With each year that passes, the Apple Watch becomes a better sports option, and as an avid runner who has used the Apple Watch in the past to prepare for marathons, the standout update to watchOS 11 for me is the addition of training load that reveals at WWDC 2024.
Training load tracking is a standard feature on the best running watches from brands like Garmin and Coros, and it helps you assess your efforts over time to ensure you’re doing enough to get fitter without overdoing it. a lot to do, which can increase your performance. risk of injury.
Running in particular is a high-impact sport and so you need to manage your training load carefully to ensure you don’t put too much strain on your body. This is especially important if you’re increasing your running either because you’re new to the sport or as part of a training plan for an event like a marathon.
Apple’s new training load feature isn’t as detailed as the analysis you can get from some sports watches, but it will help you assess your effort over time, and its simplicity is also appealing, as training analysis can sometimes get uncomfortably complicated on sports watches.
How training loads work on the Apple Watch
The training load is based on the cumulative load of the workouts you perform with the watch.
Each workout is given an effort rating from 1 to 10. This is done automatically for many types of cardio training, including running, where the rating is based on factors such as age, height, weight, pace (from GPS), heart rate and altitude. .
For workouts that don’t receive an automatic effort rating, such as strength training, you can enter one yourself to ensure it is properly accounted for in your training load.
One thing I really like about this rating is that you can manually adjust it to account for factors not measured by the watch, such as your general fatigue that day or muscle soreness from previous workouts. Being able to adjust also means that if the heart rate measurements that the watch makes during training are inaccurate, you can take this into account.
On the other hand, if the heart rate is wrong during training, as with many sports watches I have tested, the entire training analysis is skewed. For example, if my easy run is incorrectly recorded as a hard run because the heart rate value was incorrectly high, my training load for that day is considered very high.
The effort value is one of the two main factors that play a role in training load, the other being the duration of the training. The training load for a workout is effort x duration, which is then graphed showing your workouts from the past seven days, compared to a rolling baseline from the past 28 days.
This ‘effort x duration’ approach is simpler than what many sports watches do, which is to take into account the time you spend in each heart rate zone during a workout, and use this for more advanced analysis, such as whether your training mainly affects your aerobic or anaerobic had. suitability.
Apple’s approach will still work well, though, and it’s easier to understand overall: your training load is simply how hard you worked multiplied by how long you trained. On the watch you can see how your seven-day training load compares to your 28-day baseline, and Apple will tell you if it’s more or less according to five ratings: Well Below, Below, Steady, Above, and Well Above.
How to use training loads to get the best results
There are many different ways to approach your training as a runner, but the key underlying it all is not to do too much too fast, which can lead to burnout and injury. The Training Load feature can help you assess this by ensuring that your recent seven-day training load is not too far above your baseline for the past 28 days.
Apple’s ratings are an easy way to do this. If I wanted to improve and get fitter, perhaps because I had just started a new training block for an event and was increasing my mileage, I would want my recent load to be above, or perhaps well above, baseline, but you don’t want to be in the Well Above zone for too long because that can lead to burnout.
If I want to maintain my fitness then a consistent training load is good, and if I want to reduce my training load, perhaps in the run up to an event like a marathon where I taper to ensure I have fresh legs on race day, then a rating of Below or Good Below would be what I would like to see.
The addition of a training load is exciting and useful in itself, and it will also be interesting to see where Apple goes from here. Some brands, like Garmin, will actually advise you on what workouts you should do to maintain a balanced training load, and many say what kind of training effect individual runs have, such as a basic run to improve aerobic fitness, or an interval session to improve your speed. and anaerobic fitness.
But for now, I’m trying to keep my training loads in the right zones – getting fit, but not dying trying. And if necessary, take a day of rest; You can now even pause your ringtones on Apple Watch to avoid ending your streak.