Sleeping & Body Battery
dreambubble1
Posts: 2 Member
Hi Everyone, I just got a new watch. It's called a Garmin Instinct. On the watch it has a health and fitness widget called 'body battery.' It tracks the individuals feeling of energy and or tiredness. Really quite fascinating. So I'm trying to work out how my body and sleep are affected, whilst getting to know how the feature on my watch works. Has anybody else experienced the 'body battery' concept on a watch? Please share your thoughts.
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Replies
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I do have it on mine. It was interesting to see how sleep, stress, alcohol and food choices effected it and compare the results to how I was feeling. I use it in my journal sometimes. Its also useful to help me figure out why I'm more tired than normal sometimes. Be curious with it but don't take it as gospel3
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That's right. Sometimes I feel fine and my score is low. Other times I feel tired and my score is high. But then again, life doesn't always make sense does it? I have discovered that my sleep is poor and that's probably the biggest drain on my energy. Even when I think my sleep is okay the watch tells me I only had minimal deep sleep. How long have you had the watch, and do you still check the stats regularly?0
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Generally, I'd take the sleep data with a grain of salt.
I had an in-hospital overnight sleep study, all wired up to various monitoring devices for heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels, brain waves, and who knows what all. Gold standard instrumentation. I was also wearing my watch.
After the study, I showed the tech (who'd been watching my monitors all night) what the app said about my sleep cycles. We both laughed, and laughed!
It routinely shows me as asleep (usually in REM) when I'm awake in bed texting after AM wakeup (and have the time stamps to prove it), sometimes for long time periods. It will fail to show wake-ups during the night that I know I had (sometimes long ones), if I didn't move during the awake period.
From what I've read of research, the sleep tracking is equally iffy for many people. In conjunction with how a person feels, it may provide some insights . . . but I wouldn't trust it as gospel.4 -
Generally, I'd take the sleep data with a grain of salt.
I had an in-hospital overnight sleep study, all wired up to various monitoring devices for heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels, brain waves, and who knows what all. Gold standard instrumentation. I was also wearing my watch.
After the study, I showed the tech (who'd been watching my monitors all night) what the app said about my sleep cycles. We both laughed, and laughed!
It routinely shows me as asleep (usually in REM) when I'm awake in bed texting after AM wakeup (and have the time stamps to prove it), sometimes for long time periods. It will fail to show wake-ups during the night that I know I had (sometimes long ones), if I didn't move during the awake period.
From what I've read of research, the sleep tracking is equally iffy for many people. In conjunction with how a person feels, it may provide some insights . . . but I wouldn't trust it as gospel.
I'll add to this anecdotally that if you suffer from poor sleep, focusing on all the stats you get from a watch can also exacerbate the problem, I would be overthinking it and then getting more anxious about the lack of sleep, compounding the issue further.
That said I have found my Garmin to be pretty accurate as to when I'm asleep/awake, not sure I'd trust the REM/Deep Sleep as these days it only shows me in Deep Sleep about the first hour or so, everything else is light/REM and I am pretty well rested most of the time now.2 -
I have a garmin venu that I got for Christmas. I enjoy looking at the stats, but they don't really change my day. I like looking at my sleep stats too see if they compare with how I'm feeling. I have crazy dreams, so it's interesting to see how it looks on my sleep graph
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I've had similar experiences with others on the sleep.
As far as the body battery goes, it's not a replacement for how I'm feeling, but it is interesting. If I have a day with massive drain, or it barely recharged overnight, I might check to see whether it's a reasonable assessment and if so, is there something I ought to change or avoid? I've had my Garmin a year now, and look at the stats far less than I used to.0 -
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I haven't found the body battery feature on my Garmin very useful, and it doesn't really correlate with the way I'm actually feeling. It's always at 100 in the morning, even if I feel like I've slept poorly. By the time I've finished exercising for the day, it's usually in the 50s or 60s. Garmin Connect might suggest "Now might be a good time for that workout you've been meaning to try" even though, again, I've already worked out my butt off.
Might be because of my HR, which is very low in both rest and while exercising, so maybe the watch just thinks I always work out at low intensities and also recover much faster than I actually do. Probably the feature works better for some folks than others.0 -
I have a Garmin Instinct...personally, I think that feature is a joke and not particularly useful. I also take the sleep data with a huge grain of salt. The body battery wasn't a feature when I initially bought my watch...it came with one of the updates and I find it to be utterly useless.
I've always like Garmin for it's plethora of quantifiable training data and has long been one of the best in the business in regards to GPS. I like the instinct because it's rugged and I spend a fair amount of time in the mountains camping and hiking and it has good, reliable GPS and provides training data for a variety of different things...but for me, the body battery and sleep stuff is kind of outside the realm of what I have bought Garmin products for over the years...it's really just unquantifiable data that doesn't mean a whole lot to me.2 -
My Garmin devices have all been pretty terrible with sleep monitoring. I don’t pay much attention to that.
Your watch likely has a “stress” widget that is measuring your heart rate variability (how much variation there is in the amount of time in between your heart beats). This metric is something used to gauge recovery (as it helps pinpoint what is going on with your nervous system) and is the same thing used by things like Elite HRV (long used by athletes to help gauge recovery), Apple Watch “breathe”, Polar’s ANS portion of its nightly recharge (and the orthostatic test) and the like.
HRV is a long standing metric for gauging recovery.
The more your nervous system is at rest, the more you are recovering. The more stress you have (physical or otherwise), the less you are recovering. These may or may not correlate to how you feel. It doesn’t mean either is wrong.
I’ve been using HRV as such a metric for years, and it’s never been “wrong”. Days I’ve felt great but my workout was a dreadful death shuffle? HRV concurred that I was not recovered. Days I’ve felt awful but my workout was amazing? HRV concurred that I was good to go. That has been true long before body battery ever entered the scene.
Body battery is trying to put a quantifiable number to how much rest/recovery you actually need and where you stand overall. This doesn’t necessarily mean sleep. It means time your nervous system is at rest. The actual numbers you see are based on the values in your “stress” widget (except when you’re doing a workout). But If I’ve been at a “rest” stress level for 12 hours, what does that mean? Does that mean I’m good? Am I still recovering from my 4 hour run 2 days ago or the incredibly stressful day I had at work? Body battery is attempting to give you an idea of where you sit on that recovery scale.
As I’ve gotten older and my training has become longer and more intense, focusing on recovery (and my status) is what allows me to do the most effective workouts within my plan. HRV (and a whole pile of other things) is one of the things in my toolkit for that.
I have a Fenix 6s pro (I don’t think that makes a difference-it’s the same Body Battery they bought from First Beat in all the devices that have it). As far as I can tel, the specific sleep data Garmin pulls out of its random number generator does to have any effect on the body battery (only your HRV/“stress”during that time).
There’s a bit more in the blog here if you’re interested:
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/fitness/body-battery-thrive/2 -
Based on the title, I thought you were talking about how people like me batter their bodies while sleeping because we get into a bad position and wake up worth a sore neck! Haha!0
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I have an Apple Watch and have an app that performs similarly. I love it - it helps me hone in on what I'm doing to contribute to good or poor rest. It's neat!0
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Duck_Puddle wrote: »My Garmin devices have all been pretty terrible with sleep monitoring. I don’t pay much attention to that.
Your watch likely has a “stress” widget that is measuring your heart rate variability (how much variation there is in the amount of time in between your heart beats). This metric is something used to gauge recovery (as it helps pinpoint what is going on with your nervous system) and is the same thing used by things like Elite HRV (long used by athletes to help gauge recovery), Apple Watch “breathe”, Polar’s ANS portion of its nightly recharge (and the orthostatic test) and the like.
HRV is a long standing metric for gauging recovery.
The more your nervous system is at rest, the more you are recovering. The more stress you have (physical or otherwise), the less you are recovering. These may or may not correlate to how you feel. It doesn’t mean either is wrong.
I’ve been using HRV as such a metric for years, and it’s never been “wrong”. Days I’ve felt great but my workout was a dreadful death shuffle? HRV concurred that I was not recovered. Days I’ve felt awful but my workout was amazing? HRV concurred that I was good to go. That has been true long before body battery ever entered the scene.
Body battery is trying to put a quantifiable number to how much rest/recovery you actually need and where you stand overall. This doesn’t necessarily mean sleep. It means time your nervous system is at rest. The actual numbers you see are based on the values in your “stress” widget (except when you’re doing a workout). But If I’ve been at a “rest” stress level for 12 hours, what does that mean? Does that mean I’m good? Am I still recovering from my 4 hour run 2 days ago or the incredibly stressful day I had at work? Body battery is attempting to give you an idea of where you sit on that recovery scale.
As I’ve gotten older and my training has become longer and more intense, focusing on recovery (and my status) is what allows me to do the most effective workouts within my plan. HRV (and a whole pile of other things) is one of the things in my toolkit for that.
I have a Fenix 6s pro (I don’t think that makes a difference-it’s the same Body Battery they bought from First Beat in all the devices that have it). As far as I can tel, the specific sleep data Garmin pulls out of its random number generator does to have any effect on the body battery (only your HRV/“stress”during that time).
There’s a bit more in the blog here if you’re interested:
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/fitness/body-battery-thrive/
Yes! I must admit that I just did a search for this very thing. What I'd really like to know is how people have made their body battery more resilient and any patterns that people have spotted. I find that if I'm doing uni work, even if it's stressful coming up to a deadline, it copes and is just a steady reduction over the day. When I'm working 12 hour shifts on a hospital ward it consistently bottoms out and even though I would honestly consider myself to be calm, methodical and cheerful my stress levels are consistently high.
Apart from the obvious reducing BMI, increasing vigorous days and minutes and maintaining a resting heart rate in the low 50's has anyone found anything that has had an impact? The only one I've come up with so far is that alcohol had a really dramatic negative effect on recovery for me.0 -
Generally, I'd take the sleep data with a grain of salt.
I had an in-hospital overnight sleep study, all wired up to various monitoring devices for heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels, brain waves, and who knows what all. Gold standard instrumentation. I was also wearing my watch.
After the study, I showed the tech (who'd been watching my monitors all night) what the app said about my sleep cycles. We both laughed, and laughed!
It routinely shows me as asleep (usually in REM) when I'm awake in bed texting after AM wakeup (and have the time stamps to prove it), sometimes for long time periods. It will fail to show wake-ups during the night that I know I had (sometimes long ones), if I didn't move during the awake period.
From what I've read of research, the sleep tracking is equally iffy for many people. In conjunction with how a person feels, it may provide some insights . . . but I wouldn't trust it as gospel.
It's an old thread, but I just saw this. Funnily I had a sleep study done nearly two years ago. My garmin watch I know is rubbish at tracking when I'm awake or sleeping. But even more funnily, the guy evaluating the test said I slept well... actually I was awake for most of the night, posted complaints on facebook or twitter and whatnot. So i guess these are not really foolproof either.
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Generally, I'd take the sleep data with a grain of salt.
I had an in-hospital overnight sleep study, all wired up to various monitoring devices for heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels, brain waves, and who knows what all. Gold standard instrumentation. I was also wearing my watch.
After the study, I showed the tech (who'd been watching my monitors all night) what the app said about my sleep cycles. We both laughed, and laughed!
It routinely shows me as asleep (usually in REM) when I'm awake in bed texting after AM wakeup (and have the time stamps to prove it), sometimes for long time periods. It will fail to show wake-ups during the night that I know I had (sometimes long ones), if I didn't move during the awake period.
From what I've read of research, the sleep tracking is equally iffy for many people. In conjunction with how a person feels, it may provide some insights . . . but I wouldn't trust it as gospel.
It's an old thread, but I just saw this. Funnily I had a sleep study done nearly two years ago. My garmin watch I know is rubbish at tracking when I'm awake or sleeping. But even more funnily, the guy evaluating the test said I slept well... actually I was awake for most of the night, posted complaints on facebook or twitter and whatnot. So i guess these are not really foolproof either.
Did you have an at-home test? In the ones I had, I was in a hospital building (though the room was a little bit more hotel-like) wired up every possible way (HR, pulse ox, brain waves, electrodes in various spots to detect even slight limb muscle movement, a monitored CPAP-type mask thing for breathing), plus there was a microphone and camera in the room, with a tech monitoring me from another room for the whole night.
If I needed to get up or needed another blanket or whatever, I just had to say it out loud, and they'd talk to me over a speaker, respond to whatever I needed.
There is no possible way I could've been posting on FB or anything like that without them knowing. She knew I was awake even when I was staying very still, meditating (focus on the breath), hoping to fall back to sleep.1 -
AnnPT77 - those sleep labs are fascinating. Monitoring brainwaves there are distinctive patterns to different states and different brain activity. I love being a student in a hospital, a good 90% of people are enthusiastic to talk you through their work and kit. Fascinating.1
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I'm thinking the same about both fitbit and garmin sleep tracking. I've had both and both have recorded me as being asleep in meetings
Definately more interesting to look at the body battery if the calculations are being informed by heart rate variability. 0 -
Generally, I'd take the sleep data with a grain of salt.
I had an in-hospital overnight sleep study, all wired up to various monitoring devices for heart rate, breathing, oxygen levels, brain waves, and who knows what all. Gold standard instrumentation. I was also wearing my watch.
After the study, I showed the tech (who'd been watching my monitors all night) what the app said about my sleep cycles. We both laughed, and laughed!
It routinely shows me as asleep (usually in REM) when I'm awake in bed texting after AM wakeup (and have the time stamps to prove it), sometimes for long time periods. It will fail to show wake-ups during the night that I know I had (sometimes long ones), if I didn't move during the awake period.
From what I've read of research, the sleep tracking is equally iffy for many people. In conjunction with how a person feels, it may provide some insights . . . but I wouldn't trust it as gospel.
It's an old thread, but I just saw this. Funnily I had a sleep study done nearly two years ago. My garmin watch I know is rubbish at tracking when I'm awake or sleeping. But even more funnily, the guy evaluating the test said I slept well... actually I was awake for most of the night, posted complaints on facebook or twitter and whatnot. So i guess these are not really foolproof either.
Did you have an at-home test? In the ones I had, I was in a hospital building (though the room was a little bit more hotel-like) wired up every possible way (HR, pulse ox, brain waves, electrodes in various spots to detect even slight limb muscle movement, a monitored CPAP-type mask thing for breathing), plus there was a microphone and camera in the room, with a tech monitoring me from another room for the whole night.
If I needed to get up or needed another blanket or whatever, I just had to say it out loud, and they'd talk to me over a speaker, respond to whatever I needed.
There is no possible way I could've been posting on FB or anything like that without them knowing. She knew I was awake even when I was staying very still, meditating (focus on the breath), hoping to fall back to sleep.
Yeah, it was a hospital, but nobody actually watched or listened. So when the doctor told me that I was a bit restless but slept like a baby I showed him all my social media posts from that night and he was confused. I mean, I know Garmin doesn't usually realize when I wake up at night, or extends my night into my wakeup time when I wake up and surf the net a bit in bed, but this was something completely different.
Thinking of it, for movement they'd only put sensors on the outside of my lower legs. I removed those quickly because eds, poor connective tissue, and sleeping on the side. Those things HURT! (well, everything else did as well, and I ended up with bruises and swellings at every sensor point in the morning, aching joints from not being able to move as much as I'm used to, and a subluxed rib from that box where everything came together. No, I was in so much discomfort that I could not sleep). Hmm. thinking of it.. I had a dysautonomia flareup at that time which likely results in a massive dampening of the stress-inducing part of the nervous system. Waiting for an appointment with a specialized clinic for that. So even when I was awake I certainly was not as such.1
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