Garmin Adaptive Plans Get Improved Explanations

Garmin has three types of adaptive training: Garmin Coach, Race Training, and Daily Suggested Workouts. Each can change your planned workout daily based on several factors, offering distinct benefits.

Background…

Garmin Coach allows you to choose a plan from a named real-world coach, offering multi-week, distance-based training plans that should work for most levels of runners. After each workout, you’ll rate its difficulty, providing feedback that shapes upcoming sessions.

Then there’s Race Training and Daily Suggested Workouts, which rely on the advanced data your Garmin watch collects to build a responsive and customised plan. This includes everything from sleep patterns to recovery status, ensuring your training adjusts intelligently. For example, elevated stress levels might prompt a shift from a scheduled 60-minute run to 40 minutes.

The key distinction between Race Training and Daily Suggested Workouts is in their focus. With Race Training, each daily workout is aligned with a specific race goal you’ve set. If you’re not prepping for a race, Daily Suggested Workouts concentrate on maintaining and improving your overall fitness with various exercises.

What’s Changing?

Garmin is making one feature change here, but that single change involves significantly more information for runners following adaptive guidance. Simplistically, each suggested workout is explained to you – thus, you will be told what the workout is trying to achieve, how you have to do it and why the change has been suggested.

Here are some examples

What we are trying to achieve

• Improve your posture
• Strengthen your core
• Build up your base endurance.
• Boost your fitness and performance.

How do you have to do it

• Keep your activity today low-intensity, such as yoga or walking.
• Active recovery or rest is suggested for the remainder of today.
• Keep it short and low-intensity.

why the change

• …due to high run mileage
• …due to high recovery time.
• …to account for your significant jet lag.

Take Out

Although the guidance you receive is somewhat pre-planned and formulaic by cutting, pasting and re-arranging pre-canned and generic phrases, this will nevertheless be useful to some runners and give some reassurance that the algorithm is making sensible changes.

The standard phrases will grate after a while, and this is an area where Garmin Intelligence or Garmin AI would help vary and tailor the wording. I suppose that Garmin is still actively using an ‘old-fashioned’ approach, which means that any kind of Garmin AI is not close to the light of day. “Maybe that’s a good thing!” some of you will say.