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  1. Home
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  3. Recovery Score
Free Tool

Recovery Score Calculator

Should you go hard today? A free daily score from HRV, sleep, resting HR and yesterday's RPE — with a 14-day history stored in your browser.

Best time to check: in the first 15 minutes after waking. Take your resting HR before getting out of bed. Read your overnight HRV from your wearable. Sleep quality and yesterday's RPE are subjective — be honest.

HRV is within 5% of your 7-day average.

1 = woke repeatedly, dragged all morning. 10 = uninterrupted, fully refreshed.

Beats per minute

Auto-filled from your last 7 entries

0 = rest day. 5 = steady aerobic. 8 = threshold. 10 = max effort race.

HRV looks great until you sleep badly. Resting HR looks great until you go too deep on a session. Sleep quality looks great until the cumulative training load catches up. Each of these is a noisy single signal. A composite score that weights all four catches the patterns that any one input would miss.

Saw et al. (2016) in BJSM compared subjective measures (sleep, mood, perceived fatigue) against objective measures (HRV, plasma cortisol, salivary IgA) across 56 studies. The subjective measures had a stronger relationship with training-induced changes than the objective measures did. The lesson: do not throw away the soft inputs.

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Sources: Plews D.J. et al. (2013) Sports Medicine HRV in elite endurance athletes; Saw A.E., Main L.C., Gastin P.B. (2016) BJSM subjective vs objective monitoring; Foster C. (1998) MSSE session-RPE; Hopkins W.G. (2009) Sports Medicine statistics in sport; Buchheit M. (2014) Frontiers in Physiology HRV monitoring review.