Morpheus was designed to help you train smarter, recover faster, and make fitness a sustainable journey that will lead to life-long health, wellness, and performance.
Once you’re up and running with Morpheus and tracking your recovery each day, the following three strategies will help you get started down the path of personalized fitness.
Get in your zone
The three Morpheus training zones are at the heart of what makes Morpheus such a powerful tool to improve your health, fitness, and performance.
That’s because they’re designed to help you dial in each and every workout based on your recovery.
When your recovery is lower, your zones shift down and when it’s higher, they shift up.
Each zone represents a specific level of personalized intensity and a way to achieve target workout goals.
When you’re trying to push your body to its limits, your workouts should include time in your green and red zones.
These two zones will provide the level of intensity your body needs to improve without pushing you towards overtraining and increased risk of injury.
When your body needs more recovery, focusing most of your workout time in the blue zone and staying out of the red zone will help it get exactly that.
Morpheus is the only system in the world that delivers truly personalized heart rate training each and every workout.
Building your workouts around your Morpheus heart rate zones is the easiest and best way to balance your training and speed up your recovery.
More will be covered on training with Morpheus in the next module and in other courses coming soon.
Keep your average recovery in the green
The best way to see how well your body is balancing the stress of life and training with recovery is by taking a look at your weekly recovery patterns and trends.
When your recovery score is above 80%, your score will be green. When it’s between 80% and 40%, the color changes to amber. And when it’s below 40%, you’ll see a red score.
Looking at how these colors are distributed across each week and which direction things are heading, gives you a powerful view into your average recovery and where your body is heading.
This important because key to making consistent progress from your training is to use just the right amount of volume and intensity. Not too much. Not too little.
For most people, this means averaging around 2 days per week with a recovery score less than 80% (amber) and the other 5 above 80% (green).
If you’re seeing all green, then chances are high that you may not be using enough volume and intensity to push your body to improve.
If you’re consistently seeing 3-4 days per week in the amber below 80%, however, it’s a sign that your body is not fully recovering and you need to dial things back.
It’s also valuable to look at the trends, i.e. how your recovery often looks at different points throughout each week. This can help you make sure that you’re training is organized in an effective way to keep your recovery where it needs to be.
If you notice your recovery is always very low at the end of the week, for example, it may mean you could benefit from adding in some additional recovery during the middle of the week, for example.
Or, if you see that your recovery is consistently low on Monday, it’s likely a sign that your body is not fully recovering over the weekend and you may need to make some changes.
Keeping your average in the green (above 80%) each week and making sure that your recovery is heading in the right direction are two easy and important ways to use Morpheus to make sure all your hard work in the gym will keep paying off.
Get to know your body
When people first start measuring and tracking their recovery, one of the first things they are surprised by is when their recovery score on a given doesn’t match what they expected based on their workout.
They do a hard workout and yet the next day, their recovery score is still high.
Or, they don’t do a hard workout at all, and yet the next day their recovery score has a huge drop.
It’s easy to think that your workout is the single biggest factor in your recovery score, but the way the body works isn’t that simple.
Your workout is just one of many different factors, from sleep, to nutrition, mental stress, daily activity, and more that drive how much stress your body is under and how fast it can recover from it.
For most people, working out is only an hour a day. Maybe two.
Life, however, is 24 hours a day. Stress doesn’t stop when you leave the gym.
So, while your workouts do play a big role in your recovery, all the hours outside the gym add up and have a huge impact on your body.
This is important to understand because your body, and how it responds to all the different types of stress we face in life, is unique to you.
Although we all have the same basic biology, our genetics, fitness, environment, and lifestyle are all different.
One of the most effective ways to use the Morpheus recovery score is to learn more about how your body works.
If you pay attention, you’ll learn how all the different variables in your life, from how much you sleep, to what you eat, to how much mental stress you’ve been under, impact your body and thus your recovery score.
You can also test out various recovery and regeneration strategies and use Morpheus to track how well they work.
One of the best ways to use Morpheus to get to know your body is with the notes feature. You can add notes after each recovery test and add them to each workout.
This will help you connect all the dots of your life back to recovery and understand the story the numbers are telling you.
Knowing what your body responds the best to (and what it doesn’t) makes it easier to make smarter choices, improve your lifestyle and behaviors, and dial in your training.
No matter what your goals may be, learning to work with your body, rather than fighting against it, is the single biggest key to reaching them.