Should You Train With Low Training Readiness? What Your Garmin Is Trying to Tell You

You wake up, glance at your Garmin, and see it: Training Readiness is low. Maybe it is sitting at 15 or 25 when you are used to seeing it in the 60s or 70s. You have a workout planned. Now you are stuck with the question every dedicated athlete dreads: should I train with low training readiness, or should I rest?

The answer is not as simple as "always rest" or "always push through." Let's break down what Training Readiness actually measures, why it drops, and how to make a smarter decision when the number on your wrist looks discouraging.

What Is Garmin Training Readiness?

Training Readiness is a daily score from 1 to 100 that Garmin calculates to help you gauge how prepared your body is for training stress. It appears on compatible devices like the Forerunner 255, Forerunner 965, Fenix 7, and Venu 3 series.

Unlike a single metric like resting heart rate, Training Readiness is a composite score that pulls together multiple data streams your watch collects around the clock. It is designed to give you one number that answers the question: "How well can my body handle a hard workout today?"

A score above 50 generally indicates you are in a reasonable state to train. Scores in the 70-100 range suggest your body is primed for intensity. Scores below 30 are a strong signal that something is off and your body may not respond well to hard training.

What Makes Training Readiness Drop?

Several factors feed into the score, and understanding them is key to interpreting what a low number actually means for your day.

HRV Status -- Heart rate variability is one of the most important inputs. A drop in your HRV baseline, or an unfavorable overnight HRV trend, will pull the score down. HRV reflects your autonomic nervous system's balance, and low HRV often signals accumulated stress or incomplete recovery.
Sleep Quality and Duration -- A poor night of sleep, whether it was too short, fragmented, or lacking deep sleep stages, directly impacts your readiness. One bad night might not be catastrophic, but consecutive nights of poor sleep will tank the score.
Recent Training Load -- If you have been stacking hard sessions without adequate recovery, your acute training load will be elevated relative to your fitness. The score accounts for this imbalance.
Stress Levels -- Garmin tracks stress throughout the day using heart rate data. High sustained stress, whether from work, travel, illness, or life events, reduces your body's capacity to absorb training.
Recovery Time -- If your watch still shows significant recovery time remaining from your last session, that feeds into the readiness calculation as well.

The important thing to understand is that a low score is not a judgment. It is information. Your watch is synthesizing data you cannot feel with intuition alone.

Should You Train With Low Training Readiness?

Here is the nuanced answer: it depends on why the score is low, how low it is, and what kind of training you have planned.

A Training Readiness of 35 after a single night of bad sleep is a very different situation than a score of 15 after a week of overreaching with mounting life stress. The number alone does not tell you what to do. The context around it does.

There are times when training through a low score is perfectly fine, and times when ignoring it will cost you fitness rather than build it.

When It Is OK to Push Through

Not every low readiness day needs to become a rest day. Here are scenarios where you can still train productively:

The score is moderately low (30-50) and you slept poorly for one night. A single bad night does not erase your fitness. If you feel functional and your HRV trend over the past week is stable, a moderate session is unlikely to cause harm.
You have an easy or recovery workout planned. Low readiness is primarily a warning against high-intensity or high-volume work. A light jog, easy spin, or mobility session can actually help recovery by promoting blood flow without adding significant stress.
You know the cause and it is temporary. Traveled yesterday. Had a late dinner. Drank a glass of wine. If you can point to a clear, one-off reason and your body feels OK, adjusting intensity down by 10-20% is often a better call than skipping entirely.
Your HRV trend is stable or improving. The single-day HRV reading matters less than the trend over 7-14 days. If your baseline HRV is holding steady or trending up, a single low readiness day is likely noise, not a pattern.

The key principle: reduce intensity, not necessarily volume. Swap a threshold run for an easy run. Replace intervals with steady-state work. You stay consistent without digging a recovery hole.

When You Should Absolutely Rest

There are situations where training through low readiness is counterproductive or even risky:

Your score has been below 30 for multiple consecutive days. This is your body waving a red flag. Consecutive low scores suggest systemic fatigue, accumulated stress, or the early stages of illness. Training hard here does not make you fitter. It makes you slower.
Your HRV baseline is trending downward over the past week. A declining HRV trend is one of the strongest indicators of overreaching. Respect it.
You feel genuinely terrible. Sore throat, heavy legs, brain fog, elevated resting heart rate. When subjective feelings align with objective data, listen to both.
You are in a high-stress life period. Job change, family crisis, poor sleep for a week straight. Training is a stressor. When life stress is already maxing out your recovery capacity, adding training stress has diminishing or negative returns.
You are coming back from illness or injury. Your readiness score may bounce back before your body is truly ready. Be conservative during return-to-training phases.

The key principle: rest is not lost training. It is where adaptation happens. The athletes who get injured or plateau are often the ones who cannot distinguish between laziness and legitimate fatigue.

Practical Tips for Low Readiness Days

When your Garmin shows a low score, run through this quick checklist before deciding:

Check the trend, not just today's number. One low day in a string of good days is very different from a downward spiral.
Identify the cause. Poor sleep? Heavy training block? Life stress? The cause shapes the response.
Adjust intensity first. You do not have to choose between a full workout and the couch. There is a productive middle ground.
If in doubt, do a 15-minute warmup. Start easy and see how your body responds. If you feel better after 15 minutes, continue at reduced intensity. If you feel worse, stop. No guilt.
Track your patterns. Over weeks and months, you will start to see which low readiness signals matter and which ones you can train through. This self-knowledge is more valuable than any single metric.
Prioritize sleep above all else. If low readiness is recurring, the most impactful change is almost always improving sleep quality and consistency.

How AI Coaching Helps You Make Better Decisions

The challenge with Training Readiness is that it gives you a number but does not tell you what to do with it. It does not know your training plan, your goals, your race calendar, or how you responded to similar situations in the past.

This is exactly the problem that AI-powered coaching is starting to solve. Instead of staring at a score and guessing, imagine a system that reads your Garmin data -- HRV, sleep, training load, stress, readiness -- and cross-references it with your training history and goals to give you a specific recommendation: train easy today, swap to tomorrow's session, or take a full rest day.

At shoulditrain.com, we are building exactly this kind of AI coach. One that connects to your Garmin data and gives you a clear, personalized answer every morning. Not a generic number, but an actionable decision based on your body and your plan. The goal is to take the guesswork out of the daily "should I train?" question so you can focus on showing up and doing the right work at the right time.

The Bottom Line

Should you train with low training readiness? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the difference matters more than most athletes realize.

A low Training Readiness score is not an automatic rest day. It is a signal to pause, assess, and adjust. The athletes who get the most out of their Garmin data are not the ones who blindly obey every number or ignore every warning. They are the ones who learn to read the context behind the score and make informed decisions.

Pay attention to trends over single days. Prioritize reducing intensity before skipping sessions entirely. Rest without guilt when the data and your body agree that you need it. And if you want help turning all that data into a clear daily answer, smart coaching tools are getting closer to making that a reality.

Your watch is collecting incredible data about your body. The next step is learning to use it wisely.