GiGO Example & Why Good Quality Data Matters

[Marjaana]

Garbage In, Garbage Out Example from yours truly
I want to bring this to your attention as a simple user case to illustrate WHY good quality accurate data is crucial.

When chest strap battery ran out of juice I knew from previous experience that Garmin optical unit is not accurate when heart rate rises above 120ish. I strapped my watch (because I’m a data Addict and can’t run without a watch) over my long sleeved running top, thinking no way it can read the my heart rate through a thick fabric.
But check this out

Look how quickly hr (red line) increased and stayed elevated. Look at the random
drops and increases. this was an aerobic run with my dog look at wr (green dotted line) decrease steady (min around 25%) you can clearly tell when my dog wanted to stop and do his business. WR recovers slightly.
(Sometimes the optical HR monitors actually pick up your stride frequency as HR, and that’s what I think happened here. )

Next, check out my comment

Baffled how optical could measure hr through a sleeve. I went on with my day and forgot to delete the data.

New threshold detection method picked my max heart rate and gave me a new threshold of 188 (my heart would be jumping out of my perimenopausal chest at this rate!) from this data set (since I forgot to delete this garbage).

Key take away message:
If your newly updated threshold HR seems a bit off - make sure to check your data for errors / garbage data points, and delete those.

If you are using optical HR measurements, just note that it is much better to use chest strap.

Have a great weekend,
MJ

[nicoguilbert]

Hi @Marjaana,
May I ask how you fix those erroneous data ? Do you use an external tools or is there a feature to help doing this ?
I do regular heat training sessions, HR can end very high compared to power output, with an aerobic decoupling of 20% !
This is what is implemented on intervals.icu for example, I haven’t found similar options in Athletica

[Marjaana]

Hey, I delete the fit file and enter details manually so the file doesn’t have hr data.

However in your case when you are heat training, it is not erroneous data. Higher than normal hr is your body’s natural response to the heat stress, and a true reflection of the internal load. It is part of the heat training journey.

The beauty is that when you are heat adapted- your hr starts to come down, and that’s pretty freaking cool to witness. In fact remembering my own experience last summer I get goose bumps . The first few weeks my HR was shy high and I felt like I was dying inside , then something happened and started to adapt and my heart rate dropped.

Keep the heart rate data, and then you can look back at the journey, and see your adaptation process

MJ