This is a new page in the Navigator that gives you a comparison of how your cumulative Cardiac Stress Score compares to that of your peers on Crickles. By default, the period over which the sum is taken is the last six weeks and your “peers” are those who are closest in age – both the period and the comparison group can be changed in the sidebar.
Here’s what it looks like:
The uppermost bar, labelled Total_CSS, shows where your summed Cardiac Stress Score ranks relative to peers. The midline represents the median value; values to the right are relatively higher and to the left are relatively lower. If you hover over one of the bars you can see your value alongside the highest and the lowest from your peers:
In this example, the athlete’s CSS is amongst the higher ones. The hover tip shows that at 4,217 it’s well above the median of 2,305 although far lower than the highest value of 7,715. You can see the exact distribution of the CSS values for all athletes in the peer group by looking at the Relative CSS tab. You can see which of your activities contribute most of the CSS from the Activities tab and the Timeline tab. If you do more than one type of sport, you can get a breakdown of the CSS total as well as insight into the hourly cardiac stress rate on the CSS by Sport tab.
The other three bars on the chart above show the relative levels of the factors that go to make up CSS, which are:
- The weighted average cardiac intensity for your activities over this period
- The number of activities that you’ve logged in the period
- The average duration of those activities.
In this example, you can see from the chart that the athlete has done many more activities than most peers, although the activities are, on average, shorter. The exercise intensity is just a shade higher than the peer average. In all cases, the hover tips show the relevant values, so, for example, the athlete’s average activity duration is 1.3 hours, which is below the median value of 1.5 hours and well below the maximum average value of just under 4 hours. (Duration actually captures moving time, not elapsed time.)
Lower values are coloured to be progressively more blue and higher values are progressively more red.
As with much of the analysis on Crickles, the purpose of this tab is to enable you to understand how your exercise load compares to that of other keen endurance athletes. In the absence of established levels for how much exercise might be “too much”, you can at least see whether you’re doing more or less than other people of a similar age, using a methodology that is consistent across different sports.