Breaking the silence

It has been way too long since I have written a blog. I hope to start back up soon. So why the silence?

Work as been crazy busy and we have been quite busy working on our small house here in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire/Vermont. Any of our spare time is spent running on the trails.

I am still testing various wearables and other toys which help improve sleep and recovery or otherwise help you track your the effects of your lifestyle choices and training.

Garmin has expanded the Firstbeat features they load on their running watches. I picked up the new Garmin Forerunner 945 which includes a PulseOx and the Body Resources (Garmin re-named Body Battery) feature. The PulseOx is not very accurate when compared to a Nonin Finger PulseOx. I assume Garmin will try to use this for sleep apnea screening but will need to calibrate a bit more.

The Body Battery is really a 24x7 simple stress level metric. It does OK at this but has no value for monitoring recovery from an athletic standpoint.

Next up is the Polar Ignite. This is the first mainstream watch which attempts to connect Sleep, Recovery, and Training Load. Polar has added detailed sleep stage and sleep quality analysis which they roll up into a Sleep Score. This sleep assessment is combined with analysis of your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which uses changes in HR, HRV, and Respiratory Rate from your baseline which is based on a rolling 28 day window. The recovery score, known as Nightly Recharge, is then used to provide training guidance (FitSpark) for either Strength, Cardio, or Stretching. Polar has knocked it out of the park with this watch and will be rolling out all of these features, with the exception of FitSpark, to the Vantage V and M watches in October. I expect great things from Polar in the next couple of years.

Finally, I was able to get my hands on the new Ooler cooling pad. The Ooler gets way cooler than the original Chillipad which is helpful when we are sleeping in our Hypoxico tent.

And really finally, I just upgraded our SaunaSpace lights to the new ThermaLight bulbs. These bulbs throw out way more IR light than the original bulbs and generate way more heat. The 4-light panel is hung on the wall in our utility room and the room easily gets up to 110F plus. I am able to achieve the same level of sweating as a traditional Finnish sauna. I have also found that completing a 15 minute session after first waking up in the morning has consistently increased my deep sleep each night.

Until next time, Enjoy!