You wake up. You have a workout planned. But should you actually do it? That question, asked and answered badly every single day, is responsible for more injuries, burnouts, and wasted effort than almost anything else in fitness. People either ignore the question entirely and push through regardless, or they let subjective tiredness talk them out of sessions they should have done.
Your readiness score exists to answer that question with data rather than guesswork. Not whether you feel like training. Whether your body is actually positioned to benefit from it.
What Goes Into a Readiness Score
A readiness score is not a single measurement. It is a calculated synthesis of multiple physiological signals, each weighted according to how accurately it predicts your capacity to perform and adapt on a given day. The inputs vary slightly by platform, but the core signals are consistent across the scientific literature on athlete monitoring.
- Heart rate variability: the single most predictive recovery metric, measuring nervous system state
- Resting heart rate: an elevated overnight RHR of 5 to 7 beats above baseline is a reliable stress signal
- Sleep duration: total time asleep relative to your individual baseline requirement
- Sleep quality: deep sleep and REM proportions, not just total hours in bed
- Recent training load: the cumulative stress your body has absorbed over the past 7 to 10 days
- Sleep debt: the accumulated shortfall across the past week relative to your norm
- Body temperature: some devices use overnight skin temperature to detect early illness and hormonal changes
Each of these signals individually gives you a partial picture. Sleep duration tells you how long you rested but not how restorative it was. HRV tells you nervous system state but not the direction it is moving relative to your trend. The readiness score synthesises all of these signals simultaneously, weighting each according to its predictive value, to produce a single number that reflects the full picture of your physiological state.
How to Read Your Score
A score above 80 is a green light. Your body is primed. Train hard. A score below 50 is a signal, not a failure. It means something in your recovery stack needs attention.
Scores in the 50 to 80 range are where most of your training happens, and this is where interpretation requires the most nuance. A score of 78 is a solid session, somewhere close to your normal capacity. A score of 52 suggests moderating intensity: fewer sets, more rest between them, listening carefully for signs that the session should end early. Neither reading means do not train. Both give you information about how to train.
Scores below 30 are rare for most people and usually indicate something significant is happening: early illness, extreme accumulated fatigue, a major life stressor, or severely disrupted sleep. On these days, the most productive thing you can do is rest, eat well, and sleep early. Any training stimulus applied to a body in this state is more likely to deepen fatigue than drive adaptation.
Scores above 90 are equally worth noting. These are your most valuable training days. Your body is primed to not just handle a demanding session but to respond to it with above-average adaptation. If you have been waiting to attempt a personal best or try a new training stimulus, a high readiness day is when to do it.
The Mistake Most People Make
They ignore the score when it does not fit their plan. They had leg day scheduled. The score says 38. They go anyway because the plan says Wednesday is leg day, and they are not going to let a number on a screen change what they decided at the beginning of the month.
Two weeks later they wonder why progress has stalled, why their knee has been sore, why motivation has tanked. The score was not a suggestion. It was a measurement of biological reality. Ignoring it does not change that reality. It just means you are operating without the information.
Elite athletes have used readiness-based training for decades. Sports scientists at Olympic programmes have tracked HRV, training load, and readiness scores since long before consumer wearables made it accessible to everyone. The difference now is that you have access to the same data they use. The question is whether you will use it the way they do, or continue to treat it as a curiosity you glance at and ignore.
Readiness Scores Across a Training Week
Understanding how your readiness score moves across a well-structured training week helps you get more out of both your hard sessions and your recovery days. In a typical weekly cycle, you might see higher readiness at the start of the week after weekend rest, a dip mid-week as cumulative load builds, and recovery toward the end of the week as your body catches up.
The pattern varies by individual and training programme. What is useful is learning your own pattern. If you consistently see suppressed scores on Thursday mornings regardless of sleep, it might indicate your Wednesday session is too demanding for your current recovery capacity. That is actionable information. You can restructure your week, reduce Wednesday's volume, or add recovery work between Wednesday and Thursday.
Readiness is not just a daily number. It is a weekly narrative. Reading that narrative is what separates athletes who progress consistently from those who cycle through effort and breakdown.
Readiness and Periodisation
In well-structured training blocks, you expect readiness to decline somewhat during loading weeks as accumulated fatigue builds. This is intentional. You are applying more stress than your body can immediately absorb, which forces it to adapt. During a subsequent deload week, training volume drops significantly, and readiness rebounds, often to new highs. This rebound is when a lot of the fitness gains from the preceding block actually consolidate.
Tracking your readiness score across multiple training blocks teaches you how your body responds to loading and deloading. You start to see how long your body takes to show signs of accumulated fatigue, how quickly it rebounds during a deload, and what readiness levels correlate with your best performances. This is self-knowledge that most recreational athletes never develop, and it is enormously valuable for making long-term training decisions.
What FitViz Does With Your Score
FitViz calculates your readiness score every morning and uses it to build your session from scratch. Not to modify a template. Not to add a warning label to a preset plan. To actually construct what you should do today, specifically, based on what your body is capable of today. Volume, intensity, exercise selection, and rest periods all adjust in real time. The programme you see when you open the app is the programme your body called for, not one that was written last month when your circumstances were different.
Over time, FitViz learns your patterns. It builds a picture of your normal readiness range, how you respond to different training stimuli, and how quickly you recover from various session types. This contextual history makes the recommendations progressively more accurate the longer you use it. The system gets smarter. And so do you.
