If you've used a few fitness apps, you've probably noticed that most of them give you a recovery number without much explanation of what's actually behind it. That's been kind of frustrating to me as a runner, so when I built Wave I wanted the recovery score to be readable from the inside out. Here's what's actually in it.
Six signals, your baseline
The recovery score blends six biomarkers your watch or phone is probably already collecting: heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep duration, sleep debt, blood oxygen, and respiratory rate.
What makes the number actually mean something is that Wave reads each signal against your 30-day baseline rather than the general population. A 38ms HRV is bad news for someone who normally runs 55ms, but pretty normal for someone who normally runs 40ms. Wave knows which one you are because it's been watching for a while.
If your watch doesn't track every signal, the score adapts. Missing data doesn't artificially deflate your number; the remaining signals just carry a little more weight.
What it tells your plan
The score isn't just decoration in the app. It actually shapes today's training in a couple of pretty concrete ways:
- Low-recovery lift days get deloaded automatically. Same exercises, lighter loads, lower volume, so a heavy deadlift session doesn't land on a day your nervous system isn't really ready for it.
- Hard days don't stack. The scheduler tries to avoid placing a heavy lift the day before a hard run (tempo, threshold, intervals). If the hard run moves on the calendar, the lift moves with it.
You can always override either call, of course. The defaults are mostly there to protect you from the most common ways hybrid training tends to break down.
What you see day-to-day
Open the Today screen and your recovery score sits at the top, labeled Good, Moderate, or Ease up. Tap into it and you'll see each of the six signals broken down: your current reading, your baseline for it, and how it's contributing to today's number.
The number isn't a black box. You can see exactly what's behind it and why it landed where it did. I've found that kind of transparency actually changes how you relate to the score; it stops being something the app is telling you and starts feeling more like something the app is showing you about yourself.