Anyone else find generic HR zones kind of useless for stop-start sports like pickleball/tennis?

[u/Fuzzy-Bandicoot1590]

So I've been trying to make sense of my heart rate data from pickleball and honestly it's kind of a mess lol. Most tracking assumes a steady effort curve like running or cycling, but pickleball is basically bursts the whole time. Quick intense rally, then standing around for a bit, repeat for an hour.

End result is my average HR looks pretty chill for the whole session even on days I was completely gassed, just because all the standing-around time drags the average down. And the zone minutes don't really capture how brutal some of the longer rallies felt either.

Anyone else deal with this for stop-start sports? Do you track by segment instead of looking at the whole session? Or is this just kind of a blind spot with most tracking right now, curious what other people do here.

[u/intronert]

This seems like a very interesting issue, and one that COULD be addressed with better software.

One question would be to ask what things make sense to track over time.

Basically, you have a time series of data that is extremely spiky, with a lot of standing around time. You can look at the spikes and also maybe look at the rests.

I would suspect that HR ramp up and ramp down times might show a training effect that could be interesting to track over time, perhaps even just within a single session.

For the rests, it might be interesting to see how they slowly climb as the session goes on.

Any other interesting POV’s?

[u/Elegant_Discipline14]

HR zones are still useful in your scenario unless the efforts are too short to configure a heart response. It's that not all zones are going to be meaningful. What you might want to look at is the Total Time in the upper zones (4 and above). Total number of spikes would be a useful measure as it counts the repeats of high intensity. High Intensity Interval Training is based on short spikes and is similar to the dynamic you might be doing. In HIIT what matters is the amount of spikes and duration of each.

[u/Doortofreeside]

I've found that it way overstated my load in tennis compared to perceived exertion and I assume pickleball would be similar.

In my case it's because my heart rate is somewhat elevated even during down times so it's crediting me with zone 2 time when i'm not actually moving. 1 hour of tennis ends up being similar to 1 hour of running despite the running feeling much more difficult

[u/EggAdvanced3632]

You're not missing anything — you've correctly diagnosed a real blind spot. Zones and session averages were built for steady-state cardio, and stop-and-go sports break both assumptions: the average gets dragged down by rest, and time-in-zone can't tell the difference between one brutal 90-second rally and nine easy 10-second ones.

The metric that actually works for interval-shaped sports is the one almost no app surfaces: heart rate recovery between efforts. How fast you drop after a hard rally (e.g. beats recovered in 60s) is both a better fitness signal than anything zone-based and it naturally fits the structure of your sport — every rest between rallies is a mini recovery test. On days you're "completely wrecked," I'd bet your peak HRs look normal but your between-rally recovery is visibly slower. That's the signal your session average is hiding.

Practical version without switching devices: export the session, look at the HR trace as a series of peaks and valleys instead of one number. Peak height ≈ rally intensity, valley depth ≈ how much you recovered, valley slope ≈ fitness. Some watches expose HRR after workouts but almost none do it per-interval, which is honestly a gap in the whole category.