Real-time stamina is designed to help guide you toward your best possible performance, empowering you to push your limits with confidence. This advanced Garmin feature provides context for interpreting feedback from your body and delivers valuable insight throughout your workout. Time and distance to exhaustion estimates predict what you can expect to achieve with your remaining stamina at your current effort level.
What Is Real-Time Stamina?
Stamina describes your capacity for quality performance. Running out of stamina means reaching or rapidly approaching the point where maintaining your current pace becomes a serious struggle. How hard you’re working affects how quickly your stamina drains during an activity.
The Real-Time Stamina feature on compatible Garmin devices tracks two key metrics:
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Stamina (0–100%): Reflects how much you have left in the tank at your current level of effort. This perspective combines general fatigue with more temporary limitations imposed by anaerobically driven efforts such as sprints, climbs and attacks.
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Potential Stamina (0–100%): Focuses specifically on the effects of broader, longer-lasting fatigue contributors such as muscle cell damage, central nervous system fatigue and carbohydrate (glycogen) depletion. Activities that result in near or total depletion of your potential stamina typically require several days of recovery before you’re back at full capacity.
How Stamina and Potential Interact
If you haven’t fully recovered from your last activity, your potential will not be at 100% when you begin. This reflects the real physiological limitations that carry over between training sessions.
During sustained moderate-intensity efforts, expect your stamina and potential to align closely. However, when you increase intensity beyond your lactate threshold (running) or FTP (cycling), stamina will drain faster than your potential. Return to a moderate, sustainable effort, and stamina will gradually replenish toward your potential as the residual effects of high-intensity, anaerobic exertion begin to wear off.
This dynamic relationship between stamina and potential stamina provides a visual representation of how your body manages different intensity levels during exercise—making it easier to pace yourself appropriately during longer events.
How Garmin Calculates Real-Time Stamina
Real-time stamina tracking works by combining your physiological metrics with a multi-layered analysis of your recent and longer-term activity history. This comprehensive approach examines:
- Training durations
- Distances covered
- Training load accumulations
- Load distributions
These factors are analyzed for meaningful patterns that reflect fatigue resistance and personal tolerances for aerobic and anaerobic exercise.
While general fitness contributes to your performance ability, activity-specific training adaptations substantially influence your capacity for sustained performance. In other words, running ability doesn’t directly translate into cycling ability and vice versa. As a result, real-time stamina estimates are primarily guided by:
- Running history data during running activities
- Cycling history data during cycling activities
Benefits of Training with Real-Time Stamina
1. Improved Pacing Strategy
Real-time stamina gives you immediate feedback on how your current effort affects your endurance reserves. This helps you avoid going out too hard at the beginning of an event or training session.
2. Workout Optimization
By monitoring stamina depletion rates at different intensity levels, you can fine-tune workouts to target specific energy systems and improve your overall efficiency.
3. Race Day Performance
During races or challenging training sessions, stamina metrics provide objective data to help make smart decisions about when to push harder or when to conserve energy.
4. Recovery Insights
Tracking potential stamina helps identify when you might need extra recovery time before attempting another challenging workout.
Compatible Garmin Devices
Real-Time Stamina is available on select Garmin devices, including:
- Forerunner 955, 965, 970 series
- Fenix 7 and 8 series
- Epix (Gen 2 and newer)
- Enduro series
- And other advanced Garmin watches
For best results, ensure your device firmware is updated to the latest version and that your user profile (weight, age, activity history) is accurate.
Tips for Getting the Most from Real-Time Stamina
- Build baseline data - The feature becomes more accurate as it gathers more data about your personal performance patterns
- Use during varied workouts - Test how your stamina responds to different efforts to learn your limits
- Compare with perceived effort - Pay attention to how stamina percentages correlate with how you feel
- Assess recovery needs - Note potential stamina at the end of workouts to inform recovery planning
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