February 7, 2025
Right here’s how your Garmin smartwatch estimates your EPOC and the way you should utilize it to enhance your coaching.
In case you ever wrestle to decide on how laborious to push your self in a exercise or can’t inform should you’re overtraining, Garmin is right here to assist.
You already know appropriate Garmin units present knowledge in your actions. Like, loads of knowledge. However simply realizing your stats isn’t sufficient. It’s good to know what these numbers imply to tell your coaching and enable you to attain your coaching targets.
Let’s give attention to one particularly: extra post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC).
What’s the definition of EPOC?
EPOC (additionally referred to as oxygen debt or the afterburn impact) measures how a lot work your physique does to get again to regular after train by taking a look at how a lot further oxygen you’re taking in. That is measured in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight (ml-O2/kg).
After you’re employed out, your physique continues to make use of a better fee of oxygen than traditional. It takes time to your physique to reset. It is a good factor. Your physique will construct again as much as regular — after which some. That’s referred to as “supercompensation” and helps you get into higher form.
Whereas EPOC is often measured in a lab, your appropriate Garmin smartwatch gives an estimate based mostly in your coronary heart fee1 knowledge throughout train.
How you should utilize EPOC
How you utilize EPOC depends upon your coaching targets. Usually, the tougher you prepare, the upper your EPOC.
Your train depth contributes exponentially to EPOC, although the size of your exercise additionally performs a job, in keeping with a research printed within the American Faculty of Sports activities Drugs’s Well being and Health Journal. The EPOC impact, in keeping with the Cleveland Clinic, is bigger after anaerobic train equivalent to high-intensity interval coaching or sprinting.
EPOC provides up slowly throughout mild train at lower than 65% of most coronary heart fee. Excessive intensities could cause EPOC values to rise rapidly.
For instance, a 30-minute run round 50% of most coronary heart fee might add as much as an EPOC worth of 10 ml-O2/kg. Including one other quarter-hour at 75% of most coronary heart fee might elevate EPOC to 40 ml-O2/kg.
A forty five-minute run at 75% of most coronary heart fee might lead to an EPOC worth of round 50 ml-O2/kg.
How Garmin makes use of EPOC
The Garmin estimate of your EPOC is your train load for an exercise, which is then personalised for you as a coaching impact.
Your coaching impact builds all through your exercise, and you’ll see it in actual time to tailor your exercise by including this as a knowledge subject to your appropriate machine. If you’re attempting to enhance, you recognize when to push your self tougher. And you may decelerate earlier than you push too laborious.
In case you’re already in fine condition, you’ll want a better EPOC to get the identical coaching impact as somebody with a decrease health degree. That implies that the fitter you might be, the extra you might want to train to maintain seeing progress.
Moreover, your coaching impact could possibly be cardio or anaerobic; each are mapped on a 0 to five scale. Your cardio coaching impact reveals you in case your exercise had a sustaining or bettering impact in your health degree. Your anaerobic coaching impact tells you the way a exercise impacts your means to carry out at excessive intensities.
Seven main profit labels — restoration, base, tempo, threshold, VO2 max, velocity and anaerobic — let you know how your exercise helped you.
Acute coaching load is a weighted sum of your current EPOC values (train masses), which reveals the cumulative current impression of your actions in your physique and informs your restoration wants. The coaching load focus knowledge display tells you the way your coaching depth has been distributed for concerning the final three weeks. For instance, it could possibly be balanced, too excessive or too low in a class for greatest health progress.
Plus, acute coaching load is a crucial consider your coaching standing, a function that helps join the dots between your coaching and your outcomes.
Use a appropriate Garmin smartwatch — or biking laptop with a coronary heart fee monitor and energy meter — to benefit from coaching impact, coaching load and coaching standing options to assist attain your health targets.
1See Garmin.com/ataccuracy