Generally speaking, if you have a Garmin watch (primarily a newer one such as your FR955 which supports all the current Garmin metrics), you’ll want to set that as the primary training and wearable device.
For the most part, you should only set an Edge device as your primary training device if you have no Garmin wearable, or, if you’ve got something rather old on the wearable front that doesn’t support the various newer metrics.
Think of the ‘primary training device’, as the device that does all the calculations. So basically, the platform has to wait on what that device thinks. So if that device is an Edge device, you can often see issues where someone turns it off right after the ride, and then things start to get funky because it can’t be contacted. Most metrics will handle themselves without it, but just yesterday someone asked about a near identical combo to yours (840/955), and it wasn’t correctly handling what he noted was ‘Active Calories’ (not sure if he meant Intensity Minutes or not), but either way, he had his 840 set as primary trainnig device and it hadn’t been working for a while. He made the change yesterday morning, went for a ride, and boom, now everthing is happy.
Ray-This is super helpful. You’d think calculations occur in the cloud (which is what i thought) and that I was simply picking the device I train with (I use my watch to capture “life” and strength training - oh and tell time ). Garmin has so much work to go on how they architect products and think about their users. Thank you.
Grabbed this screen shot AFTER I made the change from your advice. The “help text” would not be accurate based on your explanation which make sense.
Yeah, I’ll ask for clarification on where things should be now.
I think part of the challenge is that Garmin has tried to make Unified Training Status work across literally 15 years worth of devices - and it will. It’ll somehow magically pull in Forerunner 305 or Edge 705 data if you shoot it to Garmin Connect. And that includes a lot of changes they made after acquiring Firstbeat, and starting to move a lot of the logic to the cloud (versus pre-acquisition that licensed it on a per-device basis, and thus logic had to occur on each device).
But in doing so, they’ve probably also had to make some aspects of this thing more complex to accommodate that legacy baggage, versus just cutting off those devices. In general, most times I dig into this topic over the years with Garmin, my head hurts by the end of it (and usually their heads too). But, things are getting less and less complicated, but it appears there’s still some edge cases - and how to distill that edge case scenario down to a single description line that millions of people can understand is tricky.
In any case, I’m going to circle back tomorrow with some leftover questions. Probably time for a general update on “Unified Training Status in 2024 Explained”, now that the dust has largely settled from a year ago.
You can see big drops in Recovery Time, even while just doing nothing (in fact, often while just doing nothing), as it’s constantly evaluating your day.
However, your big drop despite an interval workout is confirmation something is currently broke with the 3rd party file sync and the Recovery Time metric specifically.
Recovery time is primarily used in Training Readiness, but it’s also used in both Daily Suggested Workouts and Stamina calculations (running/cycling). There’s probably a few other things too, but off the top of my head those are the main three.
Training Readiness on Garmin Connect Mobile is only updated each morning at roughly your awake time (or, first sync after awake). However, on the device, it’s live/realtime. In the latest GCM beta that just started last week, it’s starting to be live on GCM as well.
I’m running a Taxc Neo 2T in ERG mode, no Garmin devices connected. Just finished a 2 hour Trainer Road ride, my recovery time populated on my Garmin 965 almost as soon as I saw the ride in Garmin Connect and on Strava. I do usually wear the watch while riding, so not sure if that makes a difference.
Interesting, that’s the first I’ve seen of recent Recovery Time populating on the watch.
I did the TR ride on Saturday, no luck on Recovery Time.
Then on Sunday I did a Zwift ride, no luck on Recovery Time (everything else worked fine, like TR)
I’ll do another TR ride here in an hour or so.
And then package all those results up and send over to the Garmin peeps in charge of UTS (Unified Training Status) to get clarification.
Another point that MIGHT be interesting, but maybe not. As I said earlier, I usually wear the watch while doing a workout, but simply as a watch. The heart rate monitor is active, so I do somtimes get a message of “Recovery Time Delayed” during the workout and have seen the recovery time increase almost immediately. Presumably, this is because the watch knows that my heart rate is elevated, but has no idea why.
Yeah, in that scenario you’re also getting Intensity Minutes and Calories.
I did that for today’s ride, where I left the Primary Wearble on my wrist, so I accumulated some calories and intensity minutes (versus none if off-wrist pre-sync). However, it was about half the intensity minutes of the Garmin watch record-keeping the actual workout. This is likely because Garmin increases power to the optical HR sensor during workouts, to increase accuracy of bpm in these scenarios, and it probably wasn’t catching my 4-minute intervals as well in the passive mode.
Yes I ride a Neo 2T with FR955 (not recording with the watch). Direct sync to Garmin Connect from TR. And have turned off my 1040 since hearing from @dcrainmaker. What is your question?
@libreus, the trainer does not affect recovery time. It would be the trainerroad workout data feeding Garmin Connect and then a more recent Garmin device set as “primary training device” in settings and then having the device calculate the training impact.
In my case, through advice here from Ray, I am no longer dual recording my rides on my Edge 1040. I have TR feeding Connect, and my Garmin Forerunner 955 (which is only used as a watch during rides) is handling the calculations. And yes, then training impact is properly calculated with recovery time being impacted.
As of yesterday (with Rouvy), the recovery time after the workout showed again in Garming Connect and the Training Status works as well … what happened in the time between, who knows …
). Garmin has so much work to go on how they architect products and think about their users. Thank you.
