Great breakdown. I searched for videos on this topic because I thought Fitbit is trying to kill me. I followed the daily active minutes recommendatiins for a 7 day week, it resulted in over 750 active minutes. On day 8, I crashed and needed 2 days recovery. I like seeing the data but think you have to listen to your own body when it comes to setting active minute goals. Thanks for the video.
In my testing for the last month it’s jelly beans even with 3 apps (athlytic, welltory, training today) working off the **exact same data set**.: ie Apple Watch data in the Health DB. I’m also using EliteHRV with their finger sensor, and it usually shows “uh oh you’ve gone parasympathetic - hrv is too high!) when the other apps say ready to rock. I really like the idea of these things, but the wildly different scores is not exactly confidence inspiring. Also, it makes it very clear that this is a machine learning / data science challenge, not a sensor challenge (IMO). Great early review, I hope you continue to test all these systems in the future and help us sort this mess out. :)
Yes, I've had the same results too. I've used Elite HRV, Training Today and Athlytic apps and they all give different results from the same data set from the Apple watch. It seems the best thing to do is to go along with your subjective feelings about how recovered you're and not to necessarily depend on these apps 💯%
Yeah, lots of jelly bean scenarios. I think the challenge is that HRV wasn't really designed for figuring out whether your body is ready for load. It was originally used in hospitals to figure out who's going to die when visiting an ER (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18410805/) - and it's been kinda shoe-horned into this role of 'All knowing predictor of training readiness'. While there are some trends to be made, the more and more I go down this road, the less I'm convinced it's what people think it is.
Great review and summary! Good lord those scores are all over. Would love a review of all of the ‘readiness’ systems overall after a month of use. This is great stuff. And love the Superman hair curl haha
Concerning the readiness score I guess the HRV is an important factor (more dominant than sleep or active minutes). To me that would make sense to me. If you're fit and you're working out all day and drink a lot of alcohol in the evening and go to sleep at a decent time your active minutes will be good, sleep will normally be fine but your HRV will drop a lot. I'm having the Fitbit Sense and always notice this when I drink 2-3 glasses of alcohol (maybe also as I normally don't drink that often). Btw, you need to add the readiness score to your overview on your watch/band at least on the Sense.
just started using this band, I can't wear doing BJJ and my old one got my heart rate just down my dōgi for karate so even though I trained 3 hours today I don't have any zone minutes, be interesting to see what happens when my 4 days are up.
5:22 I recently started a new exercise regimen after being almost entirely sedentary. After 2 days: 1st day adding a short 20 minute beginning workout video and 2nd day doing 30 minutes of walking…. My Fitbit is giving me a Readiness Score of 1. Almost like it’s so used to me doing absolutely nothing that it keeps thinking I need to rest.
@@Dcrainmaker Thanks for the information Celeigh and DC Rainmaker. Wonder what you have to do in readiness to get myself into the Excellent category? i will find out when i get my Charge 5 in a few days and do the free premium time period.
I’m finding the combo Garmin’s body battery/recovery time interesting (specially now that takes into account all the workouts) and it has changed a little my training load. I’m also trying to combine that info with Xert training form (it kind of complements recovery time). That said, the Fitbit presentation seems nice and more “compacted”. I think the challenge now is to get a meaningful and practical guidance from all these metrics. Thanks!
The 5 is really random for me, even compared to my old 3 - HR regularly 30-50% off, way low outdoors high indoors, despite trying ultra-tight to ultra-loose and in between. And as you point out, now readiness tells you low but good so 2x as much exercise - now do 100 active min with this 10min video. It seems like 5 different features were glued together semi-meaninglessly. Of course I can test my real HR with a chest HRM - but i can't easily test the rest HRV etc - is it all equally broken and random?
Because of issues with wearing the Whoop 4.0 strap on my bicep at sleep (it was failing), I shifted that to the wrist for night, and took the Garmin off. Then had Fitbit on the other wrist. Will swap back to Garmin here in a few mins for the rest of my Whoop 4.0 testing again.
@@Dcrainmaker A proper reviewer would have at least 4-5 wrists at hand (pun intended) to test these things properly. Looking forward to the DCR self evaluation vs(?) Oura vs Whoop vs Garmin comparison. Thanks!
@@MateHegyhati Haha...I agree! I've actually been having Bobbie wear more devices lately, and due to a weird quirk, I have an extra 4.0 pod I might stick on her. But yes, an Oura/Whoop/Garmin shoot-out is on the way after the main reviews go out over the next week.
@@Dcrainmaker Poor girl :-D Instead of a morning coffe in bed: "How would you rate your sleep on a scale from 1 to 10, honey?" Thanks for all the sacrifices the DCR family makes for our sake :-P All the best!
Weird. When I have a higher activity day and even with a good sleep day, my score is still pretty low? You say in your your videos that the more you workout the better your score will be. I've never experienced that
Fitbit is stretching reality in order to sell a product. It guesses your body's reaction to exertion the day before and sleep quality overnight. It has no idea how close you are to your limits of exertion. I have found my sleep score to have only moderate correlation with how tired I am next day. The potential is there for Fitbit to accurately read heart rate variability but it is only 1/3 of the calculation or thereabouts.
I keep getting a one readiness score, and then go out and play a couple hours of pickle ball, walk, and do other exercise. If it were up to Fitbit, I would be resting all the time. My sleep is good, and I am in the active zone a lot. I don’t think this readiness score is worth anything.
Thanks for this review. i have a question. i am gonne buy a fitbit device. Can you tell me which fitbit device has better heart rate accuracy? Thank you👍
I just got Charge 5 and it just finished the 2 week onboarding. I got 3.5 hours of sleep last night and 1.5 the night before and it's giving me a 97 readiness score. I'm lost on how it's supposed to work. I contacted fitbit but they won't tell me any actual formula/math to understand what exactly it is doing. All they could do is have me restart the device and now I'm supposed to wait for a while and see if the scores are better. I want specifics on the calculations.
I think the scores would make better sense when they're not compared outside of the same platform, which might help spot certain patterns and trends over a longer period of time...
Dont pay for premium. Work out as intense as you feel. You know if you need rest, or if you can work harder. Eat and sleep well, and your mirror can be your judge.
You've completly misunderstood the concept of this feature. It gives you *readiness* score for your *next* day. You have pushed yourself the day before so now fitbit is telling you "today do some chilling, low intensity exercises". This feature is not "the higher score the better". It's all about "what should I do today" Did you even read the material that fitbit gives?
Umm, no, you're confused (very confused). The readiness score is for this upcoming day. It's given to you when you wake up that day, not the day after. That'd be useless to be for tomorrow. It doesn't change at all during the day, only after you sleep. Further, no, the higher the score is better. That's literally why it's shown as Low/Good/Excellent. Nobody says "Excellent, oh, that means you did sucky!". Poor sleep/HRV scores/etc is what drives a lower score, and in turn drives recommendations to relax instead (which is what I discussed).
@@Dcrainmaker wait, did you removed my previous comment? Let me copy paste what fitbit says about *readiness* score one more time "A high readiness score (30 or above) means you’re ready to exercise. A low readiness score (29 or lower) suggests you should prioritize recovery and let your body and mind relax. Allowing your body to recover is an essential part of achieving any health and wellness goals" You know, *readiness* score measures how much you are *ready* for the next day.
Great review and comments! Have you shared your comments with the Fitbit development staff? You really should do that, if possible. The other thing I'd mention is that Fitbit is the best wrist-worn tracker for sleep tracking, in my and others' opinion. Whoop and Oura are not very good. Since the Readiness score depends pretty heavily on sleep the night before and sleep history, getting correct sleep info seems critical. In other words, I'm not sure I'd trust Whoop's nor Oura's readiness type score anyway. I used to use a Garmin tracker, and I always thought it's Body Battery score was pretty darned accurate. I wasn't terribly impressed with Garmin's sleep tracking though, which kind of shoots my theory, above. However, I think you have some Garmins, so I'd be interested in comparing Body Battery scores to Readiness scores in a video sometime. Thanks again for the great work!
So far in my data, Oura V3 is nailing the sleep times the most accurately. Whoop is spot-on when worn on the wrist, but 4.0 is having troubles with bicep sleep tracking (3.0 has no issues there).
I'm wondering if body readiness is a thing outside the fit tracker industry. Is this something that professionals do try to calculate? Is there any scientific research about that? I realize this is pretty convenient to have this score based on three metrics that are already gathered by fit tracking systems. Let's be clear, it makes sense to consider those factors to assess body readiness, but having the relevant metrics doesn't mean we know how to use them for this assessment. I think there's something fishy with the learning phase thing. It can't be "supervised learning" since the target variable, the body readiness score, is precisely what is unavailable. Only "unsupervised learning" is possible to do. It includes such things as clustering. So, I guess they only take fresh data because they're always redefining their clustering because they can't rely on some serious referancial.
Fitbit wants me to pay for the device AND for the subscription ? And then they have probably the worst wrist-based heart rate tracker on the market ? Are they even serious, at this point, or is this some kind of a joke ?
Hey man, try to calm down the phase of you vids, now this is personal opinion of course, but you're are talking quite fast Personally I found it a little distracting
might just be this specific video btw, but the feel I'm getting from this video, is that you're stressed, got very little time, and are rushing threw your script
Wow, 1. This is Ray's general approach. He appreciates your time by delivering content clearly and concisely. If you feel that his delivery is too quick you have a multitude of options: slow down the video, look at other creators.
@@thestamsvideoproduction7427 buddy, last thing, people are allowed to make criticisms of others content, there is no reason to be a white knight. I'm sure a 300k subbed youtuber can handle his own criticism, and whether to take it or to leave it.
Great breakdown. I searched for videos on this topic because I thought Fitbit is trying to kill me. I followed the daily active minutes recommendatiins for a 7 day week, it resulted in over 750 active minutes. On day 8, I crashed and needed 2 days recovery. I like seeing the data but think you have to listen to your own body when it comes to setting active minute goals. Thanks for the video.
In my testing for the last month it’s jelly beans even with 3 apps (athlytic, welltory, training today) working off the **exact same data set**.: ie Apple Watch data in the Health DB. I’m also using EliteHRV with their finger sensor, and it usually shows “uh oh you’ve gone parasympathetic - hrv is too high!) when the other apps say ready to rock. I really like the idea of these things, but the wildly different scores is not exactly confidence inspiring. Also, it makes it very clear that this is a machine learning / data science challenge, not a sensor challenge (IMO). Great early review, I hope you continue to test all these systems in the future and help us sort this mess out. :)
Yes, I've had the same results too. I've used Elite HRV, Training Today and Athlytic apps and they all give different results from the same data set from the Apple watch. It seems the best thing to do is to go along with your subjective feelings about how recovered you're and not to necessarily depend on these apps 💯%
Yeah, lots of jelly bean scenarios. I think the challenge is that HRV wasn't really designed for figuring out whether your body is ready for load. It was originally used in hospitals to figure out who's going to die when visiting an ER (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18410805/) - and it's been kinda shoe-horned into this role of 'All knowing predictor of training readiness'. While there are some trends to be made, the more and more I go down this road, the less I'm convinced it's what people think it is.
The comparative analysis of readiness scores deserves its own video. Are they all worthless? Has anyone done a formal study on this topic yet?
Great review and summary! Good lord those scores are all over. Would love a review of all of the ‘readiness’ systems overall after a month of use. This is great stuff.
And love the Superman hair curl haha
Hahaha...the Superman hair curl happens when I desperately need a haircut!
Thank you for the information. I'm also curious about your thoughts comparing Fitbit's score to Garmin's body battery.
Very informative, curious to see the comparisons between how "mentally ready" I feel vs the readiness score once I've done my 4 days
Waiting for the Whoop 4.0 review (i think you're wearing it in the video). Thanks for this, i like It!!
Coming up soon!
Concerning the readiness score I guess the HRV is an important factor (more dominant than sleep or active minutes). To me that would make sense to me. If you're fit and you're working out all day and drink a lot of alcohol in the evening and go to sleep at a decent time your active minutes will be good, sleep will normally be fine but your HRV will drop a lot. I'm having the Fitbit Sense and always notice this when I drink 2-3 glasses of alcohol (maybe also as I normally don't drink that often). Btw, you need to add the readiness score to your overview on your watch/band at least on the Sense.
just started using this band, I can't wear doing BJJ and my old one got my heart rate just down my dōgi for karate so even though I trained 3 hours today I don't have any zone minutes, be interesting to see what happens when my 4 days are up.
5:22 I recently started a new exercise regimen after being almost entirely sedentary. After 2 days: 1st day adding a short 20 minute beginning workout video and 2nd day doing 30 minutes of walking…. My Fitbit is giving me a Readiness Score of 1.
Almost like it’s so used to me doing absolutely nothing that it keeps thinking I need to rest.
Low is 1 to 29. Good 30 to 64. Excellent 65 to 100.
Yes, after my feedback they updated the charts on their site.
@@Dcrainmaker Thanks for the information Celeigh and DC Rainmaker. Wonder what you have to do in readiness to get myself into the Excellent category? i will find out when i get my Charge 5 in a few days and do the free premium time period.
I’m finding the combo Garmin’s body battery/recovery time interesting (specially now that takes into account all the workouts) and it has changed a little my training load. I’m also trying to combine that info with Xert training form (it kind of complements recovery time). That said, the Fitbit presentation seems nice and more “compacted”. I think the challenge now is to get a meaningful and practical guidance from all these metrics. Thanks!
The 5 is really random for me, even compared to my old 3 - HR regularly 30-50% off, way low outdoors high indoors, despite trying ultra-tight to ultra-loose and in between. And as you point out, now readiness tells you low but good so 2x as much exercise - now do 100 active min with this 10min video. It seems like 5 different features were glued together semi-meaninglessly. Of course I can test my real HR with a chest HRM - but i can't easily test the rest HRV etc - is it all equally broken and random?
The Garmin Vivosmart 4 is almost 3 years old. Is an update in the offing?
Oh man. First off, thanks for a vid. It seems like this readiness calculation is just so random - that you can flip a coin as well and rely on that.
Could you tell what Body Battery values you had on those mornings? (And maybe before the sleep?)
Because of issues with wearing the Whoop 4.0 strap on my bicep at sleep (it was failing), I shifted that to the wrist for night, and took the Garmin off. Then had Fitbit on the other wrist. Will swap back to Garmin here in a few mins for the rest of my Whoop 4.0 testing again.
@@Dcrainmaker A proper reviewer would have at least 4-5 wrists at hand (pun intended) to test these things properly. Looking forward to the DCR self evaluation vs(?) Oura vs Whoop vs Garmin comparison. Thanks!
@@MateHegyhati Haha...I agree! I've actually been having Bobbie wear more devices lately, and due to a weird quirk, I have an extra 4.0 pod I might stick on her. But yes, an Oura/Whoop/Garmin shoot-out is on the way after the main reviews go out over the next week.
@@Dcrainmaker Poor girl :-D Instead of a morning coffe in bed: "How would you rate your sleep on a scale from 1 to 10, honey?" Thanks for all the sacrifices the DCR family makes for our sake :-P All the best!
My eliteHRV score seems to match pretty good, but I'm measuring since one month only.
I guess longterm measurements are required (like a year?)
Weird. When I have a higher activity day and even with a good sleep day, my score is still pretty low? You say in your your videos that the more you workout the better your score will be. I've never experienced that
Fitbit is stretching reality in order to sell a product. It guesses your body's reaction to exertion the day before and sleep quality overnight. It has no idea how close you are to your limits of exertion. I have found my sleep score to have only moderate correlation with how tired I am next day. The potential is there for Fitbit to accurately read heart rate variability but it is only 1/3 of the calculation or thereabouts.
I keep getting a one readiness score, and then go out and play a couple hours of pickle ball, walk, and do other exercise. If it were up to Fitbit, I would be resting all the time. My sleep is good, and I am in the active zone a lot. I don’t think this readiness score is worth anything.
Thanks for this review. i have a question. i am gonne buy a fitbit device. Can you tell me which fitbit device has better heart rate accuracy? Thank you👍
I just got Charge 5 and it just finished the 2 week onboarding. I got 3.5 hours of sleep last night and 1.5 the night before and it's giving me a 97 readiness score. I'm lost on how it's supposed to work. I contacted fitbit but they won't tell me any actual formula/math to understand what exactly it is doing. All they could do is have me restart the device and now I'm supposed to wait for a while and see if the scores are better. I want specifics on the calculations.
Nice.
My readiness does not work, why? I have the membership and I have waited for it to work since Christmas.
I think the scores would make better sense when they're not compared outside of the same platform, which might help spot certain patterns and trends over a longer period of time...
Can you check the accuracy of the Tic watch pro 3 ultra readiness score
But what if you dont go buy is when it gives you a low score what if you just go for a reagular workout ? Will it mess up the configuration
great video are you reviewing the woop 4.0?
Yup, coming up!
Great video as always. I wanted to ask whether heart rate accuracy has improved on Fitbit charge 5 or is same ?
It's fine as long as it's tight enough (but then you lose GPS).
@@Dcrainmaker okay thank you 😊
Is GPS working fine ? as it is giving some problems for you in previous review.
No change there.
@@Dcrainmaker Thanks for replying. Can you recommend any band for workout ?
@@Dcrainmaker That is too bad that the heart rate and GPS cant work together because of a wrist band tightness issue. i watched that video.
How this compare with Garmin Battery
It seems that I am not able to activate the readiness score no matter how long I wear it
Pls assist.
Dont pay for premium. Work out as intense as you feel. You know if you need rest, or if you can work harder. Eat and sleep well, and your mirror can be your judge.
You've completly misunderstood the concept of this feature. It gives you *readiness* score for your *next* day. You have pushed yourself the day before so now fitbit is telling you "today do some chilling, low intensity exercises". This feature is not "the higher score the better". It's all about "what should I do today" Did you even read the material that fitbit gives?
Umm, no, you're confused (very confused). The readiness score is for this upcoming day. It's given to you when you wake up that day, not the day after. That'd be useless to be for tomorrow. It doesn't change at all during the day, only after you sleep.
Further, no, the higher the score is better. That's literally why it's shown as Low/Good/Excellent. Nobody says "Excellent, oh, that means you did sucky!". Poor sleep/HRV scores/etc is what drives a lower score, and in turn drives recommendations to relax instead (which is what I discussed).
@@Dcrainmaker wait, did you removed my previous comment? Let me copy paste what fitbit says about *readiness* score one more time "A high readiness score (30 or above) means you’re ready to exercise. A low readiness score (29 or lower) suggests you should prioritize recovery and let your body and mind relax. Allowing your body to recover is an essential part of achieving any health and wellness goals"
You know, *readiness* score measures how much you are *ready* for the next day.
@@pawelszulc84 I didn’t remove any comments. And either way, I’m honestly not sure what you’re arguing for or against at this point.
Is it detect or aware of the equation if i drink alcohol …hangover ?
Great review and comments! Have you shared your comments with the Fitbit development staff? You really should do that, if possible. The other thing I'd mention is that Fitbit is the best wrist-worn tracker for sleep tracking, in my and others' opinion. Whoop and Oura are not very good. Since the Readiness score depends pretty heavily on sleep the night before and sleep history, getting correct sleep info seems critical. In other words, I'm not sure I'd trust Whoop's nor Oura's readiness type score anyway. I used to use a Garmin tracker, and I always thought it's Body Battery score was pretty darned accurate. I wasn't terribly impressed with Garmin's sleep tracking though, which kind of shoots my theory, above. However, I think you have some Garmins, so I'd be interested in comparing Body Battery scores to Readiness scores in a video sometime. Thanks again for the great work!
So far in my data, Oura V3 is nailing the sleep times the most accurately. Whoop is spot-on when worn on the wrist, but 4.0 is having troubles with bicep sleep tracking (3.0 has no issues there).
Great Video however you background says that your work is something else!!!
I'm wondering if body readiness is a thing outside the fit tracker industry. Is this something that professionals do try to calculate? Is there any scientific research about that? I realize this is pretty convenient to have this score based on three metrics that are already gathered by fit tracking systems. Let's be clear, it makes sense to consider those factors to assess body readiness, but having the relevant metrics doesn't mean we know how to use them for this assessment.
I think there's something fishy with the learning phase thing. It can't be "supervised learning" since the target variable, the body readiness score, is precisely what is unavailable. Only "unsupervised learning" is possible to do. It includes such things as clustering. So, I guess they only take fresh data because they're always redefining their clustering because they can't rely on some serious referancial.
Fitbit wants me to pay for the device AND for the subscription ? And then they have probably the worst wrist-based heart rate tracker on the market ? Are they even serious, at this point, or is this some kind of a joke ?
How accurate is Fitbit heart rate versus whoop and our ring?
Depends on the case/scenario, and in Fitbit's case, it depends on which exact model you're using.
Actually it doesn’t work at all. Tells me I’m doing intense workouts and I’m sleeping Or doesn’t give me a score at all.
More time to be spent exercising in the morning and less time social media scrolling
Do people realize that they share all their very personal health data with google to get answers they probably already know?
Ok what is going on in your life that explains why you're going to sleep at 1:00 AM and getting only 6 hours of sleep.
all over the map :(
This is useless to count my steps, I bike ride instead, can’t walk
Can we now call Fitbit as GOOGLE....giving your data away folks
Hey man, try to calm down the phase of you vids, now this is personal opinion of course, but you're are talking quite fast
Personally I found it a little distracting
might just be this specific video btw, but the feel I'm getting from this video, is that you're stressed, got very little time, and are rushing threw your script
Wow, 1. This is Ray's general approach. He appreciates your time by delivering content clearly and concisely.
If you feel that his delivery is too quick you have a multitude of options: slow down the video, look at other creators.
@@thestamsvideoproduction7427 yep sure did, haven't watched him since this video, thanks for the tip
@@thestamsvideoproduction7427 buddy, last thing, people are allowed to make criticisms of others content, there is no reason to be a white knight. I'm sure a 300k subbed youtuber can handle his own criticism, and whether to take it or to leave it.