u/Royal-Second516

So I'm doing a challenge goal it set for myself, where I want to run a 10k in 1h, with a garmin coach program from coach greg, and today was an easy run which was pace based. Now in the past, I only did HR based runs, since I live in a very hilly area, where I thought it's easier, since you can slow down to make sure you don't run too hard. Now in the coach program I have to run with pace goals, which was definitly a new thing for me. I always tried to hold to pace, no matter where I run, not intentionally slowing down, and not having my HR visible on the screen.

The pace itself wasn't to hard, frankly quite doable, only on uphills I was sometimes a bit too slow and it was harder to maintain.

In the end Garmin rated the workout as high Aerobic and Threshold with 4.1 intensity, although it was supposed to be easy run. It wasn't easy run, but at mostly medium.

Looking at the HR chart, the HR mostly stayed in the green zone, only getting in Z4-5 when the uphills were kicking in.

I suppose, once my body will get more used to pace based runs and running up hills faster, that this will fix itself and easy runs will be marked as low aerobic, like they should, just wondering if anyone had similar issues when starting with pace based runs instead of HR based ones.

And yes my HR Zones are calculated by LTHR and the LTHR is set correctly.

So this was the first time for me doing some Hill sprints. I did a 20 Minute Z2 run beforehand and then created a seperate Sprinting workout which consisted of 6 set of 40 Seconds Sprints with 1 minute of rest in between, then 10 minute walking cooldown to get back home.

After doing this workout, my watch told me I did Tempo high Aerobic workout, not Anaerobic which I would expect when doing sprints. What did I do wrong?

Too long/short sprint time?

Too long/short rest time?

Maybe the hill was too steep? (Was going to the steepest one near me)

Too many/little intervals?

HR too low? My Max HR is 180 and LTHR is 165, I think 171 as maximum should be good enough

is bad sleep.

At least that is one of the very few bad sleep scores, where it was actually bad sleep.

So basically went to bed at 10:15 PM but couldn't fall asleep, yet Garmin still thinks that the sleep was aligned with your body's internal clock.

First floor of 10 for 6000 Fuel powered generator on my 60k rocket Fuel power plant

All Production buildings placed now

So, my watch thinks I'm unproductive and I should do more harder running sessions. Yet Garmin coach is mostly giving me easy workouts with low or moderate heart rates. I also noticed that the workouts you get are dependent on how you slept. If you get a bad sleep score, the hard workputs turn into easy workouts. Like it happened today, were yesterday the watch said I should do 3 hard intervals with 8 minutes of high intensity each. Today this workout turned into easy running.

The sleep algorithm from garmin clearly doesn't work for me well, everytime the watch is not detecting any REM sleep or just a few minutes and thus giving me a bad sleep score most of the time. I still want the sleep metrics like resting heart rate and HRV being tracked, so I want to wear the watch at night, but I don't care what garmin thinks about my sleep.

Is there a way to force garmin coach giving me the hard workout back, I feel fine and ready to do a hard running workout, I already did 2 recovery workouts with verly low heart rates on Saturday and Sunday (which also the garmin coach suggested), no need to take it easy this time again.

Resources set to all pure more advanced resources.

So I ordered a Garmin HRM 200 chest strap for more acurate heart rate measurement during running and lifting. It arrived yesterday and I tried it out for the first time today on this run. Everything worked well, but during my fast intervals I noticed that the chest strap moved down a bit and I had to readjust during the run. It happened first in the 3rd Interval and then in the last interval.

I made sure that I put it tight enough it doesn't move around on it's own but I'm still able to breath comfortable. Did I still put it on too loose?

Also Garmin coach said that this run will be for improving VO² max, after doing the run it said it was for anaerobic fitness. Did I do something wrong during the run?

This night was the first night I could finally sleep without waking up every hour.

I got a Garmin Venu 4 watch a month ago, which is my first smartwatch ever owned. I bought it because I wanted to improve my aerobic fitness. I did only strength training for 12 years now with barely or no cardio at all, because running on a treadmill is boring.

So I decided to change that by running outside and tracking the results with a smartwatch to see improvements in aerobic fitness and to stay motivated.

This definitily helped and I already see some improvements in fitness.

The issues I noticed are:

My watch is not picking up any REM sleep or only very short times. This results in only bad or fair sleep scores where my watch often times tells me to take an easy day or rest day to not burn my energy reserves. However, the last 2 weeks I had dreams every night and considering REM sleep is where you dream, I definitly had some REM Sleep that night. I feel well recovered after the sleep and can go on the day just fine, without being tired or having to take naps. I also don't drink coffee or have any caffeine on any days. My workouts can also be intense without any problems of having low energy and declined performance. I usually sleep 6-7h, go to bed at 9:30 to 10 PM and wake up at 4 to 5 AM. I also can't sleep longer than that, since I'm already fully awake by that time and can't fall asleep again.

Seeing that some people have much better sleep scores and REM sleep tracks much better for them than for me, I wonder what I'm doing wrong, or if it just takes longer for the watch to get to know my body better. I attached some pics that shows the sleep from last week, as you can see there was only one day, where REM sleep was tracked above one hour, which seems to be more accurate. The other day there was no or only very little REM sleep tracked.

Also, I noticed when running the heart rate seems to be accurate and stable, while Strength Training the heart rate sensor doesn't seem to pick up the heart rate properly.

For example on a heavy set with 5-10 reps on squats or deadlifts, after the set the heart rate only shows like 105-115 BPM which isn't true. Only after a few seconds the sensor picks up the heart rate better, but then the heart rate already dropped a fair bit, so the watch rarely picks up any high intensity moments. So most of the time the training will be tracked in the grey or blue zone and the watch says that this was a low intesity easy recoverable training session.