Long gone are the days where your wearable tech only tracks steps. Nowadays, they’re real time health, performance, and nutritional dashboards that give you more information about your health and day-to-day activities than ever. But, what does all the data mean? How can I interpret the data to make more informed decisions about my life? What action steps should I take and what should I take with a grain of salt? Let’s dive in!
First off, let’s identify what wearables are not. They are not the end all be all information hub that we should make every little decision based off of. While the accuracy of wearable technology has improved greatly of the last couple of years, there are still some inaccuracies that occur that can’t make it a complete measure of health, fitness, and longevity.
So…what are wearables? At the core, wearables are tools to improve your individualized fitness and make long-term behavior change. With the data they provide as a guideline, you can identify when your sleep score is reduced and you can look back at the activities or food that led up to your bed time and how that could have been negatively impacted so you can make more informed decisions moving forward.
But how do I interpret all of the data that my wearable tech gives me? Great question! There’s a lot of data that we can get from our phones, watches, or rings now; But there are key areas that we can focus on to make the greatest change.
Sleep Duration and Stages
- Total sleep time – light/deep/REM sleep – sleep consistency (bed/wake times)
What you’re looking for is consistent sleep over perfect sleep. Ideally you have the same sleep and wake windows consistently across days. One bad night of sleep doesn’t really matter – patterns do. Aim for 7-9 hours on average a night. If your sleep is short that night, dial back the intensity. Poor sleep + hard training is a recipe for increased risk of injury.
Hear Rate Variability (HRV)
- This is the variability between heartbeats (measured overnight while you sleep). This will often be labeled as your recovery or readiness score
When we have a high HRV, our nervous system is recovered, resilient, and ready to go! That means you should be able to lift heavier and/or push higher intensity. A lower HRV would intake greater stress load. Meaning something is causing a disruption in your recovery (work stress, chronic high training load, poor sleep, etc.). This means your training should reduce in intensity and volume to accommodate for the lack of readiness to support long term growth.
Heart Rate Zones
- This is a combination of resting heart rate, average heart rate during workouts, and time spent in specific zones
Your heart rate zones are best off of % of max heart rate. Each zone gives a specific training adaptation that involves specific recovery times for optimal performance. There are 5 different zones (1-5). Zone 1 (50-60%) is your recovery and regeneration, zone 2 (60-70%) is your aerobic base and endurance, zone 3 (70-80%) is what’s called tempo work and more moderate intensity building resilience at higher outputs, zone 4 (80-90%) is your high intensity zone, zone 5 (90-100%) is max effort or power work to build speed and explosiveness.
Where you should look to spend the bulk of your time is in zone 2 with a little bit of zone 4 mixed in. This is the most bang for your buck when we’re talking about cardio and intensity. Zone 2 training will improve your HRV, sleep, and overall endurance while not taxing your nervous system too much. Zone 4/5 will help build speed and power while also enhancing your ability to sustain higher effort output.
Stress and Recovery Scores
- This data will show your daytime stress estimates (this is not a perfect science) combining recovery and readiness scores
It’s important to note that stress is a combination of training + work + life – sleep quality. Stress is not just exercise. High stress + higher intensity training will begin to compound fatigue and if done consistently enough over time will lead to potential burnout. Your body doesn’t know the difference between deadlifts and emails when it comes to “things that stress you out.”
There is more data that your wearables can go into but these 4 will help you understand more about when and when not to push yourself for sustainable outcomes and improved longevity. Ask yourself these 3 simple questions to help determine what the next best step is for you:
- How did I sleep last night?
- How recovered am I?
- What kind of stress am I under today?
Answer these 3 questions then choose which makes the most sense: To push yourself today? To maintain a consistently level? Or to pull back and reduce intensity and volume?
What’s great is that no matter the answer you come to, it’s for your long term benefit! The only downside is when you ignore the signals and the data and choose to do something your body isn’t ready for. Sometimes the best thing for you isn’t to go hard all of the time. Be smart and deliberate with your training and choices and that will lead you to better progress and performance in the long run.
