Hey Fitbit Community,
Kickstart your fitness journey with the Google Pixel Watch 3 and its advanced health and fitness capabilities from Fitbit. Fitbit offers tools that help you not only track your workouts and fitness progress, but also understand how well your body is recovering. These tools: Readiness, Cardio Load, Target Load, and Training Status are personalized to you, your training, and your recovery. They assist in achieving fitness goals by providing guidance on your cardio exercise, recovery, and preventing overtraining symptoms like fatigue or injury.
Google Fitbit’s Readiness and Cardio training tools
- Readiness Score. An enhanced algorithm assessment of your body’s readiness using your heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and recent sleep to show how your body is recovering from the stressors of everyday life.
- Heart Rate Variability. HRV measures the time between your heartbeats and is a key indicator of your nervous system's balance. Higher HRV is a signal of better readiness.
- Resting Heart Rate. Measures your heart rate when you are well-rested and not engaging in physical activity. Everyone’s normal RHR will differ, with lower values typically associated with higher fitness. A sustained rise in RHR over a few days is generally associated with your body working harder to recover or fight illness, which may be an indicator to reduce training intensity.
- Recent sleep. Measures your sleep debt - the accumulated difference between the amount of sleep you've gotten and the amount of sleep you need. If you've been experiencing poor sleep, your body's ability to recover and perform may be negatively impacted. By sleeping more, you can reduce your sleep debt and increase your readiness to exercise. These factors help determine how well the body is recovering. Balancing activity with recovery is a cornerstone of health, so Readiness Score will now be available to all Pixel Watch 3, as well as Pixel Watch 1 and 2 and Fitbit users with heart rate devices.
These updates will begin rolling out to Fitbit users with the latest app version (4.23 and up), providing access to updated Readiness scores with no subscription required. However, it may take some time for users to receive these updates.
- Cardio Load. A new feature that measures the overall stress on your cardiovascular system throughout the day, taking into account activities ranging from light tasks to peak effort. The Cardio Load metric is a modified Banister’s TRaining IMPulse (TRIMP) model that quantifies training load using an exponential weighting for higher intensities.
Cardio load tracks background activity data all day, not just during workouts. This includes light or more intense activity levels throughout the day and continuous tracking. In other words, you could accumulate cardio load with a brisk walk, or an intense interval run - the higher you get your HR, and the more time you sustain it, the more cardio load you will get.
- Target Cardio Load. Is a new feature that compares the last week of cardio load with the last month (often called Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio or ACWR) to give you a target range for your cardio load, personalized to your training and recovery. We have a Target load to inform how much you should take on - this folds in Readiness, but there are times Readiness is high and Target Load is low if there are signs the user is overloading over recent days.
Selecting “maintain cardio fitness” will adjust your target cardio load to be in line with your average cardio load in the past week. Selecting “improve cardio fitness” will adjust your target cardio load to be slightly more than your last week average, helping you improve fitness while minimizing risk of injury from sudden increases in activity.
- Training Status. An assessment of your accumulated cardio load over the last week compared to the last four weeks. Based on these comparisons, Training Status indicates if you are improving your fitness, maintaining fitness, or at risk of under or overtraining. For example, if you take on too much cardio load too quickly, Training Status will indicate you’re at risk of overtraining.
When you're overtrained, your body is constantly fighting to recover. Instead of improving your endurance and stamina, overtraining can lead to a decline in your cardiovascular performance. Conversely, periods of undertraining can reverse the gains you've made in your fitness.
Note: Like all heart rate tracking technologies, accuracy is affected by physiology, location of device, and your movements and activity.
Helpful links:
The Google Fitbit Team
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Pixel Watch 3 works with most phones running on Android 10.0 or newer. Requires Google Account, Google Pixel Watch app, and internet access. Some features require a Fitbit mobile app and/or paid subscription. Google apps and services and Fitbit Premium content and features are subject to change and are not available in all countries or languages. Google Pixel Watch is not compatible with Android (Go edition). See g.co/pixelwatch/specs for technical and device specifications.
