“Simon Says” ™ is a new, exciting addition to ithlete Pro that does all the heavy lifting of interpreting your recovery metrics and delivers them in a short paragraph that can be read and understood in just a few seconds.
Digestible Daily HRV Interpretation & Recommendations
The information presented by ithlete can be a lot to digest: the daily number and colour, HRV weekly and monthly trends, and then there is working out relationships between HRV, subjectives and recovery enablers. Simon Says brings you a short daily summary to help you note the most important elements of your data today, and is now part of the redesigned Context Insight widget. The text will provide you with your overall recovery and readiness state, highlight all the subjective or recovery metrics outside of your normal range, and summarise the current trend in your training load*. This new, friendly avatar will help you to bring all elements of your ithlete reading together in a simple paragraph to summarise your recovery and training guidance for the day.
Simon Says?
Simon Says is the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert system for HRV training and recovery guidance. Advice and guidance feeding in is coming from HRV expert Simon Wegerif, the innovator of HRV on the smart phone who has over 10 years’ experience working on HRV and recovery analysis on athletes and sports people. To help make this tool feel friendly and relatable we’ve designed an avatar and will be calling the feature Simon Says.
Feedback
We hesitate to call the first version a Beta, because we have been designing and testing it for months, but we do expect this to be a continuously evolving and fast developing feature driven by user feedback. Please do use the thumbs up/down to tell us how relevant you find your daily recommendation and we welcome more detailed feedback via email or the Feedback widget in Pro at any time.
Log in to ithlete Pro to try it out!
*In order to calculate acute to chronic training load you must be synced to Garmin Connect or Training Peaks and importing training load.
I still don’t understand the colored numbers 75 eg shown today or the numbers appearing on either side of the colored number. And where does the acute:chronic TL on the workout bar chart appear? It’s a checked grey box next to the HR.
Hi Rob. The number eg 75 at the top of the Context Insight is your HRV for that day. It is colour coded according to whether it is higher (green) or lower (orange / red) than your baseline.
The number on the left is your resting heart rate (HR) and the number on the right is the change in HRV since your last reading.
In order to get your acute:chronic training load, you need to be synced to either Garmin Connect or Training Peaks and be importing TL https://www.myithlete.com/acute-chronic-training-load-ratio/
So I am Ill and have a cold, in the red no surprise with rest required. What did surprise me was that simons says comments say that my my weekly training load is decreased and I risk detraining. Surely that’s a mixed message that could play with my brain. I think the red comments should clearly say rest and omit any detaining message.
Hi Kate. Thanks for the comment. This has got us debating amongst ourselves which is the right way to go, ie whether simon says should emulate as far as possible what a human coach would say, vs giving a text summary of all key metrics (in which case it would be left in). I’m more in favour of the former approach, where we might say ‘the risk of detraining is lower if you look after yourself & recover fully before returning to full training’ or similar.
Any other views are also welcome.
Nice compromise Simon. I guess as an athlete we are sometimes looking for clear indicators and this is why we sign up to taking the readings daily and using the information to make informed clear decisions.