February 5, 2025

Does your Garmin watch indicate your training status is strained or unproductive? Here’s what that means.

Whether you’re training to run a marathon, win a cycling race or just improve your overall fitness, it’s important to understand how your training affects your performance.

Enter: Garmin training status.

What is training status?

Training status is a multilevel analysis feature available on compatible Garmin smartwatches. It interprets your fitness while looking at how much you’re training and at what level.

Basically, it connects the dots between your training and your results so you can see the bigger picture.

How is it calculated?

Your training status interprets changes in your fitness (measured by your VO2 max) relative to trends in your training volume and composition (your acute training load). Smartwatches capable of tracking your heart rate variability (HRV) status¹ consider that factor too. Let’s break those down.

Acute training load: This is the toll exercise takes on your body over time.

When you record any activity with heart rate, a compatible Garmin smartwatch will find the exercise load — a representation of how difficult the activity was. That exercise load is added to your acute training load, which shows the strain on your body from recent activities. The impact of an activity fades over time and is gone after 10 days.

Your current fitness level and activity history are factors in finding your optimal training load range to maintain or improve fitness. Mix up your high-intensity and low-intensity workouts to get the best results.

VO2 max: This is the defining measure of cardiorespiratory fitness and aerobic performance capacity. It’s the highest volume of oxygen your body can take in, move and use in 1 minute during intense activity.

While these tests are usually done in a lab running on a treadmill, compatible Garmin smartwatches estimate your VO2 max through advanced analytics that look at your heart rate and performance data. This can also be recorded when cycling with a power meter, including Rally^™ RS200, and recorded heart rate data. You can also pair a compatible cycling computer, including Edge^® 1050, with a heart rate monitor such as HRM 200.

HRV status: Your HRV is the length of time between your heartbeats. If your HRV is unbalanced or outside your baseline, that could mean your body is struggling to recover from stress, exercise, infection or drinking alcohol. A balanced HRV generally indicates less stress and better recovery. HRV is only captured while you sleep, so it’s important to wear your watch to sleep to get the most accurate training status.

What statuses are there?

Your smartwatch could give you one of eight training statuses (outside of when your smartwatch doesn’t have enough information and will report “no status” or you’ve paused the training status).

Peaking: You’re in ideal form. Even though your overall load is reduced, your fitness is increasing. This may occur in the tapering phase of a training program.

Productive: Keep it up. Effective training means your fitness is increasing. To continue to improve your fitness level, ensure you maintain a good balance of recovery and training.

Maintaining: Your workouts are challenging enough to keep you at the same fitness level but aren’t increasing it. Look at your load focus; this may help jump-start progress.

Strained: Take it easy. You’re probably not getting enough recovery time, and this could limit your performance. Health and lifestyle factors could also be affecting your recovery.

Unproductive: Your fitness is declining. This may not necessarily be because of excessive training loads. If your training is balanced, look at your nutrition, daily stress and sleep quality.

Overreaching: Your body is struggling to keep up with your higher training load. You could see a decrease in performance, or a low or unbalanced HRV status, as a result.

Recovery: You might see this during normal recovery periods in your training program. If your activities are less challenging, your fitness level may hold or slightly drop.

Detraining: You’ve taken an extended break, and your fitness level is decreasing.

It’s time to get the most out of your training. Beat yesterday by using the training status feature on a compatible Garmin smartwatch.

_{¹See Garmin.com/ataccuracy}