The new Morpheus October updates are here and we think you’ll really like the improvements we’ve made!

If you don’t have automatic updates turned on, make sure to visit the app store to download and install the newest versions.

We’ve made three changes all designed to improve the workout features of Morpheus. Give them a try and let us know what you think by posting a pic on IG and tagging us or sharing in the Morpheus FB community.

Improved workout history view

The new and improved workout history view makes it much to scroll through your past workouts and get a quick glimpse at the data, workout time, calories, and average heart rate.

You can scroll up and down to look through past workouts and if you get to the bottom of the list, just hit “view more” to bring up the full screen menu.

To dive deeper into a specific workout, just tap on the workout you want to view and it will take you to our new all-new workout summary reports

New workout summary report

The updated workout summary report includes a more complete look at all the details of each and every workout, as well as a new landscape view that lets you view your heart rates at two different times throughout the workout.

You can get to the all new report by completing a workout in the app, syncing a workout from the M7, or through the workout history view as discussed above.

In the updated report, you’ll find additional statistics, better workout graphs, a list of any zone-based intervals completed in the workout, as well as the new landscape view.

To get to the landscape view, simply swipe the top section to get to the graph view and click the small arrow icon in the upper right corner. This will then open the landscape view where you can view any two points on the graph by clicking on the screen.

This is especially useful if you’d like to look at your heart rate recovery between any two points of the workout.

Once you’re done, you can close the landscape view by hitting back and it will return you to the workout summary.

Interval training updates

One of the most important features in Morpheus is the Zone-Based Interval Training (ZBIT) methods that can be found within the TRAIN screen. In an effort to increase awareness about ZBIT, we’ve added labels to the icons in the upper right hand screen that are used to configure and then start any intervals you’d like to do in your workout.

Finally, we’ve also made one small change to how the interval counter workouts. When you’re doing any of the 12 intervals, the interval counter will now display the interval number that you’re currently on, rather than the number you’ve completed as it did before the update.

This means that if you have chosen to do 10 intervals, you will now see 1/10 as soon as you start the first interval instead of seeing 0/10 until you had completed the first rep.

This is more in line with how other interval timers work and we think it will make it easier to know exactly where you are and how many you have left.

Welcome to day 1 of the Morpheus Recovery Challenge.

Now that it’s officially started, let’s talk about the rules, scoring, and how to get the win!

To get as many points as possible and give yourself the best shot at claiming the top spot, it’s important to make sure you understand how the scoring works.

There are 4 different ways to earn points:

1. Recovery score
2. Completing daily activities
2. Working out with Morpheus
3. Being consistent and hitting streaks

Recovery score

The single biggest way to earn points is the daily recovery score. Each day, you’ll earn the number of points equal to your recovery score. If your score is 87%, for example, you’ll earn 87 points in the challenge.

The higher your recovery score, the more points you’ll earn.

Scoring for daily activities:

Each day, you can earn up to 30 points by completing each of the 5 activities below. Being consistent and hitting each of these goals each day is also how you maintain a high recovery score and unlock bonus points from streaks.

7,000+ steps per day: 10pts
Sleep 8+ hours: 10pts
Sleep 7-8 hours per night: 5pts
Complete daily lesson: 10pts

Scoring for workouts:

Each calendar week (mon-sun), you can earn points for up to 4 workouts. You’ll receive 10 points for each workout, plus bonus points if you do recovery workouts.

A recovery workout is any workout that causes your recovery score to go up afterwards.

All the details on recovery workouts will be covered in an upcoming lesson, but the basic guidelines for recovery workouts are:

• Keep your heart rate in the blue zone for the vast majority of the time
• Workout for generally around 25-40 minutes
• Make sure your average HR for the workout is above 100bpm
• Have an RPE of 6 or lower.
• You can do a variety of different exercises, it’s totally up to you.

Recovery workouts can increase your daily recovery score from 1-7%. You’ll earn bonus points based on this number.

For example, if you do a recovery workout and your recovery score increase 5%, you’ll earn 10 points for the workout + 5 bonus points, for a total of 15pts.

You can do as many workouts throughout the challenge as you like, but you’ll only receive points for a total of 4 per week.

It’s important to keep in mind that the key to workouts in the challenge is balance. If you do too many workouts and/or too much intensity, your recovery score will be lower. If you don’t do enough workouts, or all you do is low intensity, your fitness may decrease.

Throughout the challenge, you’ll learn more about the most effective ways to build training programs using Morpheus.

Unlocking bonus points for streaks

Consistency is a major key to success in fitness and an important part of the challenge. You can unlock bonus points for hitting 7, 14, and 28-day streaks for hitting the daily goals for steps, sleep, and getting a recovery score.

To get into the top spots, you’re going to need to unlock as many of the streak bonus points as possible. Not only will this help you win, being consistent will also help you build the right habits to each your fitness goals.

Tracking your scores

You can see exactly what you stand in each of these areas by clicking on the “Scoring” tab next to the leaderboard.

These scores are updated in real-time so you will always know where you stand.

Note that because we have people from all over the world in the challenge, you may see people a day ahead of you based on time zones. You’ll see what day people are on listed in the scoring tab.

What to do next

Our goal is to help you take the next step in your fitness journey by unlocking the power of faster recovery and smarter training.

Over the coming days, you’ll learn a lot more about what recovery really is, how it’s related to stress, and why the 23 hours outside the gym have such a big impact on whether or not you achieve your fitness goals.

By the end of the challenge, whether you win first place or not, you’ll know exactly how to connect all the dots to drive meaningful (and sustainable) improvements in your fitness, health, and performance.

By completing this first lesson, you’ve earned points in the challenge!

To get more, all you have to do is make sure to take an HRV measurement so you can get a recovery score, and then hit at least 7,000 steps a day before getting a good night of sleep.

Finally, before tomorrow’s lesson, your homework is to take a few minutes to write down the answer to two important questions:

1) What is your single biggest fitness goal? In other words, what motivates you to get up, go to the gym, and put in the work day in and day out?

2) What is the main obstacle keeping you from reaching that goal?

Write the answers to these two questions down because we’ll refer back to them as we progress through the daily lessons.

You’ve put in a lot of work to get here—well done!

Let’s quickly review what you’ve learned on this 30-day journey:

You began by learning the science of HRV and how it’s a powerful reflection of your recovery.

You dove into other major contributors to your health and recovery: training, sleep, movement, and nutrition.

Then, you discovered how to build new healthy habits, one step at a time.

The following lessons helped you build your recovery toolkit with specific recovery and regeneration strategies: hydrotherapies, sauna, breathing strategies, soft tissue care, mental relaxation drills, cold water immersion, compression, and recovery supplements.

This taught you exactly when to use each recovery strategy and how to perform them for maximum impact.

That’s when you studied the Train, Recover, Repeat model of health and fitness and learned how to balance your stress and recovery using Morpheus.

You continued by investigating specific training methods and how to use them to improve different areas of your conditioning and performance.

All those lessons laid a solid foundation for how to transform your recovery and fitness.

The final section helped you define why.

You used the Morpheus Recovery Assessment to examine the habits and behaviors affecting your recovery. And the results from this test helped you identify your biggest recovery limitations.

These “recovery roadblocks” gave you a starting point to:

• • Single out an outcome goal for your health/fitness

• • Set process goals to help you steadily pursue your outcome goal

Finally, at the end of the last lesson, you wrote down how you intend to track your progress, identify setbacks, and hold yourself accountable as you chip away at your process and outcome goals.

Now, it’s time to follow your well-developed plan.

The beauty of this recovery roadmap is that you can use it again and again.

Things change. Down the road, you may struggle with areas of your recovery that seem effortless now.

At any time, you can take the Morpheus Recovery Assessment again, identify a high-benefit behavior change you can make with the least amount of effort, and map out your new outcome and process goals.

This is a system for continually adapting your recovery plan as your needs evolve.

We hope you’ll use it as a framework for the methods and strategies we’ve covered in these lessons.

Thank you for following along with us over the past 30 days.

And congratulations on completing the final lesson!

In the previous lesson, you identified one area of your recovery you want to improve.

Now, it’s time to pinpoint the exact goal you should set to make the greatest positive change in your health and performance.

It’s important to understand that successful goal-setting is an actual science. If you don’t work with the brain’s natural dopamine reward system, you’ll fight an uphill battle and ultimately fail to make changes that stick.

Part of what is knowing how dopamine motivates us. Each time we predict a reward, whether it’s getting thousands of likes when we open Instagram or seeing the number go down when you step on the scale, we get a little dopamine spike.

This is important, because the spike comes before the actual reward! It’s the anticipation of something great that causes the dopamine uptick.
 

 
This is what drives and reinforces our behavior.

But what happens when we don’t get what we’re anticipating? When what actually happens falls short of our expectations?

Each time our brain incorrectly predicts the level of reward from an action, it adjusts its prediction up or down—and your motivation to take that action again adjusts along with it.

What does this mean for your fitness?

When you first start training, your brain sees very rapid progress, i.e. a big reward from the work. Your body fat quickly drops, strength grows, aerobic fitness improves, etc.

Your brain becomes conditioned to expect a big payoff from all the work. This predicted reward leads to a large dopamine spike before each workout, which strongly motivates you to work out.

The big problem is that progress is never linear.

Those initially rapid gains inevitably slow down, usually within a matter of weeks.

As soon as the reward diminishes, your brain starts to realize that its prediction was wrong—the work isn’t leading to the same level of reward.
 

 
When your brain sees fewer results than it expected, your dopamine levels nosedive and your motivation to train goes along with them.

If your goals are tied to things that don’t always improve quickly, it’s only a matter of time before you stop working toward them.

So, what kind of goals should you set?

There are two kinds of goals, and both of them are important.

The first is an outcome goal, and this is what you ultimately want to achieve. This might be “Lose 20 lbs” or “Increase my bench press by 20 lbs,” or “Get at least 8 hours of sleep each night.”

The other kind of goal is a process goal, and this focuses on the behaviors required to reach an outcome goal.

For example, if your outcome goal is to lose 20 lbs, then there are a series of steps around being active, eating, training, and recovering that will ultimately determine whether you reach that goal.

In the last lesson, you identified your biggest recovery roadblocks.

This is your outcome goal, what you’re ultimately trying to change or improve.

The way to steadily make progress toward your goal without losing motivation is to shift your focus away from your long-term outcome goal—like sleeping better, eating healthier, or losing weight—and toward the process of achieving them.
 

 
Whether it’s getting in enough steps, doing the workout you planned, avoiding caffeine after a certain time, or anything else, you can stay motivated simply by concentrating on achieving these very short-term goals.

The power of progress

Set a goal you can achieve each day and make it small and practical.

Take advantage of the dopamine reward system and give yourself the gratification of accomplishing something each day.

This will keep your motivation strong and your focus trained on what you can control.

Nothing will dampen your drive to change more than failing to meet your expectations.

Action step:

Write out your outcome goal—the single area of your recovery you want to improve.

Then detail the steps you need to take each day to reach that goal.

Once you’ve identified 2-3 key process goals to help you reach your outcome goal, answer the following questions:

• What are you going to measure to track your process goals?
• How will you track them? (Excel, daily checklist, etc.)
• How often will you track them?
• What will you look for to identify progress or setbacks?

Now that we’re nearing the end of the recovery challenge, you have an arsenal of tools and strategies to boost your recovery.

It’s time to start thinking of your recovery as a trait you can program and train for, just like fitness.

And the foundation of any good program is a thoughtful assessment: The Morpheus Recovery Screen, in this case.

You need to know the answer to “What is the biggest thing limiting my recovery?”

This will help you develop a clear recovery goal that you can build a well-planned recovery program around—which we’ll talk more about in the final lessons.

How to assess & identify your recovery roadblocks

As you know by now, there are many factors influencing your recovery. That’s why the Morpheus Recovery Screen assesses each of the core lifestyle contributors to recovery:

• Movement/activity
• Training
• Nutrition
• Sleep
• Regeneration

You can probably guess what your recovery roadblocks are already. But it’s still helpful to have an objective scoring system so you can track your progress over time.

Take a few minutes to answer the questions below and write down your scores for each section.

Any section with a total score that’s less than 8 is an area that can use improvement.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Which recovery roadblocks should you fix first?

You may have multiple sections with scores less than 8. That’s ok.

Remember that when it comes to changing behavior, it’s hugely important to work on just one goal or habit at a time.

Choose what you want to change by identifying what will require the least amount of effort and lead to the greatest fitness benefit.

It’s helpful to revisit the chart from the lesson on habits as you do this:
 

 
Once you’ve identified the single recovery area you want to work on, we’ll help you develop a plan to achieve it in the final lessons.

The best way to think of the cardiovascular system is that it’s the body’s aerobic engine. Its job is primarily to pump blood and deliver oxygen throughout your entire body. Without it, you wouldn’t be alive.

At the center of this engine is the heart itself.

Although the heart is composed of a slightly different type of muscle tissue than that of your skeletal muscles, it’s still a muscle nonetheless and capable of becoming bigger, stronger, and more efficient.

In many ways, it’s the most important muscle in your body when it comes to improving fitness, health, performance, and everything in between.

Just as with other muscles, the type of training that you do dictates the changes that happen within the heart as a result. The heart of a marathon runner looks and performs very differently than the heart of a powerlifter.
 

 
The marathon runner’s heart has to be capable of delivering a lot of blood with each beat. It has to be extremely efficient.

The heart of a powerlifter, on the other hand, has to be able to support the tremendously high blood pressures, up to 345/245, and force on the body during maximum lifting.

This requires the walls and tissues of the heart to be strong. Efficiency is much less important when you’re training for heavy lifts that only last a few seconds.

How red power intervals work

The reason all this is important to understand is because red max intervals are specifically designed to cause changes in the heart that can up the horsepower of your entire cardiovascular system.

This horsepower is typically measured in terms of how much oxygen your body can use during high level exercise. This number is known as your VO2 max and it’s a very good gauge of your overall aerobic fitness.

The primary goal of red max intervals is to help train the heart to be able to deliver more oxygen by driving it towards the highest intensities. This is where it’s forced to work the hardest, sort of like the equivalent of pushing your heart to its 1-rep max.

By pushing the heart up to the limits of its oxygen pumping potential, it causes changes that improve VO2 max and overall aerobic fitness. The result is that you develop a stronger heart that can power a bigger aerobic engine.
 

 
How to do red max intervals

Let me start by saying that red max intervals are not fun. They are extremely demanding because the single most important thing you have to do is drive your heart rate up to its max, or as close to it as you can get it.

You also don’t want to hit your max and then immediately slow back down. The goal is to keep it up towards the top for up to 30 seconds, or more, to really drive the maximum results from this type of interval.

Before you do this, there are two important considerations:

• Red max intervals are not for beginners. Just as it’s not a good idea to take someone that’s new to lifting weights or coming off a long layoff and start by doing heavy 1-rep max sets, the same applies to heart rate training.  
  You should not include red max intervals in your program until you already have a relatively high level of aerobic fitness. This generally means an HRV in the 80’s and a resting heart rate in the low to mid 50’s.
• Exercise selection is extremely important. To get up to your max heart rate means only total body exercises will work. Exercises that are seated like rowing or biking will not be as effective because you will not be able to get your heart rate as well. 
  It’s also important to avoid trying to incorporate heavy strength-based exercises or circuit training. These may drive heart rate up, but they will also drive blood pressure much higher as well and this can change the impact on the heart as well.

Each rep of red max intervals should be somewhere between 90-120s depending on how long it takes you to get your heart rate to max, or close to it. Your goal should be to hit the top of the red zone and keep it there for up to 30 seconds or more.

Rest periods should be 4-5 minutes, or until you feel fully ready to drive your heart rate up to max again.

Active rest around the middle of the blue zone is more effective than passive rest, though you may feel the need to sit down or take a complete break for the first minute or two.
 

 
It goes without saying that you should be thoroughly warmed up before you do your first rep. It’s incredibly important to focus on maintaining good technique, even as you start to become fatigued.

How to incorporate red max intervals into your program

This type of high intensity training is best reserved for short periods of time, only a few weeks at most. They are particularly effective when peaking for a competition that requires a high level of aerobic fitness.

When you’re first starting out, as little as 1-2 reps is all that’s necessary. As you progress, work up to 3-4 reps per workout. Because the intensity is so high, there is generally no need or benefit to doing higher reps than that.

As with other high intensity methods, red max intervals should be incorporated into your program a maximum of 1-2 times per week, with at least 2 days between them.

When these guidelines are followed, they may not be fun, but they are an incredibly powerful way to increase the horsepower of your aerobic engine and boost your performance in a short period of time.