Christmas is supposed to be about rest, indulgence and pretending a long walk to the fridge counts as cardio.
Unfortunately, your Garmin watch doesn’t always get the memo.
A few days off structured training, a disrupted routine, maybe one festive run, too many mince pies too late, and suddenly your running watch is serving up a less-than-encouraging Training Status update.
The good news is Garmin has built in a way to stop your well-earned break from being misinterpreted as a fitness collapse.
What's Training Status?
Training Status is one of Garmin’s most useful (and occasionally most guilt-inducing) features.
Found on many of the brand’s triathlon watches, it looks at how your recent training load stacks up against your longer-term fitness trends.
Using VO₂ max estimates, training load and intensity balance, it categorises your training as Productive, Maintaining, Peaking, Overreaching or, ominously, Detraining.
It’s designed to help you understand how your body is responding to training over time, not to shame you for taking a few days off.
That’s where the festive problem comes in. Training Status doesn’t know the difference between a deliberate recovery phase and a Christmas week spent travelling, socialising or simply switching off.
If your activity levels drop suddenly, the algorithm can interpret that as lost fitness, nudging your status towards Unproductive or Detraining just as you’re trying to relax.
It’s accurate in the long run, but not always kind in the short term.
A Christmas miracle
To Garmin’s credit, there’s an easy fix. Many Garmin watches let you pause Training Status entirely, effectively telling your watch, “I know what I’m doing – we’ll talk later.”
When Training Status is paused, your watch still records activities as normal, but it stops analysing them for Training Status, training load trends and recovery-based guidance. In other words, your Christmas break doesn’t get baked into your performance narrative.
How to pause Training Status
You can pause Training Status directly on the watch. Head to the Training Status widget, open the options menu by long pressing the middle button and select Pause Training Status.
(The wording may vary slightly by model, but the idea is the same.)
Once paused and synced, your watch will clearly show that Training Status tracking is on hold. When normal training resumes in January, you can switch it back on from the same menu and let Garmin pick up the story again.
Training Status works best over weeks and months, not during the festive limbo between Boxing Day and New Year.
Pausing it doesn’t cheat the system; it simply keeps the data honest.
And if that means enjoying your Christmas break without your watch quietly judging you, that feels very much in the spirit of the season.
