I’d ignore Garmin, its constantly for me saying something positive such as ideal (or whatever term they use) or peaking, then goes the next day to unproductive and not enough Anaerobic/ VO2 max. I’m following a TR plan with a longer term goal rather than a random stat which only seems to look into the past.
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Meh. Mostly time constraints and decreasing daylight, but also the temperature is dropping and I really hate riding when it gets too cool. I’m a Sweaty Betty and getting soaked through with sweat and getting chilly just sucks, for me. I’ve probably said this a million times, but I’d much rather ride when it’s 80F than when it’s 60F. Plus I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and riding outside in the autumn (to say nothing about winter) kind of … brings me down, I guess? It’s just not as fun 
I mean, I’m still riding outside, when I can, but I don’t expect that I’ll be going more than a few more weeks.
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I’m a bit confused.
Their polarized example schedule for 5-8 hours is hardly polarized at all.
With 2 VO2max sessions, 1 endurance, and 1 tempo/sweetspot session.
It’s not even polarized in time, let alone in sessions.
So to me it seems the crossover point lies more in their 10h+ example, although that still has 2 out of 5 sessions marked as VO2max sessions.
yeah, I don’t know where he got that chart either. I googled “HR Tempo Zone” and this was the first reply. It has the definitions of the HR zones. That should help.
I have won a national championship this year, but I have never had my watch or bike computer say a workout was productive. Never once. I completely ignore that Garmin screen. I have no idea what they are judging that on.
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Cycling Science | Garmin Technology | United States
Evidently, they keep track of your ATL, but don’t seem to mention anything about CTL. [Edit: it does mention chronic 4-week training load later in the writeup]
Back when I first got a Garmin, before I had a power meter, I tried to follow one of the garmin cycling plans (I forget which one), and it never seemed to think my training was productive.
Yeah, I suspect time-in-zone for the week would look more pyramidal. I didn’t post it in support of polarized, that’s a label they use.
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When looking at my data I use my laptop. Don’t have access to it right now so on my iPhone went to connect.garmin.com and pulled up a tempo workout. Here is how to find it:
Click on the question mark…
Scroll to the bottom, expand Primary Benefit, and scroll down some more.
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I don’t pay much attention to the productive/maintaining/unproductive graph, however switching from TR plans to FasCat plans (and then FasCat coach) resulted in:
- a lot more Productive status on my Garmin 530, a lot more
- broke thru 250W FTP ceiling I saw using TR for 2 years
- my entire power curve improved vs TR
- stopped having minor knee issues
- felt faster and stronger on and off the bike
Doubt I’ll ever win any cycling championships, started too late in life and not genetically gifted in that way. And I agree with you about Productive/Maintaining/Detraining (Training Status) not being helpful to guide training. Never found that useful, I’d rather focus on 3 or 4 week training blocks and stick to that plan.
However the 4 week load (anaerobic, high aerobic, low aerobic) has been in agreement with times that I wasn’t able to follow my coach’s plan because of life I was forced to cut out z2 / low aerobic rides. So I use it as a rear view mirror, and when low aerobic suffers I make a point of doing more z2 work.
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Ok, interesting. I’ve honestly never clicked on an activity in Garmin Connect since I typically look at WKO and Strava.
It’s kind of frustrating that you have to hunt and peck between so many screens on one’s head unit, garmin connect web site, and the app. It’s too bad they don’t put it all in one place and make it more usable.
Not on mine. Never had it. I only have a Garmin 530.
Do you have a Garmin wearable?
No load focus for me there. I get Training Status with tabs for Current, 4w, 12w, 6m.
That’s what I have. Believe you need a Garmin wearable to see it in iOS app.
Yeah, I have issues with using HR too. I’m in my 50s and I take daily medications that seem to keep my HR 25-30 beats below max unless I am absolutely drilling it. Some days I sleep well, some I don’t. Some days I have 3 espressos before I ride and some days 1. All those things make hr higher or lower, regardless of whether I did a PZ2 ride or PZ6. I have the same issue where Garmin tends to complain that I have a lack of “High Aerobic” rides and the needle barely moves even if I just did a long Threshold ride. I’d much prefer using power zones. Just trying to help explain how the Garmin training advice works.
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Garmin uses 5 zone model for HR and you can adjust %. I’m using LTHR and modified %, its pretty good.
For power zones I’ve modified the 7 zone’s % to match TR or TP or whatever.
When training on the bike my HR is generally reliable and consistent. There are a few days with outlier HR.
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I think the answer to whether long endurance rides are beneficial is easy - they absolutely are, and if you have time then you should do them. If time is a limiter then incorporating Sweetspot to compensate for low volume is the next best thing, and you can certainly get great results from limited volume with this approach, even for longer events.
Garmin training status I think has a whole bunch of issues which make it of questionable use for a lot of people. I pretty much ignore it for the following reasons:
- It seems over-reliant on HR. Personally my HR at any given power varies quite a bit depending on time of day, temperature, caffeine, sugar, fatigue, etc. Over the long term my estimated VO2 tracks quite well with the training I’m doing, but in the shorter term there are a lot of ups and downs which I have very little faith in, and which in turn drive misleading changes in Training Status
- It’s pretty hit and miss on rides not recorded on a Garmin device. E.g. some of my TR rides get categorised with a training benefit, some don’t. When they do it’s likely to be wrong - I’ve had a VO2 max ride categorised with Primary Benefit as “Tempo” despite spending 0 minutes in the Tempo zone. I assume it just looked at AP or NP to categorise the workout instead of time in zone
- Seems to be inconsistent between devices. When I go into the Connect app on my phone and look at Training Status it gives me the option to toggle between my Edge and Fenix devices. They each show different statuses over the last 4 weeks - there are periods where one is Productive and one is Unproductive at the same time. I have triple checked my power and HR zones are set the same on both, I’ve checked that Physio TrueUp is turned on, I’ve synced both devices. Maybe I’ve missed a setting somewhere but honestly the fact that Garmin even think that there should be an option to have different training statuses on different devices (as opposed to Garmin Connect being a single source of truth based on all the data it has available) speaks volumes about how well they’ve thought this through!
I think if I recorded 100% of training on the same Garmin device, and maybe was more consistent in terms of the conditions in which I trained, I’d get better data. But even so I think Garmin is a long way down the list of tools I’d use to plan and analyse my training.
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I just hit the reset button and these are the defaults, annotated with my notes:
Defaults are aligned with Coggan Classic zones except for zone7.
Are yours the same? Those should be the default as I hit Reset and it changed % and changed FTP to 200W.
You can align Garmin zones with TR by changing % like this:
Because TR inserts Sweet Spot as the new zone4 which moves threshold to z5 and vo2max to z6 and anaerobic to z7 (dropping neuromuscular).
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Thanks for this. I went and checked my Garmin zones after your last post and was trying to figure out why the TR zones were different than Coggen.
Yes I always found it confusing. When I switched to FasCat plans, they have you add Sweet Spot in TrainingPeaks:
But it doesn’t replace a Coggan Classic zone.
You can add Coggan Classic back into TR:
But you have to do that workout by workout, instead of having it permanently defined like in TrainingPeaks.
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They use power if it is available. If not it uses HR.