Does anyone have a good solution for tracking time spent in different HR zones across multiple activities? I use both a Garmin and Apple Watch when I work out and that data goes to Garmin Connect, Apple Fitness, Apple Health, and Strava. Unless I’m missing something, neither of those solutions provide a good way to allow me to report on total time that I worked out in a given period, and how that time is distributed by zone. Any insight into how best to do that would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Good question. I believe that you will probably have to do some fiddly work to make this come out right. Is it possible to set or export the data with times in UTC? If you can, then you can calculate the workout time directly. Or, you can keep track of your own time zone offset in a separate calendar or spreadsheet, and calculate your workout times. I’ve spent some time converting a column of times using time zone offsets, and although I’m admittedly very distracted and clumsy what I try to do things like that, I still thought it was unreasonably fiddly. I’m sorry to give you such an absurd answer, but I do think it’s realistic.
Will be interesting to see if others have better ideas. We convened a special session on time stamps at a QS conference some years ago and it was really interesting. The most naive questioners during the Q&A were very confident that this problem was already solved, while the most experienced people in the discussion, including some who had overseen firmware development for commercial wearables on the market, kept trying to say “it’s harder than you think.”
If you are using multiple devices, and Apple Health isn’t doing a good job of consolidating them, try FitnessSyncer: I don’t know if they do the summary you are looking for, but they do let you configure your heart rate zones, so that’s promising…
Thanks, I will check that out. I found another solution called Intervals.icu that looks to have what I’m looking for. However, I have a question about the data which I asked in their forum and have yet to get a response. I will look into your solution as well. Thanks again.
Thanks for your response! Though in all honesty I’m not sure if it answers my questions…if I’m understanding correctly, it looks like your response speaks to normalizing workouts across time zones whereas I’m looking to break down all of my workouts over a given time into different heart rate zones. So I can say that i, for example, ran 100 hours last month (I didn’t!), and x% of that was in Zone 2 and y% was in Zone 4, for example.