The Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m medalist and Amazfit ambassador explains why smart wearables provide you with valuable information about your training.
In his quest to become one of the best distance runners in the world, Grant Fisher plans his training using a combination of instinct and technology. A top-level runner since his teens, the 28-year-old has developed a keen sense of what his body is capable of. However, he doesn’t rely entirely on old-school intuition. “My training is largely data-driven,” he says.
So far the approach is working. Last year she won bronze medals in the 5,000m and 10,000m at the Paris Olympics before setting indoor world records in the 3,000m in 7:22.91 and 5,000m in 12:44.09. In addition, he holds the American record for the 10,000 meters with 26:33.84 and has run a fast time of 3:48.29 in the mile.
Reaching this level has required years of dedicated, patient and often painful training. When he first started showing promise as a teenage runner, GPS watches weren’t as common as they are today. But in recent years he has embraced the use of smart wearables and uses the Amazfit Balance 2 and Helio Bracelet, as well as the Helio Ring while he sleeps, to measure how his body is handling his daily training load.
“Data collection is good as a broker,” he says. “You really have to use it to make it worth it. Otherwise you’re just looking at numbers, at least for me.”
“The first metric you get as a runner is time. Or ‘how far did I run?’ The second metric you get is distance. And from there you can calculate the rhythm. So those are the first things people look at.
“So I think the next type of metric that people start looking at is heart rate. And then I’m all the way to lactation. I wouldn’t recommend that a casual runner prick their finger to check their lactate, but at my level it’s important.”
We’re chatting at his team hotel at the World Championships in Tokyo. Our interview concluded between a nap and a massage. It sounds relaxing, but he’s in the middle of a difficult week in which he ranks eighth in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, results that aren’t exactly what he wanted.
Still, he’s all smiles during our chat. He enjoys talking about running and training and is excited about what the next few years will bring.
“My coach in high school used blood lactate training,” he explains. “So I was introduced to data-driven or science-based training from an early stage.
“But when I was in college and in my first professional situation, I didn’t use a lot of data. So I made a coaching change about two years ago and I wanted to get back to that. I actually went back to my high school coach (Mike Scannell) and we started working together again. And so blood lactate fueled that conversation again.”
He adds: “Working with Amazfit has been fantastic. I’ve been testing their products for a good six months, maybe. Even in those six months, they’ve really improved a lot of their things. It’s gotten a lot more precise, a little more elegant. Things are a lot better built over those six months.”
“Most companies don’t review products so quickly to improve. They may release a new watch or a new product in general once a year, every two years, but there seems to be a very strong desire to improve there, which I like. The things I am suggesting are being implemented very quickly.”
Amazfit worked with marathon world record holder Kelvin Kiptum until his untimely death in 2024. Since then, his group of athletes has grown to include recent Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc winner Ruth Croft, Olympic 200m gold medalist Gabby Thomas and European 10,000m champion Yeman Crippa, among others.
Ambitious athletes and coaches will be familiar with runners who prick their fingers during training to take lactate readings so they can train at optimal pace.
Fisher is among the modern athletes who do this, admitting, “I don’t like picking my finger, but the data you get is very useful.”
However, Fisher says that right now those kinds of numbers are a little “piecemeal” in the sense that lactate is taken every two or three repetitions. “This means you don’t really know what’s happening in between,” he explains, “so having a continuous flow of data is very helpful.”
Currently, smart wearable devices cannot measure blood lactate levels, but Fisher believes it could one day be possible. It finds similarities, for example, with continuous glucose monitors that offer 24/7 readings through a small device that is usually worn on the upper arm and has a thin wire that runs under the skin.
“I think there is hope,” he says, of the likelihood of inventing a wearable device that can measure blood lactate. “It would be possible in some way. But it would have to be somehow invasive. The technology exists for glucose in the arm, but for lactate it is not available yet.”
So what statistics does Fisher use to measure his training and recovery? “It’s a combination,” he says. “If I’m doing a really specific workout where I’m trying to put in a very specific effort or trying to get a certain response from my body, then lactate is really accurate.
“Heart rate becomes really useful because you can combine those numbers and use them in unison. One metric on its own is sometimes a little misleading or a little variable depending on the day. But if you use both, you can adjust your effort and really know what’s going on inside.
“Then if you combine it back with the GPS data, you’ll get a really good understanding of how hard you’re working. If you’re a little tired that day, for example, you can scale things back. Or if you’re feeling really good that day, you can increase the stimulus a little bit, whether that’s making the rep longer, faster, or taking shorter breaks. There are all these different levers you can pull.
“One of those data points is good,” he adds, referring to lactate, heart rate and GPS, “but if you have three of them lined up, you get very good confidence in what you’re doing.”
What happens when you’re not running? “24/7 data has become more important for professional runners and I feel like a lot of my friends who are just casual athletes are more interested in that stuff now. A big part of that is sleep tracking.”
Fisher wears the Helio ring while he sleeps because he doesn’t like sleeping with a watch. “The ring is very useful because I can take off the watch and put the ring on without you noticing,” he says.
“The ring is much less intrusive and everything syncs. So you take off the ring and put on the watch, and they both feed data to the app and it merges it together seamlessly.”
He continues: “When I train, it’s really helpful to see where you’re pushing your body’s limits all the time and that you’re pushing yourself to the point where, without adaptation, you break down and suffer an injury. So you can figure out where that line is. Sometimes the data can give you an idea of when you’re pushing yourself a little bit before you realize it or before you get sick.”
Does Fisher analyze the stats a lot himself or does he leave it to his coach?
“I watch them a lot and so does my coach,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s my body, so I’m more in tune with how I feel. It’s good to share ideas and numbers with people, but there are some days when I’m just really tired.
“As an athlete, your instinct is to always push. So sometimes it’s good to have something that stops you at the right moment.”
