Oct 1, 2026 · 11 min · 7 segments
Fitness trackers can provide a wealth of data like heart rate variability and sleep scores, but they can also be misleading for helping you auto-regulate your workouts. Instead, the smarter play is…
Autoregulation is the idea where you are working hard enough to get a really good, strong stimulus to get great results, but you're not working too hard, so you're overstressing your mind, body, and lifestyle.
And the mistake a lot of people make when it comes to their workouts is they base their workouts off of a formula that basically tells them how much work they should do.
But that's kind of like getting in your car and saying, okay, how fast should you drive your car? It doesn't matter if you settle on driving 60 miles an hour or 30 miles an hour.
If you have a finite amount of work that's not changing, sooner or later you're either forcing yourself to do more than you should, in which case you're overstressing yourself, or you're putting yourself at a low bar and saying, okay, I'm only going to do this little bit, in which case you're holding yourself back when you should be doing more to get much better results.
Auto-regulation solves this by saying, no, no, no, it's not how much work you do, it's how much you can achieve the objective you're after, and that's what makes your workouts effective.
It's not how hard you're working, it's can you achieve your objective to a higher degree, and you work with the circumstances you have.
Autoregulation is the idea where you are working hard enough to get a really good, strong stimulus to get great results, but you're not working too hard, so you're overstressing your mind, body, and lifestyle.
And the mistake a lot of people make when it comes to their workouts is they base their workouts off of a formula that basically tells them how much work they should do.
But that's kind of like getting in your car and saying, okay, how fast should you drive your car? It doesn't matter if you settle on driving 60 miles an hour or 30 miles an hour.
If you have a finite amount of work that's not changing, sooner or later you're either forcing yourself to do more than you should, in which case you're overstressing yourself, or you're putting yourself at a low bar and saying, okay, I'm only going to do this little bit, in which case you're holding yourself back when you should be doing more to get much better results.
Auto-regulation solves this by saying, no, no, no, it's not how much work you do, it's how much you can achieve the objective you're after, and that's what makes your workouts effective.
It's not how hard you're working, it's can you achieve your objective to a higher degree, and you work with the circumstances you have.
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