Gentler Streak: Wellness Hub 12+

I use them all

I have been using several HRV monitoring apps as well as Gentler Streak. This is my favorite, let me tell you why.

I’m absolutely the guy that pushes himself too hard. I have to admit that I keep my score in the top end most of the time and often exceed the recommendation. That’s the beauty of it, I know and have learned to take more days off without guilt.

I’ve noticed less burn out. I have a pattern. I go hard for about six or seven weeks and then just burn out. Burn out for me means I’m 100% off the train. I eat poorly, sleep poorly and don’t exercise at all. When I rest more, I go much longer before I burnout. Actually, I probably don’t burn out until I decide to ignore the recommendations.

All the HRV tools. They are all over the place. One will tell me to rest, the other tells me I’m sick and the third may tell me I died two days ago. This tool, tends to track to more Jim how I’m actually feeling but just helps me stay reasonable.

I’m looking forward to some of the upcoming changes in the app and am curious how the HRV features will help or break the current recommendations. I hope it gets a solid baseline and then sprinkles in some of the common sense built into this tool. I think the others are a little to rigid in the HRV baseline and zones.

Great tool folks. I feel this is really well suited for the overall wellness crowd. Let’s face it… the elite athletes will follow much more structured advise.

Still needs a bit of work

UPDATE: We still aren’t getting anything to show our steps as activity in this app. That’s a critical issue here. We shouldn’t have to log our daily steps as workouts to record the activity. I’ve tried doing this to have a more accurate picture of wellbeing and actually have the app saying I’m overreaching when it’s not that hard to walk throughout the day, taking breaks in between. Developers need to find a way to work this into the algorithm for the app. As it stands it seems that while other apps ignore the need for customization based on individual abilities/needs this app ignores the need to have basic data at its core. We need to meet somewhere in the middle here ASAP.
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I like the app but there are area it needs work; 1) The new Wellbeing tab and syncing with Health is good, but why doesn’t it show our steps? and why aren’t our streaks reflecting our walking throughout the day? This needs attention ‼️ 2) I’ve had to edit sleep in other apps as it over estimated my time sleeping. But then this app shows “Insufficient data” under the Wellbeing tab.🤨 The day is there? I just corrected it so that the record is accurate. This shouldn’t be a problem. 3) One of the reasons I’ve liked this app is the ability to do things at our own pace. I don’t like the “reminders” about exercising or losing a streak. A streak shouldn’t rely solely on workouts but also steps. See point 1.

Developer Response ,

Hello,

thank you for taking the time and leaving a review. We are indeed a work in progress. 😊

1.
a) Steps may become a part of Wellbeing if we find a sensible way to include them.
b) Your heart rate is the base for the TRIMP formula, which lies at the core of our algorithm. When you don't track your workout, we get very scarce feedback on it; therefore, we cannot estimate the toll it took on your body. The same goes for steps that appear as exercise minutes (if you use Apple Watch). We take it into account, but since heart rate data is not dense, we can't tell the strain it had on your body, therefore the effect on Activity Path is most probably not as great as it would be with full data. The Apple Watch reads your heart rate continuously every couple of seconds when tracking a workout, giving us great data to work with. When you are not tracking, your watch reads your heart rate every 2 to 5 minutes, getting up to 20 readings per hour at best.

2. This was a bug that was removed with the next version. If the problem still persists, please send over an email to support@gentlerstories.com and we will have a look into it.

3. Reply in the 1st point covers this. I agree this would be optimal, but it would not be backed with data, which then makes it messy. You could insert walking activity by hand, and do an equivalent of distance, and estimate your efforts with RPE. However, this is not optimal and we would suggest tracking as many workouts as possible, and with that getting quality data in, so we can guide you best as we can.