Your watch buzzes as you finish a run. A second later you're staring at a wall of numbers: training load, MET-minutes, average pace, weekly volume, trend arrows pointing in three different directions. It looks impressive. It also looks faintly baffling.

You didn't sign up for a data science course. You just want to know: was that a good week, and should I push harder or ease off? Here's how to read the numbers that actually matter — no spreadsheet required.

Activity Load: Your Body's Running Tab

Activity load (sometimes called training load or strain) is a single score that tries to capture how much stress a session placed on your body. Most platforms calculate it by combining duration, intensity and your personal heart rate data. A steady 40-minute jog might score 60; a hard interval session of the same length might score 120.

The useful thing about load is that it lets you compare sessions across different types of exercise — a swim, a bike ride and a run can all land on the same scale, which is far handier than just looking at miles.

What you're looking for is a gradual upward trend over weeks, not wild spikes. A single enormous load score after a big race is fine. Back-to-back enormous scores with no easy days in between is how niggles happen.

MET-Minutes: The World Health Organisation's Favourite Metric

MET stands for Metabolic Equivalent of Task — a measure of how hard an activity works your body relative to sitting still. Brisk walking is roughly 3–4 METs; running is 7–10 METs depending on pace. Multiply METs by minutes and you get MET-minutes, which public health guidelines often use to define weekly exercise targets.

Many athletes ignore MET-minutes completely because it sounds medical. That's a shame, because it's actually a decent reality check. If you've had a patchy week — a missed long run, a couple of short walks — your MET-minute total tells you honestly whether you still hit a meaningful dose of activity, even if it didn't feel like "proper training".

Don't obsess over the number. Do glance at it if you're wondering whether a recovery week was too easy or just right.

Pace Trends: The Signal Hidden in Your Average

A single pace figure — "average 5:42 per kilometre" — tells you almost nothing on its own. Pace trends over four to eight weeks are where things get interesting.

If you're running at the same effort (same heart rate, same perceived exertion) but your pace is gradually improving, that's a clear sign your aerobic fitness is moving in the right direction. You're getting faster for free, essentially.

The opposite pattern is worth paying attention to too. If your easy runs are getting slower at the same heart rate, it may mean you're accumulating fatigue, sleeping poorly, or coming down with something. Your body is telling you before your legs do.

The key is to compare like with like: same route, same effort level, similar conditions. A blistering headwind or a hilly detour will skew the numbers, so don't draw conclusions from a single session.

Weekly Volume: More Isn't Always More

Weekly volume — total distance, total time, or total elevation — is probably the number most athletes fixate on. It feels satisfying to hit 50 km in a week. It feels like failure to manage only 30.

But volume without context is almost meaningless. Forty kilometres of easy running is a very different stimulus from 40 kilometres that includes a 20 km long run, a tempo session and a set of hill repeats. And 40 km in week eight of a build phase is very different from 40 km in week one.

The questions worth asking are:

  • Am I ahead of, on track with, or behind my plan? A small shortfall one week is nothing to worry about. A consistent pattern of under-hitting suggests the plan needs adjusting, not that you're failing.
  • Is the increase sustainable? A commonly cited rule of thumb is not to increase weekly volume by more than roughly 10% in a single week — though this is a guide, not a law of physics. What matters is that you're building gradually, not lurching upward.
  • How does it feel? Data should confirm what your body is already telling you, not override it.

Am I Ahead, On Track, or Overdoing It?

Here's a simple framework for reading your week at a glance:

On track looks like: load is steady or slightly up on last week, pace at easy effort is stable or improving, you finished your planned sessions and felt broadly okay doing them.

Ahead of plan looks like: volume is higher than the plan called for, load is spiking, you're tired but convinced you should bank extra miles "while you feel good." Resist the urge. Fitness is built in recovery, not in the sessions themselves.

Overdoing it looks like: heart rate is elevated on easy runs, pace is slowing despite the same effort, motivation is low, sleep is poor. These signals often appear in the data before you consciously register them.

Seeing It Clearly Without the Spreadsheet

The challenge most athletes face isn't access to data — Garmin, Apple Health, Strava and their ilk generate plenty — it's making sense of it in context. A load score of 85 is meaningless unless you know whether that's high or low for you, and whether it fits your plan for the week.

This is exactly what Will Powered is built around. Rather than making you cross-reference apps and build your own tracking sheets, it pulls together the activity data from the apps you already use and surfaces the things that actually matter: whether your week is shaping up well, whether you're carrying more fatigue than usual, and whether there are signs you should dial back or press on.

The aim is to give you the confidence that comes from understanding your training — without turning every Sunday evening into an analysis session.

The Bottom Line

Load, MET-minutes, pace trends and weekly volume are all useful lenses. None of them is the whole picture on its own. The goal is to triangulate — to look for patterns across several of them and let the data confirm (or gently contradict) what your body is already telling you.

Treat the numbers as a conversation, not a verdict. And remember that the best training plan is one that keeps you healthy, consistent and improving over months — not one that looks perfect on a graph for a fortnight before you get injured.

Try Will Powered free and see your training data in plain English — no spreadsheet, no faff.