[maeil]

Super helpful, going to look into those! I too only care about the fitness part, in an even narrower scope - literally only the usecase mentioned here, giving some VO2max-ish or other "stamina level" number (even if of questionable accuracy) that I can slowly see improve over time to help with motivation.

In some sense less data might be better to make it clearer which number to focus on, so sounds like the Forerunner may be the right fit. The Training Readiness does sound a bit intidimating for someone who's starting from zero (or really, minus), but I can always strategically ignore that ;)

Thank you.

[542354234235]

>The Training Readiness does sound a bit intidimating for someone who's starting from zero

I totally understand, however, I would say that is exactly where it is most useful. You don't need to actually know or understand any data, since Garmin crunches all those things in the background for you and distills it down to concrete advice on where you are and what to do next. You can really do well with just two metrics (the daily suggested workout and Training Status). You could just follow the workout of the day "Easy run, heart rate range x-y, 31 mins" or "Tempo run, warm up 10 mins, run 15 mins heart rate range x-y, cool down 10 mins" etc. And look at what your Training status is currently, which is things like “Productive”, “Overreaching”, “Maintaining”, etc.

You don’t need to understand about lactic threshold and what types of runs improve it or how high aerobic, low aerobic, and anaerobic runs affect different aspects of improving your fitness or how many rest days are enough. You don’t need to have the experience to know how to balance recovery and training and which factors to even look at. Was your status “Productive” most of the week? Awesome, you know you are improving. What is the next workout? Done.

I hope it works out for you and you enjoy running as a healthy hobby.

[maeil]

> Was your status “Productive” most of the week? Awesome, you know you are improving. What is the next workout? Done.

Right, but to us monkey-brained seeing a boolean "productive" isn't a great motivator, we need to see a number that can go up, making it much more addictive. That's why I was so convinced by the Apple Watch user giving that one number that they look at - that will definitely work for me as it's super effective on the reward-related parts of my brain. A boolean, or having a hundred numbers - not as much. If you're someone who doesn't need that, I'm sure the training readiness is much more actually useful for improving, but we're not necessarily looking for that - our hope is to one day get to a point where we may start looking for that :)

I've noticed it myself even when doing projects. So much easier to stay motivated when you have this one number, e.g. page views or active users that updates every day (not "enterprise contracts" which may change once every month), to focus on, purely for monkey-brain reasons.