Your Running Stress Balance (RSB) is the difference between your accumulated long-term running stress (42-day weighted average) and your short-term running stress (7-day weighted average). As such, more recent runs have a higher contribution to these average values.

In general, your 42-day average is an expression of your fitness. It captures the long-term trend in your stress that contributes to your fatigue resistance. Your 7-day average is an expression of your fatigue and encapsulates the time before your training stress results in fitness gains.

Because the value is the difference between your 42-day average and 7-day average, the value won’t be accurate until you have approximately 42 days of training.

So, if you jump into using Stryd in the middle of a training block, please ignore the value until you have at least a few weeks of data. This will be remedied in a future update.

We focus on the balance between the 42-day average or the 7-day average because we find the trend (accumulating stress or losing stress) to be more valuable than the less tangible and more individual nature of the values themselves.

Overreaching -45 to -40

When your running stress is beyond advised for sustained training.

Cautionary -40 to -25

A state of heavy training. Be cautious of increasing your running stress.

Productive -25 to -10

When your running stress is quickly adding to your fatigue. With proper recovery, it will contribute to your fitness.

Maintenance -10 to 5

The state of balancing your running stress and recovery.

Performance 5 to 25

The state where your running stress is low and you’re primed to take advantage of your current fitness.

N/A 25 to 45

Your running stress is too low to contribute to your fitness.

If you are in the Overreaching category, you have placed a tremendous amount of stress on your body in a short amount of time. If you do find yourself in this state, we recommend that you allow your body sufficient rest so you do not risk injury from overtraining.
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If you are in the Cautionary category, your training volume has considerably ramped up. You should be careful not to remain in this category for an extended amount of time or push your way into the Overreaching category because you will likely see diminishing returns from your efforts. Ideally, you should allow for some extra recovery to move to a Productive status.
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If you are in the Productive or Maintenance category, you are in the sweet spot between stress and recovery. Your fitness is steadily improving because you are stressing your body and then letting your body adapt and improve from that stress. Ideally, you want to be regularly shifting between the Productive category and Maintenance categories to establish a rhythm of steady improvement.
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If you are in the Performance category, you are race-day-ready. You have allowed your body to fully adapt from the recent training so you will be fresh for the race. This is the perfect status to be in if you want to give yourself the best chance of setting a new personal record on race day.
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If you are in the N/A category, your recent training has not been enough to contribute to your fitness. You will soon reach a state of detraining. We recommend ramping up your training to move back to a Productive or Maintenance state to achieve beneficial training.

Your Run Stress Balance is updated once per day at Midnight during your local time.