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Building recovery into your training with YMR Track Club and Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series
YMR Track Club was founded on the track, athletics is in our DNA. We are no stranger to training hard and enjoy the challenge of different sessions. We love the feeling of being active and pushing ourselves. However, we also know that we need to build in time to recover because it helps our body and mind to heal, adapt, improve, and get stronger. There are so many benefits to building in recovery to a training plan, it helps prevent injuries, restores energy, improves sleep quality and it helps sustain a consistent exercise regime over a long time.
Building in recovery though, requires discipline. So many of us prefer to push through another interval set, another long run or another gym session rather than rest or do a lighter session. That’s why it’s important to understand how our mind and body are feeling at any point in time so that the right amount of recovery is built into a training plan.
As we are all unique, having data and insights that tell our own story is key. With this in mind, we were excited to test out Samsung’s new watch, the Galaxy Watch6 classic, specifically to find out more about how it helps support recovery.
There are two key features of the watch that help understand more about how much recovery we might need, and how the body is feeling - Stress and Sleep.
There is no doubt, life can be stressful. Balancing work, home and training can be a challenge. Whilst a little stress can be good for us, prolonged stress can negatively impact the body - it can increase heart rate, blood pressure, cause muscle tension and shallow breathing. Stress can also impact sleep. Maintaining stress levels and monitoring stress levels is therefore important to overall wellbeing – physical and mental.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 series makes it super easy to keep track on stress levels. Either at a moment in time or continuously. By opening the Stress tile*you can see exactly where you are at. What’s more is that should stress levels be higher than normal as part of the ‘Stress’ feature there are simple breathing exercises to do – the function allows you to set your own breathing time, so you decide how much time out you need to relax and get back in control.
These can be done directly on the watch and in Samsung Health you can find more mindfulness exercises on your phone. The data and insights gathered from the ‘Stress’ feature can also help you with your own understandingof how much recovery time you might need to consider as part of your overall training plan.
We love good quality sleep. It is so important for our health and wellbeing and specifically our training. When we sleep well, our body has time to rest and repair and our mind has time to re set. The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 series can help understand more about sleep patterns and help with recommendations to improve sleep.
Whilst wearing the watch at night the watch collects lots of data including total time asleep, sleep cycles, how much time you spend awake and how the sleep you had contributes to physical and mental recovery. Wear the watch for 7 days including 2 days off and you’ll discover what type of ‘sleep animal’ you are, and you’ll be given a specific sleep coaching programme to help improve overall sleep quality.
Using the Samsung Health App, you can try various simple exercises to help support good sleep such as stretching exercises and breathing exercises before bed.
To finish, as athletes, we can find it difficult to slow down. When recovery is discussed often, we think it is about complete rest, doing nothing. Whilst in some circumstances this is the case, recovery options can include targeted stretching, yin or flow yoga, or even practicing mindfulness, all which have a positive impact on performance.
We learnt a huge amount about our body using the Samsung Galaxy Watch6 series specifically about our stress levels and sleep quality. We have used the data and insights to build recovery time into our training plan and are looking forward to seeing how this impacts our performance.
As part of the YMR Track Club community you can enjoy a 10% discount (worth up to 590kr) on the Galaxy Watch6 series enter the code RUNWITHGALAXY at the checkout to get your discount here: https://www.samsung.com/se/watches/galaxy-watch6/buy/