Recovery
How ready your body is to take on strain today, from 0 to 100%.
- Red0-33%
- Yellow34-66%
- Green67-100%
What goes in
Pulse scores Recovery each morning from last night’s main sleep, comparing each vital with your own baseline: a running average of recent nights that leans on the last two weeks and clips extreme nights.
- Heart rate variability
- Fitbit’s nightly HRV, in ms. Higher is better.
- Resting heart rate
- Fitbit’s daily resting heart rate from Google, in bpm; the lowest 5-minute average during sleep only on a day Google has none. Lower is better.
- Sleep performance
- Last night’s Sleep Performance. 85% is neutral.
- Respiratory rate
- Breaths per minute asleep, in rpm. Higher counts against you.
- Skin temperature
- Distance from Google’s skin-temperature baseline (your 30-night median), in °C; Pulse’s own baseline only when Google gives none. Either direction counts against you.
How it is weighted
Each input is measured in units of your usual night-to-night swing from baseline. Sleep moves one unit per 12 points away from 85%, skin temperature one unit per 1 °C. A missing input’s weight is shared among the rest.
- HRV
- 55%
- Resting heart rate
- 20%
- Sleep performance
- 15%
- Respiratory rate
- 5%
- Skin temperature
- 5%
What the bands mean
The weighted average goes through an S-shaped curve (slope 1.6). Every input at baseline lands at about 58%; a quarter of a swing above reaches green, 0.6 below drops into red.
- 67-100%
- Green: your body is primed for strain.
- 34-66%
- Yellow: you are maintaining; moderate strain fits.
- 0-33%
- Red: your body needs rest.
Limits
Recovery needs 7 nights of HRV before the first score and is Provisional until 14. The other vitals join once each has 4 nights of baseline. A night Fitbit could not stage has no HRV, so it gets no score rather than a guess, and after more than 14 nights without HRV the first night back is not scored. Recovery is an estimate from a wrist sensor: it reads your body, not your plans or how you feel.
Sources
- noop: the open-source analytics engine Pulse's recovery, strain and sleep scoring is ported from
- Plews DJ, et al. Training adaptation and heart rate variability in elite endurance athletes. Sports Med 2013;43:773-81
- Buchheit M. Monitoring training status with HR measures: do all roads lead to Rome? Front Physiol 2014;5:73
- Altini M, Plews D. What is behind changes in resting heart rate and heart rate variability? Sensors 2021;21(23):7932
Recovery: questions
Does the Fitbit Air have a recovery score?
Google's app gives Fitbit Air owners a Readiness-style score. Pulse adds a recovery-app-style 0-100% Recovery computed on your own server from the band's nightly HRV, resting heart rate, sleep, respiratory rate and skin temperature.
What is a good Recovery score?
67% and above is green, 34-66% yellow and 33% or below red. Every input sitting exactly at your own baseline lands at about 58%, so a typical night reads yellow.
Why is there no Recovery score for my first week?
Recovery compares each vital with your own baseline. It needs 7 nights of HRV for the first score and is marked Provisional until 14.