Recovery Score
A quick read on sleep, soreness, stress, and food to help you decide how hard to go today.
Fill in the form and your result lands here.
Learn the details
The score weights self-reported markers, sleep duration and quality, soreness, stress, and nutrition, into one readiness number. Lower scores suggest reducing volume or intensity to avoid overtraining.
Training is the stress. Recovery is where the adaptation actually happens, and it is the half most people skip, because it is the half that never feels like doing anything. This score is a two-minute way to make it visible.
What recovery actually is
A hard session does not make you fitter. It makes you temporarily worse: micro-damage in the muscle, a drained nervous system, glycogen spent, inflammation up. The fitness shows up afterward, while you sleep and eat and do nothing impressive at all. That is the part that gets skipped, because resting never feels productive. But if the recovery half never happens, the training half accumulates as fatigue, and the usual sign is not an injury. It is a program that quietly stops working while you keep showing up for it.
What actually moves the number
Sleep first, and it is not close. Duration is 25 percent of this score and quality is another 20, so nearly half the number is what happened between lights out and your alarm. Nothing else on the form competes with that. Soreness and nutrition carry 20 percent each, and stress carries 15, which sounds small until you notice how reliably a bad week at work becomes a bad week in the gym. Resting heart rate sits on the form but stays out of the math on purpose. I keep it for the trend, not for today.
A worked example
Say you slept 6 hours and would call the quality a 3, you are moderately sore at a 3, stress is high at a 4, and food was average at a 3. Sleep credit is 6 divided by 9, so two thirds of the maximum. Run the weights and you land near 50 out of 100, which reads Fair: train, but pull the volume back. Now change one thing, 8 hours at a quality of 4, and the same day scores about 61 and reads Good. One input moved a whole band.
What this is not
This is a self-report, which means it is honest about your perception and nothing more. A wearable readiness score is reading heart rate variability and sleep staging; this is reading what you think about your night, and the two can disagree. Self-report also drifts. A rough month resets your idea of normal, and what used to be a 5 quietly becomes a 7. What it has going for it is that a rough estimate you actually check beats a precise one you never collect.
What to do with a low score
A low score is a dial, not a stop sign. Most days the right move is to keep the session and shrink it: same exercises, 20 to 30 percent less volume, technique over top sets. That protects the habit, which matters more across a year than any heavy day. If it stays low for a week or more, look upstream instead of at the program. Sleep cycle timing helps you pick a bedtime that fits whole cycles, the stress score tells you whether stress is the real driver, and a planned deload is a much better answer than an unplanned one. If the fatigue feels like more than training fatigue, that is a conversation for a doctor.
Score it at the same point each morning, before caffeine, so today's number is comparable to yesterday's. If it stays low for a week or more, look at sleep and stress before you blame the program, and check in with a doctor if something feels off beyond normal fatigue.