Any good wearables for total stress (work + life + training)? Would it matter?

Triathlon Forum
1

If the past several months have taught me anything it’s that work/life stress definitely impacts training. I know this isn’t news to anyone, and I’ve been told plenty of times that the body doesn’t differentiate between different types of stress, but it’s never been so apparent to me as it has since trying to juggle work/home/kids during COVID. I got through summer ok and did a lot of bike volume in the absence of races. Then once the fall semester started everything went to shit. I’ve since cut back training but physically I feel more beat up then when I was putting in a bunch more training.

So I’m wondering – are there any wearables out there that actually do a decent job of quantifying overall stress (life + work + training)? The Whoop strap looked promising but I’m not interested in their monthly subscription model. Restwise is also subscription based. Garmin and Suunto use FirstBeat and Polar has their own thing, have any of them been useful to you?

Right now I have an older Suunto that I use with a Tickr Fit. I’ve never had anything that does 24hr heart rate monitoring. I just wonder if any of these wearables that track HRV or whatever are able to provide some insight into overall stress since I’m not as self-aware or objective as I should be.

2

I don’t think that the stress/recovery numbers provided by wearables should be taken too seriously. Sure, HRV is interesting, but how is that being measured? Wrist-based HR tracking is kind of just good enough at the moment, and still not as accurate as a chest strap or (of course) ECG. So as long as wrist-based HR sensors have mediocre accuracy, my confidence in their ability to provide meaningful and actionable HRV data is low. I might look at the numbers provided by a 24-h wearable out of interest, but I wouldn’t shape we day or week around them. My 2 cents.

3

Check out the Oura ring. I bought one years ago not to monitor stress in particular but because it gives me a “readiness score” every morning based on heart rate, hrv, activity, etc. It’s been awesome. No monthly fees.

Only drawback is that it doesn’t track well when I’m on the bike but I don’t care as I’m using garmin for this.

4

Garmin uses the body battery, stress rating, an updated recovery time algorithm, and has now added suggested workouts based on all of those factors plus your current training load and balance. Using the these metrics on the 945, and they seem to match up more or less with how I feel day to day, especially the body battery. It’s also nice to get a lot of this kind of data from Garmin without having to pay for another subscription like whoop.

5

Check out the Oura ring. I bought one years ago not to monitor stress in particular but because it gives me a “readiness score” every morning based on heart rate, hrv, activity, etc. It’s been awesome. No monthly fees.

I hadn’t heard of the Oura. Looks interesting. I’d rather wear a ring at night than a watch. But for the price of an Oura + Coros Pace 2 I could pick up a Polar Vantage V2 that essentially does both things in one device…

Garmin uses the body battery, stress rating, an updated recovery time algorithm, and has now added suggested workouts based on all of those factors plus your current training load and balance. Using the these metrics on the 945, and they seem to match up more or less with how I feel day to day, especially the body battery. It’s also nice to get a lot of this kind of data from Garmin without having to pay for another subscription like whoop.

I like that Garmin has all of FirstBeat behind it, I just haven’t had the best experience with Garmin before. Too buggy and too much stuff I don’t care about (music, contactless payments, etc.). That’s why I’m a Suunto user and have a Stages M50 for the bike. Though my old Edge 500 just won’t die.

I’m leaning toward a Vantage 2. If anyone has one I’d be very curious to know what you think of it.

One irony is that a few years ago, at the ripe old age of 36, I got a pacemaker – an extremely accurate HRM that’s always on and has a >9 year battery but the damned thing isn’t bluetooth!!! (my wife was not amused when this was the first question I asked my cardiologist when he told me I needed one)

6

I’ve tried Whoop, Garmin Body Battery, HRV4Training, and Elite HRV.

Garmin Body Battery is the worst, in my opinion. It seems to use sleep as “recharging” and workouts and waking-hours as “discharging.” So it’s mostly a measure of how well you’re sleeping, and also letting you know you’re tired at the end of they (duh). Vs. a real measure of cumulative stress.

The other 3 are “OK”, but Whoop wasn’t worth the subscription for me. And I’m starting to lose faith in HRV altogether. Sometimes it seems to correlate. But sometimes it makes no sense…like telling me I’m at “10” when I destroyed myself in a workout the day before and don’t want to get out of bed.

7

If the past several months have taught me anything it’s that work/life stress definitely impacts training.

+1. With great surprise I found that stress and psychological wellbeing have by far the best correlation with my race performance. Kinda disappointing, we’re supposed to be made of iron, right? Emotional stuff shouldn’t affect us!!! /pink

For a couple of years I thought I can mitigate it somehow by measuring other stuff and adjusting my training. I’ve measured everything that I could, both objective trainerpeaks metrics and subjective reporting. The only two that correlated with actual performance were sleep quality and weight. :slight_smile: Not really actionable, both are just indicators of stress.

May be there are people, who are capable to measure their workouts and plan races with great precision, like in `Triathlon 2.0’. I envy them.

I don’t know how to solve it for emotional people. For myself I found the best approach is to solve the problem from the other end - psychological wellbeing. Whatever helps: meditation crap, self-help motivation, discipline exercises, solving root causes of stress, family support - peak your poison!

8

If the past several months have taught me anything it’s that work/life stress definitely impacts training. I know this isn’t news to anyone, and I’ve been told plenty of times that the body doesn’t differentiate between different types of stress, but it’s never been so apparent to me as it has since trying to juggle work/home/kids during COVID. I got through summer ok and did a lot of bike volume in the absence of races. Then once the fall semester started everything went to shit. I’ve since cut back training but physically I feel more beat up then when I was putting in a bunch more training.

So I’m wondering – are there any wearables out there that actually do a decent job of quantifying overall stress (life + work + training)? The Whoop strap looked promising but I’m not interested in their monthly subscription model. Restwise is also subscription based. Garmin and Suunto use FirstBeat and Polar has their own thing, have any of them been useful to you?

Right now I have an older Suunto that I use with a Tickr Fit. I’ve never had anything that does 24hr heart rate monitoring. I just wonder if any of these wearables that track HRV or whatever are able to provide some insight into overall stress since I’m not as self-aware or objective as I should be.

No.

Don’t spend money on wearables for recovery monitoring.

The following is a snippet I’ve shared with clients about wearables and calorie expenditure:
Wearable technology at it’s best has a 10% margin of error on AVERAGE for a population which means that for any given person it could be up or down by 20%, from reality… and that’s for the BEST of them. I can’t remember which ones have tested out the best, but they’re all essentially really good at making people over-confident in the amount of calories that they’re burning daily and lead to far more headaches than accurate diet recommendations, unfortunately. The only way to get accurate calorie burn information is through direct gas exchange or in multi-million-dollar calorimetry rooms. There’s just too much variability in human HR, heat production and energetic efficiency (movement economy, ie. how much energy is burned to accomplish roughly the same movement), that no amount of fancy prediction models can hone it in farther than the current technology does… at least not yet, and I’d wager at least not for the next 10-15 years.

Monitoring / tracking recovery, stress, training load etc, is much much worse.

9

The only way to get accurate calorie burn information is through direct gas exchange or in multi-million-dollar calorimetry rooms.

Random fact – I work at the same institution, and in the same department, as Wilbur Olin Atwater who was the first to quantify the caloric content of different macronutrients using a respiration calorimeter chamber he built over 120 years ago. We still have the bicycle erg that he had students ride while living in the chamber for up to several days!

10

The following is a snippet I’ve shared with clients about wearables and calorie expenditure:
Wearable technology at it’s best has a 10% margin of error on AVERAGE for a population which means that for any given person it could be up or down by 20%, from reality… and that’s for the BEST of them.

Why the all-caps? :slight_smile:

n=1, but I disagree on calorie tracking. It’s been brilliant for me. Set my app to 1lb. per week.

Lost 1lb. per week.

Though the app does let you scale if you’re having trouble, e.g. mine has a daily baseline burn of about ~2000 calories based on weight/age/gender, etc. But if your results aren’t matching your calculated calorie deficit you can easily just jog that baseline down a bit. This doesn’t require research-grade million-dollar rooms. Just enough so that most days you’re burning more than eating.

I’m using power-meter based kilojoules for most exercise (imported automatically from Strava).

I think the tech is just great for this stuff, though. It’s incredibly “freeing” to be able to eat large meals throughout the day knowing I’m still well within my daily budget. Before I was tracking I’d always feel guilty eating those meals. No need to now.

Here’s a screenshot of my app. 163.1 was yesterday. I’m nearly down to my goal, so will switch to “maintain” weight pretty soon.

weight.png

11

The following is a snippet I’ve shared with clients about wearables and calorie expenditure:
Wearable technology at it’s best has a 10% margin of error on AVERAGE for a population which means that for any given person it could be up or down by 20%, from reality… and that’s for the BEST of them.

Why the all-caps? :slight_smile:

n=1, but I disagree on calorie tracking. It’s been brilliant for me. Set my app to 1lb. per week.

Lost 1lb. per week.

Though the app does let you scale if you’re having trouble, e.g. mine has a daily baseline burn of about ~2000 calories based on weight/age/gender, etc. But if your results aren’t matching your calculated calorie deficit you can easily just jog that baseline down a bit. This doesn’t require research-grade million-dollar rooms. Just enough so that most days you’re burning more than eating.

I’m using power-meter based kilojoules for most exercise (imported automatically from Strava).

I think the tech is just great for this stuff, though. It’s incredibly “freeing” to be able to eat large meals throughout the day knowing I’m still well within my daily budget. Before I was tracking I’d always feel guilty eating those meals. No need to now.

Here’s a screenshot of my app. 163.1 was yesterday. I’m nearly down to my goal, so will switch to “maintain” weight pretty soon.

All caps because: attempting to emphasize that if 10% is the average, then for every person for whom the accuracy is perfect, there is a person for whom it’s a 20% difference from reality.

The population subset used in studies of this subject are a random sample of the population… which is not the actual population using the devices for the purpose of calorie expenditure information. In painful irony, it’s weight-loss-interested folks who represent a higher rate of usage of such devices and who also are overrepresented in the portion of the bell curve for whom calorie expenditure is overestimated by the devices.

Absolutely fantastic that it has helped you feel free from guilt. Seriously. So fantastic that I may experiment with this with a few of my clients who tend towards this pattern of thinking. So, THANK YOU! I see value here, in this population subset.

12

Incredible!!

13

Following up just for fun, here’s the bike Atwater had his students/subjects ride in his calorimetry chamber (the bike is currently mounted in our stock room):

and here’s what it looked like in use 100+ years years ago. Definitely a “your saddle’s too low and you need more reach” situation:

IMG_0605.jpg
calorimeter.jpg

14

That is seriously epic. What an awesome piece of history.

15

Garmin Body Battery is the worst, in my opinion. It seems to use sleep as “recharging” and workouts and waking-hours as “discharging.” So it’s mostly a measure of how well you’re sleeping, and also letting you know you’re tired at the end of they (duh). Vs. a real measure of cumulative stress.

i’ve found garmin body battery to be quite good at reflecting the amount of stress through the day outside of exercise and also reflecting quality of sleep rather than duration. i can have relaxed days where my body battery hardly drops at all and other days when i’m in principle not doing much but sitting at my desk getting stressed by work and my body battery drops as if i’m racing. sometimes it rises rapidly during sleep, sometimes not - most often there is a delay where the first few hours are not recharging which tends to match with days where i struggle to switch off.

where it fails for me is that it doesn’t reflect well the training stress since i use other garmin devices for that - it is aware of the training but doesn’t recognise the full impact on my “battery”

16

So I’m wondering – are there any wearables out there that actually do a decent job of quantifying overall stress (life + work + training)? The Whoop strap looked promising but I’m not interested in their monthly subscription model. Restwise is also subscription based. Garmin and Suunto use FirstBeat and Polar has their own thing, have any of them been useful to you?

Qualifier - I trained to be a pretty good, runner, then triathlete, and then cyclist, essentially on Perceived Exertion (PE), and with time and pace.

I won a Polar Heart Rate Monitor when I won a 5K running race back in the mid to late 1990’s. I was already nearing the end of my triathlon “career” at that point. But when I got the Polar unit and did a bunch of testing with efforts on the bike and the run, and EVERYTHING matched up in terms of the respective “zones”, and the bench-mark and classic training sessions I did all fell into the right areas and things you needed to do - in other words, the PE was not that far off. It had worked well for me! You don’t reach the level of performance that I did, without things matching up like that!!

Ditto with fatigue, and recovery. I now have an advance Polar unit - a Polar Vantage V. It literally can do EVERYTHING! I only use it for heart rate and GPS tracking. I do pay attention from time to time with what it’s telling me about what State I’m in - “Overreaching”, or that I’ve not slept well - but again, just like my experience with my first Polar unit year ago - it matches up well with how I really feel - If I have been in an “Overreaching” state for a few days, with the training I have been doing . . , guess what, I’m feeling a bit tired and run down!! :slight_smile: So you go easy for a few days, or take a day or two off!

There’s a tendency here to make things overly complicated. Inputs that you get from a wearable training tracker, are helpful - I’m not dismissing them - but what you body is actually telling you, is ALSO an important input. Sometimes the training is really hard, you feel shitty, but you keep pressing on. Other times, the combined input from your wearable technology and how you feel - say, maybe pressing on is NOT the best thing.

Remember, Endurance Sports training is a LONG game. To be your best, whatever that is, takes year and years. It’s important to keep that in mind as well with all the data and info that we do have at our disposal!

17

Thanks for your thoughts Steve. Always good to have a reality check from people who have been at this longer than I have.

There’s a tendency here to make things overly complicated. Inputs that you get from a wearable training tracker, are helpful - I’m not dismissing them - but what you body is actually telling you, is ALSO an important input. Sometimes the training is really hard, you feel shitty, but you keep pressing on. Other times, the combined input from your wearable technology and how you feel - say, maybe pressing on is NOT the best thing.

I fully agree with this and I continue to get better at listening to what my body is telling me during training. Where I think I’m falling short, more this year than any other, is understanding how I’m dealing with life stress. I’ve always been pretty good at working efficiently and juggling a lot without getting overwhelmed. Or at least I’ve thought. I think for many of us (all of us?) this year has been a whole different kind of stress test. What it’s made clear to me is that there’s a limit to what I can handle in terms of life stress just as there’s a limit to the amount of training stress I can handle. The training stress is easier for me to be objective about. It’s the life stress that’s much more of a black box to me.

Hopefully this year is a significant outlier and life stress will drop back down to baseline where I can be blissfully ignorant about it again. But I also wonder if things like HRV (or something else) might be able to help me learn to understand the life stress side of things. That’s what I’m really curious about.

Remember, Endurance Sports training is a LONG game. To be your best, whatever that is, takes year and years. It’s important to keep that in mind as well with all the data and info that we do have at our disposal!

I’m also banking on this. My first triathlon was 15 years ago, but I was off and on and unstructured for easily the first decade of that time. It’s only been the past five or so years that I’ve started to actually think about the sport and try to get better.