What is recovery, and how is it measured?
Recovery is not just how much you rested. It is how ready your body is for load today, and it is read from the night before.
Recovery is a readiness read
Recovery answers a simple question: how much can you take on today without digging a hole? It is not a measure of how you feel on waking, which can lie, but a read of your physiology overnight.
The usual inputs are heart rate variability, resting heart rate and sleep, sometimes with respiratory rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature. Together they show whether your nervous system has actually settled or is still under load.
What moves recovery
A short or broken night, a hard training day, alcohol, illness and sustained stress all suppress recovery. Consistent sleep, easy days and time push it back up.
Recovery is best read against your own baseline. A read that is low for you is the signal. Comparing your recovery to someone else's is close to meaningless, because the inputs are so individual.
What recovery is not
A recovery score is not a diagnosis and not a verdict on your worth as an athlete. It is one honest read of readiness, useful for deciding whether today is a day to push or a day to hold. A single low read is information, not a sentence.
How TIDES reads it
TIDES reads recovery overnight against your own normal range and shows the handful of things moving it, ranked. Without a wearable it does not invent a number, it tells you which inputs it is missing. And it treats the gap between what your sensor says and how you actually feel as information, not an error.
Common questions
What does a recovery score measure?
It measures how ready your body is to take on load today, read from your overnight physiology: usually heart rate variability, resting heart rate and sleep, sometimes respiratory rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature.
Why is my recovery low?
Short or broken sleep, a hard training day, alcohol, illness or sustained stress all suppress recovery. It reads best against your own baseline, so a read that is low for you is the signal.
Do I need a wearable to measure recovery?
A wearable gives the fullest read. Without one, an honest system works from what you log and tells you which inputs it is missing rather than guessing a number.