Adaptive Cardio Load Targets for Improving Fitness and Performance

TL;DR

This paper introduces adaptive weekly Cardio Load targets in Fitbit to personalize cardiovascular training, enhancing fitness and performance by considering daily activities and providing a comprehensive overview of CL measurement and its comparison with AZMs.

Contribution

It presents a novel adaptive, personalized approach to setting weekly Cardio Load targets based on user activity data, improving fitness tracking accuracy.

Findings

CL captures both active workouts and incidental activities.

Adaptive targets improve user engagement and training effectiveness.

Comparison shows CL and AZMs serve different health and performance purposes.

Abstract

Cardio Load, introduced by Google in 2024, is a measure of cardiovascular work (also known as training load) resulting from all the user's activities across the day. It is based on heart rate reserve and captures both activity intensity and duration. Thanks to feedback from users and internal research, we introduce adaptive and personalized targets which will be set weekly. This feature will be available in the Public Preview of the Fitbit app after September 2025. This white paper provides a comprehensive overview of Cardio Load (CL) and how weekly CL targets are established, with examples shown to illustrate the effect of varying CL on the weekly target. We compare Cardio Load and Active Zone Minutes (AZMs), highlighting their distinct purposes, i.e. AZMs for health guidelines and CL for performance measurement. We highlight that CL is accumulated both during active workouts and incidental daily activities, so users are able top-up their CL score with small bouts of activity across the day.