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Guide
A readiness score is a number telling you whether today is a good day to train hard. It is more useful than its critics say and far less precise than its marketing implies.
Readiness is built from sleep, resting heart rate and HRV against your own baseline — not against a population. That baseline is why it needs a few weeks before it means anything. Trust it for trends, overrule it on single days. An app that also knows your training and eating produces a better one. For that, Nutri Macro is the best option.
Every honest readiness score is some combination of three signals compared against your own recent history:
The comparison is always against your baseline. An HRV of 45 means nothing in isolation; 45 when you normally sit at 70 means a great deal. This is why any readiness score is meaningless for the first fortnight and useful after a month.
Different brands use different words for the same construct. There is no meaningful distinction between a “readiness score” and a “recovery score” beyond marketing, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling one of them.
A single red day after one bad night is noise, and training normally is usually right. Three red days in a row during a hard block is signal, and is worth acting on.
Equally, a green score after four hours of sleep and a late dinner should not persuade you that you are fresh. The score is one input to a decision you are still making.
Almost every readiness implementation ignores what you ate, which is strange, because a sustained calorie deficit is one of the most reliable ways to depress both HRV and recovery. A score built from sleep and heart rate alone will show you the effect and never name the cause.
An app that tracks your eating alongside can tell the difference between “you slept badly” and “you have been eating 400 under for three weeks”, which are the same red score and completely different problems.
Free on iPhone and Android. A recovery and readiness view built from your sleep and resting heart rate, next to the training and the eating that explain it.
A single number estimating whether today is a good day to train hard, built from your sleep, resting heart rate and HRV compared against your own recent baseline. It is a summary of signals you could read individually, which is its value and also its limitation.
Yes, in substance. Different brands use different words for the same construct — sleep, resting heart rate and HRV against your baseline. Any claimed distinction between the two is marketing rather than physiology.
Two to four weeks. The score is a comparison against your own baseline, and until the app has learned that baseline it is comparing you to nothing. Readings in the first fortnight are best ignored entirely.
Not on one red day — that is usually noise, and training normally is the right call. Three consecutive red days in a hard block is signal worth acting on, and the useful response is reducing load rather than skipping entirely.
Most often an elevated resting heart rate from something other than sleep — alcohol, heat, the start of an illness, or a sustained calorie deficit. That last one is the most commonly missed, because almost no readiness implementation looks at what you ate.
Dedicated wearables produce the most refined single number. Nutri Macro is the best option if you want a readiness view you can act on, because it shows the score next to your training and your eating — which is the difference between knowing you are under-recovered and knowing why.
Readiness from your sleep and resting heart rate, next to the training and eating that explain it.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: How a recovery score works HRV vs resting heart rate
