I incorporate stretching into my general fitness routine and use my Garmin watch to capture it as “Yoga.” This syncs to Strava and then automatically updates in TrainerRoad’s calendar. However, I’ve noticed that TrainerRoad treats it as a stressor, which often flags my next day as a yellow day in the red light/green light feature.
Since stretching is low intensity and not meant to impact my recovery, I’m curious how others handle this. Change how I log it on Garmin, or handle it differently in TrainerRoad?
Any tips or strategies would be greatly appreciated!
You shouldn’t record, as in assign TSS, to stretching. I realize it auto assigned TSS, but this is incorrect. At best it’s irrelevant and at worst it messes with the algorithm assigning fatigue when there is none. You can make a note on the calendar instead to track stretching or edit the workout. Or don’t put it in as Yoga on your garmin.
I guess I’m nobody as I record it as well as general stability and other mobility work. Logging is a way to track to ensure it’s completed. There are quite a few athletes who log it as I’d estimate at least 50% of the athletes interviewed on the How They Train podcast or on the Scientific Triathlon podcast note a couple hours logged of similar work per week, but they don’t assign stress to it.
To @Nitrotron , I don’t use Trainer Road so I’m not sure if their training log can be manipulated manually, but within training peaks I manually override and assign 0 TSS and therefore any fatigue incorrectly assigned is removed.
FWIW I tend to record yoga on the garmin watch as well. Keeps me consistent with doing it, there’s no really useful data within the session itself obviously but some useful correlations. E.g. Strong correlation between doing yoga in the evening and better sleep quality and higher HRV that night. And the correlation is stronger when I go to an actual class or follow an instructor on the TV than when I do the same exercises from memory while watching TV or listening to a podcast. Which suggests the benefits are probably as much from the mindfulness as they are from the actual stretching. But which I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t tracked the sessions and looked at the data trends. And looking over weeks and months there’s also strong correlation between my sleep quality and HRV and the consistency of my training and numbers on the bike. So knowing that yoga actually has a quantifiable benefit for me makes me more likely to do it and more likely to do the form of yoga (instructor led) which gives me the most benefits. Nice virtuous circle! Obviously set those sessions to private on strava.
To the OP, I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a yoga session flipping a day from clear to yellow, if it’s doing that then maybe they’ve just coded yoga the same as strength sessions (which I have seen trigger a yellow and justifiably so). That’s definitely a yellow I’d be more inclined to ignore if I felt OK, though I’d also guess that for a yoga session to tip you over the edge you must have been pretty close to a yellow already.
So…I my guess is the Yoga session recorded via Garmin is tracking your HR, passes through Strava and gets assigned a TSS in TR. So, your total TSS goes up more than expected, and a yellow day is triggered.
In my plan, I have my rest day (monday) scheduled for “Recovery Strength and Stretching.” Really, all I do is play around with very lightweight versions of my kettlebell strength workouts and stretch and foam roll. I did this last night an my HRV jumped 30% and I was coming of a 2 hour max effort race on Sunday! So maybe there is something to it.
At any rate, maybe just schedule the yoga sessions on your TR calendar instead of recording them on your watch. Then, just go in and mark as complete, adjust the actual time, whatever. But the accountability of seeing Yoga on the schedule is still there. Oh, and don’t assign a TSS! I personally don’t assign a TSS to any of my strength or record my doggy walks…
This is what I’ve been doing when it triggers a yellow day the following day and I have a work out planned for that day. It’s a pain to have to delete it and then have the algorithm rerun to clear the yellow or not.
If you know it’s the yoga/stretching that’s triggered the yellow … can you not save yourself the work and just ignore the yellow?
As a general rule for life, I have found that identifying things I can ignore and ignoring the living f*%£ out of them makes for a considerably more serene existence.