Garmin recovery time

[TheFoz]

I’ve just joined the gym in the last month and I’m going to a few classes a week and doing a few sessions on my own. On Friday I did 2 classes, a strength class and a yoga class, 12 hours apart. After this my recovery time was 96 hours. It’s at 66 hours at the moment.

I have a class booked for 12 hours time, should I do it or skip it? I haven’t done any exercise since Friday evening.

Your body is much better at keeping score than a watch.

Its really important you don’t start to ignore your body’s cues in favour of a device.

Use the data lightly, and check in on yourself in the morning before you decide.

I find my Garmin to massively overestimate how much recovery time I need. It’s an 8-minute downhill bike ride to collect DD from school. It often recommends that I need 3-7 hours recovery time.

Ignore it, or you’ll never be doing anything! I find it useless, massively overestimates recovery time. It is the kind of feature that puts me off using my Garmin tbh! I’ve turned it off, with some other dubious ‘features’ like the food and drinks reminder.

If I trusted my body I wouldn’t do a thing! Peri meno with toddler and poor sleep so I’m constantly knackered!

Thanks for the advice, I’ll take the recovery time with a pinch of salt.

It helps to think that it's measuring the time before you could do a strenuous activity (long or hard session) without being affected by being tired. If you have something easy planned or don't mind being a bit slower than you could be on a hard workout, you're good to go.

It also takes into account how well you are sleeping, so being sleep deprived would mean you're getting longer recovery times. I would always say use the device to prompt the question "am I doing too much/little etc, but always override if your body disagrees with your watch.

I take most of what my Garmin tells me with a pinch of salt, mine is currently predicting me a 3:11 marathon, which is definitely not going to happen!

What is useful is resting heart rate. If that's unusually high rest, as it shows youre still recovering. Otherwise if you feel OK, carry on.