Garmin reporting high aerobic shortage
 

Garmin keeps telling me that my rides, while productive, are experiencing a 'high aerobic shortage'. Anyone have any workout/suggestions how I can meet this goal? Thank you.

Go do some long tempo climbs. Any ride with substantial tempo or threshold time will be counted as "high aerobic".

I guess you can do tempo rides on a flat course, also. But it's harder to maintain tempo on the flat -- at least for me.

Remember there are three levels, Low aerobic, High aerobic and Anaerobic. So Garmin probably thinks you aren't doing enough work at the also beneficial high aerobic level.

Might check your HR zones to be certain they are correct. I very recently found that Garmin had changed my Max HR to 220 when it should only be 179. I think that happened when I had a strap go bad and was giving very high HR's for some of my riding.

I'll get that message sometimes if I have a break in my riding for a week or so. Usually takes 2 or 3 rides to get it telling me what I want to hear. Or for times when I ride very hard for the entire ride or very easy for the entire ride. Though the very hard rides usually will get a low aerobic shortage. But not always.

​​​​​​When your Garmin sees that your heart is beating faster than your maximum heart rate, it thinks your mHR is just set wrong and corrects it. You can turn this behavior off of you ride with faulty equipment, there's a setting called auto detect maximum heart rate. You can add the zone you are currently in as a data field so that it will be obvious if yours are set up wrong.

This is one of Garmins useless features. I don't think I'd base my training off of it. The training readiness and HRV functions are pretty good though.

Thanks. I might do that if I have issues again.

Though I think my Edge 530 may have told me it detected a new maxHR value and ask if I wanted to use that. But when they do those things right after a ride, then sometimes I'm not fully thinking about what those ultimately mean. So I hastily approved it so I could see the things I wanted to look at. And without realizing that I'd done something that would affect my HR zones. Similarly it always asks me if I want to use the new ftp it's detected. Though those are fewer and far between lately. I really ought to do a proper ftp test I suppose.

Getting back more toward the OP, today's ride my Edge reported the effort as "balanced" which I think is a new one for me.

I don't think this feature is based on heart rates exactly. I've seen plenty of people (cyclists and runners both) talking about having a high aerobic shortage and score of zero, but having anaerobic. You can't get your HR into the 190s without going through the 160s and 170s on the way.

I suspect they're using HRV. These three zones might correlate to VTs, I'm not sure. When I'm riding hard enough to gasp for breath, my "high aerobic" bar responds like gangbusters.

Eating a lot of slow carbs is a sure fire way to register more "high aerobic."