Garmin Endurance Score And Hill Score Explained: The Two Numbers VO2 Max Misses
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Short answer first, because most people arriving here have just found two new numbers on their watch and want to know whether to care.
Endurance score is your watch's estimate of how long you can keep working at a decent fraction of your maximum. It is about stamina, not ceiling. Hill score is its estimate of how well you run uphill. Both are built from months of your own recorded activity rather than from a test, and both move slowly by design.
They are the newest numbers on a Garmin, and they are the only two that describe something the older metrics genuinely miss. VO2 max estimates how big your engine is. It says nothing about how long you can hold a given effort, and nothing whatsoever about gradient. These two fill those gaps.
They also arrived on the higher-end running and multisport watches rather than across the whole range — recent Forerunner and Fenix models are the usual home for them. If you cannot find either number anywhere, by far the most likely explanation is that your watch does not calculate it, rather than that you have a setting switched off.
Why this post does not print the score bands
Nearly every page on this subject opens with a table of numeric ranges and category names. I have left those out on purpose. Those bands shift between firmware versions and get half-remembered wrongly, and a wrong band table is worse than none at all: it tells you that you are "superior" or "intermediate" with a confidence nobody has earned. Your own watch shows you your band.
What does not change, and what actually decides whether these numbers are useful to you, is three things: which direction is good, what moves the number, and what it cannot see. That is the rest of this page.
What endurance score is actually built from
Endurance score is a long-window summary of your training history. Two ingredients feed it:
- Your current aerobic ceiling — your VO2 max estimate is an input, so anything that distorts that distorts this.
- The accumulated load you have genuinely done, weighted so that sustained aerobic work piled up over weeks and months counts for far more than a handful of hard sessions.
As best I understand it, the score draws on aerobic work from across your sports rather than from running alone, which is consistent with how it behaves: long rides build it too.
The consequence worth sitting with is that endurance score is closer to a report card on what you have done than a measurement of what your body can do. It cannot tell a genuinely durable athlete from one who has simply logged a lot of consistent aerobic hours — which is a distinction without much practical difference, since logging those hours is how you become durable. But it does mean the number is backward-looking. It describes your last few months, not your potential.
What hill score is actually built from
Hill score is running-specific and terrain-specific. It is derived from your actual uphill running efforts over recent weeks, set against your current fitness estimate. No hills, no score.
That catches people out more than anything else about it. If you run on flat ground, a hill score either never appears or sits stale at whatever your last hilly block earned you. The watch is not judging your climbing ability in the abstract. It only knows what you have shown it.
On the models I have looked at, the score comes with a breakdown separating short, steep efforts from long sustained climbs. Those are two different abilities, trained differently: a runner who is good at a 45-second wall is not necessarily good at a twenty-minute drag. The label wording varies, so read your own screen rather than my description of it.
The section that matters: a big engine with mediocre stamina
Here is the pattern that brings most runners to this page. My VO2 max estimate is strong. My endurance score is unremarkable. Which one is wrong?
Neither. They are answering different questions, and the gap between them is real information.
VO2 max is estimated from how fast you run at a given heart rate, and the watch learns that mostly from moderately hard efforts. You can produce a flattering VO2 max figure on a diet of 5k-paced intervals and short tempo runs, because those are precisely the efforts the estimate reads best. Endurance score barely notices them. It wants accumulated time.
So the classic profile is the runner who trains hard three times a week, races a genuinely quick 5k, and comes apart somewhere in the last third of a marathon. Big engine, small fuel tank. Garmin now has a number for that, and it is the single most useful thing these two metrics added to the watch.
| What you see | What it usually means | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Strong VO2 max, unremarkable endurance score | Intensity-heavy, volume-light. Fast over short distances, fades late in long ones | Add easy aerobic volume and lengthen the long run before adding any more intensity |
| Modest VO2 max, strong endurance score | High-volume, low-intensity. Durable but without much top end | Add structured work at and just below threshold. Your base will support it |
| Both reasonable, hill score poor or missing | You train on flat ground | Only matters if you race on hills — but if you do, it is the cheapest gain available |
| Endurance score drifting down in a good block | Usually a taper, a week off, or a VO2 max input that moved | Check the cause before changing anything. See the next section |
One warning about that first row, because it is the one most people land on. An unremarkable endurance score beside a strong VO2 max is not a verdict on your talent — it is a description of your last few months, and it is the most fixable thing on the list.
What actually moves each number
Both are slow metrics. Neither responds to a single session, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
| Endurance score | Hill score | |
|---|---|---|
| Moved by | Consistent aerobic volume; longer sessions; months of uninterrupted training; a rising VO2 max estimate | Actual uphill running — both short steep repetitions and long sustained climbs |
| Barely moved by | A single hard session; short intervals; one big weekend | Flat running of any volume; treadmill work, depending on how your incline is recorded |
| Drops when | You taper, take time off, get ill, or switch your focus to another sport the watch weights differently | You stop running hills, even if you are getting fitter in every other respect |
| Realistic timescale | Weeks to months | Weeks, and only if the hills are in your actual training |
If you want the practical version: endurance score responds to patience, and hill score responds to specificity. There is no shortcut into either.
Why they fall when you have not got worse
This is the complaint that generates most of the forum threads, so it is worth being precise.
- A taper. You deliberately cut your load before a race. A metric built on accumulated load registers that as a decline. It is working correctly and you are fitter than you were.
- A week off, a holiday or an illness. Same mechanism. The number is a trailing average of work done, so it decays when the work stops.
- You moved, or the season changed. Hill score in particular can fall simply because your usual route is now the flat one.
- The VO2 max input moved. This is the sneaky one. Both scores inherit your fitness estimate, so a wobble upstream shows up here looking like a loss of endurance.
That last point is the reason this post links up to the one about a maximum heart rate set too low. Garmin's VO2 max estimate is calculated from your heart rate relative to your maximum, so if your maximum is a formula guess rather than a figure you have actually seen, every number downstream of it is built on a wrong foundation — endurance score and hill score included. It is the single highest-value thing to fix on the whole watch, and almost nobody checks it.
Where they sit beside the other numbers
These two are summaries, not instructions, and they overlap with things you already have. Training status already tells you whether your recent load is productive; endurance score tells roughly the same story over a longer window and with less nuance. That makes it a decent sanity check on a training block and a poor basis for deciding Tuesday's session.
And if what you actually want to know is what fraction of your ceiling you can hold, there is a far better number for that, and it is not endurance score. It is your lactate threshold — the effort above which lactate starts accumulating faster than you can clear it. Threshold is a physiological boundary you can measure and train directly, and it is a better predictor of endurance performance than VO2 max for exactly the reason this post exists: it describes the fraction, not the ceiling.
Endurance score is an honest attempt to express that idea from data a wrist-worn watch can collect, but it is not a substitute for knowing your threshold. If you want to raise the fraction rather than watch a score describe it, that is a training problem with a known solution.
If you have not mapped out which Garmin metric depends on which, the index of them all is worth ten minutes. A lot of these numbers are the same underlying data recombined, which is why they so often agree with each other.
How to use them without overreacting
- Read the trend, never the single value. Both are designed to move over months. A week-to-week change is noise.
- Compare them with each other, not with other people. The gap between your VO2 max and your endurance score is the informative part.
- Check your maximum heart rate before you believe either. They inherit the fitness estimate, and the fitness estimate inherits your maximum.
- Ignore hill score unless you race on hills. If your races are flat, a mediocre hill score accurately describes a priority you were right to deprioritise.
- Do not chase either number directly. Train for the event and let the score describe what happened. A metric you are gaming has stopped being a measurement.
The wider point
Your watch measures well and advises badly. "Your endurance score is unremarkable" is a measurement. It is not a plan, and it cannot tell you whether the answer is three more easy hours a week, one longer long run, or six weeks of patience.
Closing that gap means putting these two numbers next to your threshold, your load and your actual sessions over the last few months — and then changing next week. The principle holds however you do it: these are inputs, not instructions.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Garmin endurance score?
The only comparison worth making is with your own figure a month or two ago. The score is scaled against your own fitness estimate and built from your own training history, so it is not a league table and a value that looks modest beside a friend's may reflect a perfectly sensible block of training. Rising while your training is consistent is good; falling during a taper is expected.
Why is my Garmin endurance score going down?
Almost always because your accumulated load has dropped — a taper, a holiday, an illness, or a quiet few weeks. The score is a trailing summary of work done, so it decays when the work stops, and that is not the same thing as losing fitness. The other common cause is a change in your VO2 max estimate, which feeds into it.
Can you have a high VO2 max and a low endurance score?
Yes, and it is a common and informative combination. VO2 max is estimated largely from moderately hard efforts, so an intensity-heavy, volume-light runner can produce a strong figure while having little accumulated aerobic work behind it. That is the profile of someone quick over 5k who fades late in a marathon.
Which Garmin watches have endurance score and hill score?
Both are features of the higher-end running and multisport watches rather than the whole range, and recent Forerunner and Fenix models are where you will usually find them. Garmin's own product pages are the only reliable source for whether your specific model and firmware include them, since the list changes.
How do I improve my Garmin hill score?
Run hills. The score is calculated from your actual uphill efforts, so flat volume will not touch it no matter how much of it you do. Include both short steep repetitions and longer sustained climbs, because the metric distinguishes between them and they develop different abilities. Expect weeks, not days.
Is endurance score the same as lactate threshold?
No. Endurance score is an estimate built from your training history and your fitness estimate. Lactate threshold is a physiological boundary — the intensity at which lactate begins accumulating faster than you clear it — and it can be measured directly rather than inferred. If you want to know what fraction of your ceiling you can sustain, threshold is the better number.
Turn the gap into next week's training
A strong VO2 max next to a flat endurance score is a clear diagnosis and a useless instruction on its own. Lactate Training syncs your Garmin activities and health data and builds and adapts a plan around them, with zones anchored to a measured lactate threshold rather than a share of an estimated maximum.