Relative Effort & Progress Data seem off ?

[VincentFR]

Hello fellow sporty people,

2 things before we start : 1) Happy New Year to all of you's - wishing you some miles and lots of smiles, 2) Pardon my English, trying my best here. 🙂 

I've started last week my Paris Marathon preparation and for the last two weeks and potentiall due to the (in)famous WearOs tracking issue, Relative Effort and Progress charts seem off. 

Relative Effort : I've compared 2 very similar trainings I did, one this morning and one a couple of months ago - one gives me a 47 relative effort score, the second one (this morning) gives me a 15 score (while i reached a 175HR) ... 

Link to activity 1 : https://www.strava.com/activities/9670511769/overview

Link to activity 2 : https://www.strava.com/activities/10496892064/overview

The difference is less noticeable on easy runs but I can now hardly reach 15/16 relative effort score on 1h - 1h15 easy runs while these runs would previously get me a score between 30 and 40. 

I've also increased pace drastically since my last marathon prep' so in terms of HR I make sure to stay in the sweet 125-140 range (depending on how tired / cold / ... I am). 

Progress Chart : Same issue there. While regularly running 4/5 times a week, my Progress Chart stays at a 38/39 score and does not increase. 

Below are 2 screens : first is on the 1st day of my 1st Marathon Prep, second is on the fisrt of the 2nd prep. 

You can see that despite training consistently, progress bar goes down. 

I have no idea what's wrong there - is it entirely due to the WearOs issue ? - but as you can imagine, it's quite frustrating to not be able to trust any data that appears on Strava anymore ... 

[Jessica_Mee]

@VincentFR I am experiencing the exact same thing with my current analysis of my fitness data, comparing my training cycle from 2023 to this year.  I am blaming my HRM for not collecting my HR correctly, (old technology) however, it very well could be the Strava algorithm calculating my Relative efforts wrong.  (Almost half as much effort as I've been given for similar workouts in the past)

I agree, this is disheartening, and makes me question paying for the service that makes me question my training intensity.

[VincentFR]

Hi @Jessica_Mee !

I gave up on paying premium membership on Strava a long time ago, mostly due to the WearOs issue, but also because the whole Relative Effort calculation / Progress charts are not coherent with actual running science. 

From their point of view, the harder you train, the "healthiest" you get. Meaning that you would never see your score progress if you work in your Z2, which is the most important in endurance training. 

So yeah, nice tool to post activities and get kudos, but far from being an actual health app focused on endurance training. 🙂 

[Jane]

Hi @Jessica_Mee 

So sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue.  Someone from our Strava Support Team would be happy to take a look at your activities and troubleshoot why the relative efforts scores have a large discrepancy. Please submit a support ticket

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hi @VincentFR 

Thanks for posting about this.  It looks like you made edits to your heart rate zones between those 2 activities. Making changes to your heart rate zones on Strava can have large impacts on the relative effort number you see on activities.  That's because we use the % of time you spend in HR zones to calculate relative effort.  We then use relative effort to calculate your fitness score, so that is also impacted.

More on relative effort here

I hope that's helpful.

[Mlstrava]

Hi Jane. 
I’ve noticed the same thing but never changed anything? 
anything else that could be causing it? I worked harder and got 18, vs 29 in early December. The average HR however is lower in the newer activities…

Thanks