Recovery calculator

Recovery score calculator

Combine HRV, sleep and resting heart rate into one number — and see exactly how it was calculated, which your watch will not show you. Free, instant, no sign-up.

What is a recovery score?

It is a single number combining a few daily measurements that each say something about how much load your body is carrying. This one uses three: heart rate variability against your own baseline, how much you slept against your own target, and how far your resting heart rate has moved from its usual. Those three are combined with fixed weights into a figure from 0 to 100.

Why this one shows its working

Because none of the others do. Every wearable sells a recovery score, none of them publish the formula, and none has been validated against an outcome anyone actually cares about — not injury, not performance, not illness. A number arriving from a black box invites you to treat it as a measurement, when it is a weighted opinion about three inputs. So this page exports its weights, shows each sub-score separately, and prints the arithmetic. If you disagree with the weighting, you can see what it is and discount it accordingly. That is not a feature the alternatives offer.

Where the weights come from

Judgement, not a fitted model, and the page says so rather than implying otherwise. HRV carries the most weight because it responds to autonomic load and has the most literature behind it for this purpose — though only as a multi-day trend, which is why the input is a deviation from your own baseline rather than this morning's reading. Sleep is weighted almost as heavily, because when the other two look bad, sleep is often the reason. Resting heart rate is weighted least: it is the crudest of the three and largely says the same thing as HRV, but almost anyone can measure it, and it sometimes catches illness a day earlier.

The limiting factor matters more than the total

A composite hides which input caused it, and that is the only part you can do anything about. Being told you are at 61 is not actionable; being told your sleep is what dragged it there is. The limiting factor is worked out by weighted loss rather than by lowest raw sub-score — an input can look terrible and still not be what is holding the number down, if it carries little weight. If the answer is sleep, no amount of autonomic interpretation changes what you should do tonight.

What it cannot tell you

Why. Suppressed HRV and an elevated resting heart rate are equally consistent with a hard training block, a bad night, a second glass of wine, an infection coming on, a hot bedroom, and ordinary life stress. The number narrows nothing down on its own. It is also only as good as its inputs: a single morning HRV reading is noisy enough that the HRV calculator deliberately reads a seven-day average instead, and you should feed this page that trend rather than today's value. Treat a low score as a prompt to think about the week, not as a verdict on the session.