Training balance

Whether your recent strain is above or below what you are used to.

  1. Undertrained0-0.79
  2. Balanced0.8-1.29
  3. Pushing1.3-1.49
  4. High risk1.5-2

What goes in

Your daily Strain. A day with the band worn but too little heart rate counts as 0; a day without the band is skipped. Today’s Strain so far counts toward today’s ratio.

How it is weighted

Training load (ACWR) is your average Strain over the last 7 days with data, divided by your average over the last 28. 1.00 means this week matches your usual. Reports use the last day of the week or month that has a ratio; Fitness shows today’s.

What the bands mean

Below 0.80
Undertrained (Detraining on Fitness): load dropped below your usual.
0.80-1.29
Balanced (Optimal): the usual sweet spot.
1.30-1.49
Overreaching (Pushing): load is rising faster than you are used to.
1.50 and up
Overreaching (High risk): load jumped well above your usual.

Limits

Training load needs 14 days of Strain; until there are 28, your usual is the average of the days you have. It compares you with yourself, so it says nothing about whether your usual load suits your goals. The 0.8-1.3 sweet spot comes from team-sport injury research (Gabbett 2016) and is a rule of thumb.

Sources

  1. Gabbett TJ. The training-injury prevention paradox. Br J Sports Med 2016;50(5):273-80
  2. Impellizzeri FM, et al. Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio: conceptual issues and fundamental pitfalls. Int J Sports Physiol Perform 2020;15(6):907-13
  3. noop: the open-source analytics engine Pulse's recovery, strain and sleep scoring is ported from