Make cardio load appropriate!

[katiesf]

Cardio load messages keep bouncing up and down, crazily in terms of what it suggests I should be doing. One day it says you need to do less. The next day it says you need to do dramatically more. I am adapting my cardio load to my age and level of heart healthiness. The messages I receive and the measurements have total ignorance apparently of my age or heart health. What do I do to make it relate to this?

[Julia_G]

Hi, @katiesf , “cardio load” is a fairly new stat to Fitbit and I don’t think it is fully developed yet and hopefully will be updated based on real world data collected and user feedback.  

To answer your specific questions, I believe it is already designed to take into account your age and current basic heart health stats etc so there are no other settings that you can tweak in that regard.

For myself, I have found that it is very (very!) broadly accurate, in the sense that if I am doing significantly more than usual it will send me some Whoa! Slow down! messages, and then only a day or two later when I become sedentary it will tell me I am in danger of “under training”.  Neither of those messages is very useful to me, to tell the truth - I know when I am doing a lot or not so much…

However, I do find the other heart health metrics useful, especially the HR graphs during exercise, resting heart rate metrics, the heart rate variability info (and graphs tracking).  I think back to my first Fitbit in 2014 when I was amazed that I could see my heart rate all the time!  I wished I had had that when I was training for the London marathon 25 years ago…

I am excited to see how the Cardio Load feature develops.  I feel pretty sure that as the data is gathered, and the technology develops, it will become a more and more useful training device, even if it feels pretty basic right now.