot of estimation and in my opinion isn’t a reliable method for people to use, because you aren’t using objective, tracked data for the most part.
Are trends useful?
Assuming you do track all your metrics, if you start seeing your training readiness go down because your sleep score is poor, your stress score is high and your load is high, should you listen to this?
Quite possible, yes.
In my opinion, what these metrics and tools should do is prompt you to critically evaluate your current lifestyle and diet.
Are you actually sleeping for enough hours a night? Are you switching off, following good sleep hygiene, not drinking alcohol or caffeine before bed?
Have you massively increased your training load, or are smashing high intensity after high intensity session?
Is your work super stressful and an area that you should prioritize improving because this will actually improve your overall happiness and health?
This is a reasonable way to use the data if you want to track.
For the most part, I would ignore the actual specifics. I’d look at the trends and critically analyze what is or isn’t working well, and make sure I fix them if they aren’t.
The mental load
I mentioned that I’ve had clients who felt really upset after seeing their Garmin score or that they saw a sudden change in their HRV and became really worried.
This ties in somewhat with my own experience with data, and is a big reason I stopped tracking my data. Unfortunately, I don’t actually think this is talked about enough and I expect others have had similar experiences.
Personally, tracking my sleep, my HRV and other metrics made me incredibly aware of them.
I’d roll over in the night and a part of my brain would think ah crap, this might affect my sleep score. Or I’d go to the toilet and worry it would mess up my HRV because I’ve done more movement and therefore my HRV would have a weird blip.
(All ridiculous really, I know).
And one of the first things that would happen when I wake up is that I’d get a morning report from my Garmin, that would give me this deluge of data. So instead of just waking up naturally and giving myself some time, I’d worry about what I’d see, whether I should go for my intervals and how recovered my watch thought I’d was.
For me, that just wasn’t healthy or sustainable.
I preferred to go back to basics, focus on getting enough sleep, balancing my training load and I now use a recovery-on-demand approach.
I have a training plan which I try to stick to, but if I’m not feeling up to a hard session I simply skip it or do easy work. I listen to my body, how fatigued I feel, and when I’m feeling motivated and ready I get the work done.
I’ve found this is so much more helpful for genuinely being in tune with my body and training consistently, especially when I balance it with a busy family and work life. It’s so easy to get sucked into the data when it doesn’t really help.
Should you use Garmin metrics?
I can’t give you a specific answer as to whether you should use the data that Garmin provides, but I can provide some guidance for you to follow.
Firstly, it would be to understand whether the data you’re looking at, either Garmin or any other device, is measured or estimated.
Heart rate variability is measured whereas training readiness is estimated, and measured data is more accurate and worthwhile than estimated.
That does come with it’s own problem which links to my second piece of guidance, which is to know what is good, bad or neutral data and have a plan of what you’re going to do with it.
This is difficult because data can be an absolutely minefield (and if there’s actually a particular set of data you’re interested in let me know in the comments and I’ll try to factor this into a future post) but knowing what the trends actually mean and having a plan in place means that if you see changes in the data you know what to do, and can have rules to follow rather than coming at them from a reactive, emotional point of view.
Finally, use the metrics for context and a reason to critically analyze your own habits. Be truthful, reflect on them and take action if you need to.
Prioritizing your sleep or reducing your life stress will be far more influential to your health and performance, and if you can use a metric to make you understand this then that is definitely a good way to manage things.
You can watch the full video for this here on YouTube if you’d prefer, and you can also check out whether protein shakes are worth it too.
