What is your Best Practice Guidance for Smoothing and Intensity?

The blue area in the chart represents your baseline HRV band which is a 60day moving average +/- 12.5%.  We read the 60-day average whenever you open the iPhone app (because Apple Watch only stores 7-10 days of Health data)

It would be normal to expect the chart to be within the blue area when you are training lightly each day, but with a 2 or 3 days of days rest you should see it rise perhaps over the top of the band, much like if you were “tapering” for an event.  After hard training sessions, you would see it dip below the band - at this point, you should be resting to avoid overtraining or injury and to let your body recover.

So if the shape of the chart looks right in terms of your activity and how you are recovering but you feel it is too high in the blue band for how you are performing, you could reduce the intensity down a few steps.  Alternatively, if you feel you can push harder, try having the intensity increased a few points.  

If the chart shape looks wrong in that it looks like it is responding too much to setbacks or rest, so for example it spikes too high after a solid nights sleep or drips too much after a training session, you may want to increase the smoothing to lessen this effect.  We found this to be appropriate for more highly trained athletes who can push through and adapt to those things more easily.  

Over time you should settle on values for Intensity & Smoothing that works for you.