If you use a Garmin during your runs, many of you will have noticed a notification appear during your run that says “Performance Condition”. If you want to know how to improve Garmin Performance Condition, let me take you through what it is and the steps you need to take.
- Which watches support Garmin Performance Condition?
- What is Garmin Performance Condition?
- What data is Garmin Performance Condition based on?
- What do I use Garmin Performance Condition for?
- How to improve Garmin Performance Condition
- How reliable is Garmin Performance Condition?
- What is Garmin Performance Condition affected by?
Which watches support Garmin Performance Condition?
Not all the Garmin Wearables support Garmin Performance Condition. At the time of writing, the Venu and the vívoactive lines do NOT support Performance Condition. Most of the more athlete orientated watches like Garmin Forerunner, Garmin fēnix, Garmin Instinct and Garmin epix do support Performance Condition, but check their website for specifications to be sure.
If your watch supports it, but it doesn’t appear, either during your runs or in the data afterwards, make sure it’s turned on in Physiological Metrics.
What is Garmin Performance Condition?
Before you can understand how to improve Garmin Performance Condition, you need to understand what it is.
Garmin Performance Condition is a real-time evaluation and comparison of your fitness during a run activity, when compared to the overall background evaluation of your fitness measured in previous runs. This means that it can guess whether you are expected to perform better or worse than normal in the current run. It’s compared against the guestimate it makes of your Garmin VO2max, which is really just a measure of your fitness too.
It appears briefly on your watch as a notification and looks like a number, ranging from -20 to +20, along with a word to explain the number, like “Good” or “Poor”. At least Garmin says that’s the range – but I’ve never seen more than +10 and thought that was in Unicorn territory! To get +20, I’m pretty sure you’d need to train for a couple of months without the device and then try a run so that it sees a bigger leap in fitness than normal. Tell me in the comments what the biggest number you’ve seen is, either positive or negative.
Whilst the pop-up notification appears on your watch within the first 6 to 20 minutes of the run, it’s worth noting that you can add it on as a data field to a page on your run activity watch settings, so you can keep an eye on it for the whole of the rest of the run. The Garmin Performance Condition will naturally gradually drop throughout your run due to heart rate drift and muscle fatigue. If you are newer to aerobic work, Performance Condition during each run will drop quite quickly. If you are aerobically very fit, the value will stay steady for quite a while before starting to drop. Here’s an image from an example 60 minute run where performance condition started at around +3 and ended around -3:
What data is Garmin Performance Condition based on?
To come up with the Garmin Performance Condition value, the watch uses your pace, your heart rate and your HRV / Heart Rate Variability, combined with your user data like sex, age and weight. It can then decide if the running pace you are achieving is requiring a higher or lower effort level than normal.
What do I use Garmin Performance Condition for?
Garmin Performance Condition is actually pretty useful. If you are doing a run session and the initial value appears and is positive, that’s just nice to know, but if the value is negative for a few runs in a row, it’s time to pay attention. If Garmin performance condition is negative, it means your performance isn’t as expected and you might not have recovered well enough from previous runs. Therefore you can consider changing the focus of the session. If it was planned to be an easy run, you could make it shorter. If it was planned to be a hard interval session, you could change it to an easy run, or do less intervals.
Alternatively, a very negative Performance Condition value might be a sign that you are getting an illness, like cold or flu virus.
How to improve Garmin Performance Condition
As you might have determined by now, if you were wondering how to improve Garmin Performance Condition, it’s something that happens naturally if you are training well. If your fitness is improving from good quality running training, you’ll see less negative values and more zero or positive values. Having a good mix of fast and slow running, recovering well and avoiding injury will all tend towards giving you good numbers on your Performance Condition. The fitter you get, the later the Performance Condition will tail off in each run too, which is good.
It’s not something you should be trying to always increase or attempting to get as close to +20 as possible. Instead you are looking for it to be positive more often than negative so that you gradually improve over a long period of time. So if you see a negative value, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if it’s most often negative and rarely positive over a month, you are heading in the wrong direction.
How reliable is Garmin Performance Condition?
The value provided by Garmin Performance Condition is only as good at the data its based on. If the heart rate data is poor due to a loose watch for example, that will give very erratic data. If you are running under a lot of trees, GPS data might be affected so it won’t know how fast you are going. Similarly if the GPS doesn’t lock on properly for whatever reason. If you suddenly change the user profile data, for example changing your weight, this will give confusing results until it settles down over the next few runs.
Whatever the value that the watch decides to guess for your Performance Condition, remember that it’s just a guess. It’s more important to listen to your body. If the watch is guessing +10, but you feel rubbish, taking action from the way you feel is more important than what the watch is telling you. Or if the watch is guessing -10, but you feel great and effortless, maybe ignore it for the first part of the run until you are properly warmed up and in your element.
What is Garmin Performance Condition affected by?
Your Garmin watch doesn’t know everything. Some examples of aspects of your run that might produce unexpected Performance Condition data are: hills, wind, heat, humidity and terrain.
- Hills: Garmin has to rely on a mix of map data and GPS elevation to understand the hills you are on. It’s much easier for it to be consistent in output on flat routes.
- Wind: There’s no way for your watch to know if it’s windy, either in your face or assisting you from behind. Windy days can give unexpected results.
- Heat and Humidity: In hotter or more humid weather, your body can’t cool itself as efficiently. This can lead to Garmin showing you a negative value if the recent runs have been cooler.
- Terrain: Your Garmin doesn’t know about the terrain. If your route is off-road, or muddy, or rocky, or shingle or sand or other difficult terrain, Garmin will not understand why you are going slower than normal and give you a negative value.
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