What are cardio load and target load?

Your heart is a powerful muscle at the center of your health, and its health is responsible to help improve your fitness. Google Health's cardio load is a personalized score to help you understand how hard your heart works during physical activity.

Important:

The cardio load tile is available in the Google Health mobile app when you pair a supported device to your account.
Cardio load is available on-device in Google Pixel Watch 3 and 4.
Cardio load requires Google Health mobile app version 4.26 or higher.

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Target load is a suggested range for your cardio load that you can use to guide your training. The Google Health app now uses a personalized weekly cardio target instead of a daily target. The target load considers your fitness level, recent activity, and bodily recovery from past workouts. It also considers your plan to either maintain or improve your cardio fitness level. This weekly focus offers more flexibility, as your daily cardio load accrual adds up toward your weekly goal, allowing you to balance heavy workout days with rest days throughout the week.

Understand the differences between cardio load and target load

Cardio load measures the strain on your cardiovascular system during exercise and weekly activities. It considers not only the duration but also the intensity of your efforts, which recognizes that higher-intensity exercise places greater demands on your heart. You receive more cardio load for longer or more strenuous activity based on your heart rate.

Your target load is a suggested cardio load range that you can use to guide your training. Aim to get enough cardio load to reach your personalized target by the end of the week. It takes into account your fitness level, recent activity, and how recovered your body is. It also considers whether you plan to maintain or improve your cardio fitness level. Think of it as a sweet spot for exercise.

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Use cardio load to check how hard you pushed and avoid under or over training. This allows you to reach your fitness goals while prioritizing your cardio health. Instead of aiming for a specific cardio load each day, the Google Health app now provides a personalized weekly cardio target. This offers more flexibility, as your cardio load accrual adds up toward your weekly goal, allowing you to manage your activities across the week to meet your target.

Track your progress: Track your cardio load over time to monitor your progress toward your fitness goals.
Optimize your training: Use cardio load to guide activity levels and intensity. This ensures that you work out at the right intensity to reach your goals, while you consider your recovery.
Balance your training load: Use your results to help you understand if you have accumulated the right amount of cardio load for the goal you’ve set for yourself. You can use the result to decide if you want to maintain or improve your cardio fitness.

Additional Tips

Individualized metric: Remember that cardio load is personalized to you, based on your heart rate during physical activity. This helps ensure your target load is still achievable with the right amount of challenge. You can also get additional information and recommendations here:
- Training status: It shows how well you’re training recently. You get notified whether you’re "Under training," "Improving fitness," or "Over training." This can help you decide if you want to adjust your next workout or training sessions.
Varied activities: Cardio load can be accumulated through activities that increase your heart rate. This includes running, cycling, walking, and any of the 40+ activities in your Fitbit device.
Consult with professionals: If you have concerns about your heart health or training intensity, you should always consult with a healthcare professional or certified trainer.

Cardio load is based on the TRIMP (TRaining IMPulse) model, a well-established method to assess your training load. This model takes into account your heart rate during activity, and factors like your age, resting heart rate, and sex.

Google Health uses several factors to calculate your target load:

Training target: Your target load is tailored to the fitness target you have set in the Google Health app to maintain or improve fitness.
Recent activity: Google Health compares the last week of cardio load with the last month (often called Acute to Chronic Workload Ratio or ACWR). This ensures that your target load is appropriate for your current level of training.

Target load needs time to calibrate to you and your activity. Your first target load score appears after 7 consecutive days and nights of wearing the watch.

Weekly Cardio Load for Google Health Premium Users

Important: Weekly Cardio Load requires the Google Health app, a Google Account, a compatible Android device, and internet connection. Premium content and features are subject to change, may vary by device, aren’t available in all countries, and may be in English only.

For users with a Premium subscription who have opted into the Google Health Coach, your Coach dynamically sets and adjusts your weekly cardio load target. This ensures that your target aligns with the coach's specific recommendations, including your fitness goals and recommended workouts.

Your coach adjusts this target based on your weekly Training Focus, which is classified into one of three states:

Recovery: A lower target to help your body adapt and recover.
Maintain: A target designed to keep your current fitness level consistent.
Build: A higher target to help you push for greater fitness gains.

Tip: Your coach provides fitness suggestions. Always progress at a pace that feels sustainable for you.

If you do not have a Google Health Premium subscription, the weekly target continues to be determined by your average cardio load over the previous 4-week period.

You start every day with zero cardio load. As your heart rate increases to the light zone and beyond, you'll begin to accumulate cardio load. While your daily accrual resets to zero at midnight, the cardio load you earn each day adds up toward your overall weekly target. There's no practical maximum to the load you can accumulate each day.

On the Today tab, you can monitor your progress through the weekly cardio ring. The ring closes as you earn load throughout the week, with the percentage in the center reflecting your total progress toward your weekly goal.

On the Today tab 👁 Image
, tap the Cardio load tile.
Switch between the tabs at the top of the page to check your load trends over the course of a day, week, month, or year.

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Alternatively, you can access cardio load trends from the Fitness tab 👁 Image
. The Fitness tab also includes additional information:

Summary: This shows the summary of your exercise achievements based on the data from Exercise days, Cardio load, and Steps.
Exercise days: This highlights the days that you workout. It displays the workout you did for a specific day and tracks your progress towards your exercise goal.
Steps: It counts your steps and average steps per day. It also shows historical data about your steps for the week. When you meet your step goal, it shows a check on the day when you achieved it.

Tip: In the day view, you can check your total cardio load, your weekly target, and the breakdown of activities that contributed to that day’s cardio load. Tap the arrows to navigate to a different day.

Check post workout summary

You can get a workout summary that gives information related to your most recently completed workout:

Workout summary: This summarizes information about the workout and provides some insight. This includes the cardio load you earned, the duration of the exercise, and heart rate zones during the workout.
Progress target: It displays your progress towards your weekly cardio load target and highlights the cardio load gained from the workout. This can help you determine the impact of your recent workout to your target.
Heart rate zones: This highlights the distribution of cardio load earned relative to the heart rate zone throughout the workout. It gives a breakdown of the heart rate zone, the duration you spent on each zone, and the amount of cardio load earned.

Tip: A notification about post workout summaries also appears after the workout. It highlights one metric like heart rate zone or distance. You can tap See full recap to open the Google Health app and get detailed information about the notification.

Open the Google Health app 👁 Image
.
Tap the cardio load card to check the details on your current cardio load and your target load. This also includes a breakdown of what activities have contributed to today’s cardio load, and a graph of your cardio load trend over the week.

👁 Cardio Load

Google Health Today App

👁 Cardio Load Details

Google Health Cardio Load Details

Tip: To check how much cardio load you accumulate during a workout, customize your workout views. Choose cardio load as one of the key metrics during a workout, or check out your workout summary afterward.

Target load is best for people who regularly train their cardiovascular system, ideally in a consistent pattern of days.

The Google Health app uses a personalized weekly cardio target instead of a target. This lets you plan your workouts more flexibly around your schedule while ensuring you get accurate training guidance.

On the Today tab, your weekly cardio ring closes as you earn cardio load throughout the week.

Daily Progress: The amount of cardio load you’ve added for the day is shown inside the weekly cardio load ring.
Weekly Progress: The percentage in the middle of the ring reflects your overall progress toward your weekly target.
Total Load: The total cardio load you’ve earned for the week is displayed at the bottom of the ring.

A weekly target helps smooth out day-to-day changes in your activity so you can focus on making consistent progress over time. If you have a busy day or feel sick, you have the flexibility to make up the load later in the week.

Google Health measures how active you’ve been over the last 7 days in comparison to how active you've been in the last 4 weeks to determine your training status.

If you take on too much cardio load too quickly, you’re at risk of over training. When you're over trained, your body constantly fights to recover. Instead of improving your endurance and stamina, over training can lower your cardiovascular performance. You might find it harder to maintain your usual pace or distance, and you might feel more easily fatigued.

Conversely, if you stop training for a period of time, you’re at risk of under training. While taking breaks is essential, long periods of inactivity can reverse the gains you've made in your cardiovascular fitness. Your heart and lungs become less efficient at delivering oxygen to your muscles. You may notice that you tire more easily and can't sustain your previous levels of exercise intensity or duration.

The sweet spots between under training and over training are maintaining or improving. Maintaining means you’re getting a consistent amount of cardio load and you regularly reach your target range. Improving indicates you’re regularly reaching the top of your target range or slightly exceeding it, helping improve your fitness.

Your target load guides you to maintain or improve depending on what goal you choose when you onboard.

Just-right training: Your target load takes your current fitness level and recent activity patterns into account. Hitting your target load consistently can help you achieve your fitness goals safely and effectively.
Injury prevention: Staying within your target load range can help to prevent over training, reducing the risk of injuries and burnout.
Motivation: Tracking your progress toward your target load can be a great motivator to keep you engaged and excited about your workouts.

Tip: Target load isn't a rigid rule, but a helpful guide based on your body. Listen to your body, prioritize rest when needed, and enjoy the journey to a healthier, fitter you.

One of the keys to successful training is balancing load and recovery. A weekly target is designed to smooth out day-to-day changes in your activity, allowing you to focus on consistent progress over time rather than hitting a specific number every day. This reduces the risk of over training. Because the target is weekly, you have the flexibility to make up for lower-activity days later in the week or prioritize rest after a particularly strenuous session.

General considerations

Ensure you allow sufficient time for your watch calibration for each individual activity level, establishing a baseline measurement.
Certain medications affecting heart rate will influence cardio load and target load calculations.
Infrequent or erratic training patterns can impede accurate target load calculation.

If the target load appears low

Check your recovery levels. A lower level may require a target load adjustment.
The actual cardio load is the amount of stress placed on the cardiovascular system during physical activity. An individual’s perceived exertion may be different from the actual exertion. This discrepancy can arise from various factors, which include individual fitness levels, exercise intensity, duration, and environmental conditions.

If the target load appears high

Target load is derived from your cardio loads accumulated over several days. Weekly cardio load accrues throughout daily activities like running, cycling, walking, and any of over 40 activities in Google Health, not solely during workouts. Thus, the target load encompasses the entire target, not a singular workout.
Prioritize self-assessment. If readiness is high but you feel fatigued, listen to your body and take a break.
This may indicate early stages of illness, not yet reflected in the readiness score, and may influence target load. Prioritize rest, taking breaks, and reducing the intensity of your workout.

Cardio load is available in the Google Health mobile app when you use one of these devices:

Fitbit	Google Pixel Watch
Inspire 2 Inspire 3 Luxe Sense Sense 2 Versa 2 Versa 3 Versa 4 Charge 5 Charge 6 Air	Pixel Watch 1 Pixel Watch 2 Pixel Watch 3 Pixel Watch 4

Set up cardio load

From the Today tab 👁 Image
or Fitness tab 👁 Fitness icon
in the Google Health app, tap the Cardio load tile. Follow the instructions in the app to choose your goal and begin tracking cardio load. After you wear your device for two weeks, your cardio load goal becomes a personalized cardio load target. This is automatically determined based on your average cardio load in the previous two weeks.

This brings flexibility to your workout routines:

Hit the sweet spot in your training: Your personalized target can help you keep up with your fitness goals without under training or over training.
Choose how hard you want to push: You can choose to just hit your target to maintain your current fitness level or push forward for more gains.
Your target adjusts to your fitness level: Each week, Google Health adjusts your target based on your cardio load average from the past few weeks.

Optional: To set cardio load as your focus at the top of the Today tab:

From the Today tab 👁 Image
in the Google Health app 👁 Image
, tap Edit 👁 Google Translate Pencil Icon
.
Under "Set your focus," swipe through the options and select Build cardio fitness.
Tap Save.

Tip: Target load needs time to calibrate to you. Your first target load range appears after 7 consecutive days of accumulating cardio load and sleeping with your device. To get the most accurate target, wear your watch during the daytime, especially during periods of exercise. For best results, wear continuously for 28 days.

Troubleshooting cardio load and target load

In the Google Health app 👁 Image
, on the Today tab 👁 Image
, tap the Cardio load tile.
Tap Menu 👁 Image
👁 and then
Manage data.
Tap Delete Data 👁 and then
Cardio load.
Select the data range you want to delete.
Tap Delete.

Going above your target cardio load on a single week isn't a problem. As your body experiences fitness gains, you'll notice your target range increasing as a result. In fact, it’s a great way to push yourself to higher fitness gains. However, doing this too frequently can lead to over training. The goal is to balance out your training so that from a weekly and monthly perspective you’re maintaining a good balance to achieve your fitness target. To learn more about this, go to What is my training status.

To add the Cardio Load tile to your Pixel Watch 3 and 4:

From your watch face, swipe to any tile.
Long press on the tile to bring up the tile selector menu.
Tap Add 👁 Image
to add a tile.
Scroll vertically to find the Cardio Load tile and tap to select it.
Use the arrows to select where the tile should appear among the other tiles on your watch.
Press the crown to return to your watch face.

To remove the Cardio Load tile from your Pixel Watch 3 and 4:

From your watch face, swipe left or right until you reach the Cardio Load tile.
Long press on the tile to bring up the tile selector menu.
Swipe vertically from bottom to top to remove the tile.
Press the crown to return to your watch face.¹

^₁_{Like all heart rate tracking technologies, accuracy is affected by physiology, location of device, and your movements and activity.}

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URL: https://support.google.com/googlehealth/answer/15402655