Restwise is equally effective in measuring fatigue in athletes who participate in any sport that requires demanding training or competition, whether it is an aerobic endurance sport, a power sport, or one that combines both. The tool will not tell you what individual systems are overstressed, but it will tell you your global fatigue state, i.e. that you are showing signs that your training load is too great for your body to absorb. This is relevant across all physically demanding sports.

Athletes who rely on Restwise come from almost any sport you can imagine. They include professional soccer teams, Olympic sailors, amateur triathletes, professional rugby teams, collegiate rowers, national cricket teams, mixed martial artists, collegiate field hockey, Olympic runners. You name it.

Restwise was designed for any athlete who is pushing himself or herself to reach a challenging physical goal, whether that is training for your first sprint triathlon or to make the Olympic rowing team. The physiology of elite athletes is essentially the same as amateur athletes, and Restwise calibrates against your personal baseline. We don’t say that “a RHR of 34 is better than a RHR of 64”, but we do say that an unusually elevated morning heart rate may be an indicator of fatigue. So we flag it and factor it into that day’s recovery score.

Because Restwise also tells you when it will be most productive to work out hard, it is also an extremely valuable tool for people who simply want to get the most out of a limited amount of time they have to exercise.

Part of what we want you to gain by using Restwise is a deeper understanding of all aspects of recovery. This includes the role of recovery in a coherent training plan, the basic science of recovery, how non-training stresses affect your ability to recover, and what behaviors have the biggest effect on how quickly you recover. As such, when you subscribe to Restwise you will receive a stream of about a dozen emails that will help you learn how to get the most out of Restwise as well as about recovery in general.

Absolutely! Restwise is simply a tool that can be used with others to build a coherent training program. Its value depends on how it is used, and your coach is the one who will be best positioned to interpret your score in the context of everything else that should be considered in helping you reach your athletic goals. We have built a robust coach platform where coaches can monitor multiple athletes, and we feel so strongly about its value to athletes that we provide coaches with free Restwise accounts.

The weighting varies for each marker and is dependent on the strength of the empirical and anecdotal evidence of each. Keep in mind also that the algorithm is specific to the individual by intelligently referencing to an individual's baseline data and also intelligently responding to the degree by which specific markers change over a few days; for example the weight of last night's sleep score (a proprietary algorithm for duration and quality) factors in the previous two night's scores, with the understanding that the effect of poor sleep is cumulative.

The two keys are consistency and honesty. For quantitative inputs, such as resting heart rate and weight, it is critical to establish your own protocol and stick to it. For example, you should take your pulse under the same conditions every day, ideally before getting out of bed in the morning. Subjective questions really require honesty and sensitivity to what our bodies are telling us. As athletes, we tend to be driven to succeed, and we like to score well on tests. But to get the most from Restwise, you have to put aside that mindset and answer questions as honestly as possible, even if you know this will result in a low score. More specific advice on how to capture each marker is provided within the Restwise software.

Your Restwise recovery score is a measure of how well your body is responding to your training load. A low score, particularly over an extended period, is an indicator of fatigue, stress, and over-reaching. It suggests that your system is most probably requires increased rest, prudent nutrition (especially high carbs), positive fluid balance, etc to train or compete at a high level. Importantly, Restwise is not is a predictor of acute performance. You may have a great performance on a day that you have a low recovery score, but you are risking tearing yourself down in a way that is counter-productive and ultimately will lead to underperformance. Rather, Restwise will help you find the line between over-reaching and underperformance.

Your recovery score has to be interpreted in the context of a coherent training plan. If you are intentionally over-reaching in order to produce a supercompensation, then you would expect, even want, a low recovery score. However, if you are nearing the end of a recovery phase and your scores have not rebounded, then it is an indicator that you should rest more before resuming hard training or competition. If you work with a coach, your coach can set up a free Restwise account, so he or she can monitor your score and adjust plans accordingly.

The quick answer is "no". The results of sporting events are always unknown. That is what makes competition so intriguing! The long answer is more nuanced. Performance in competition depends on any number of variables that are beyond the ability of science to predict. Strategy and tactics, nutrition, weather, attitude, the competition... all will influence outcomes, and all are beyond the scope of our tool to predict. It is important to remember that the core idea of training is to increase the probability of a successful outcome when you compete. Since Restwise is, essentially, a training optimizer, we can state with confidence that using it consistently will give you a better chance as performing well. However, neither Restwise (nor anyone else, for that matter), can predict how you'll perform on a given day.

A 3-point scale based on the normality of data has shown to be most reliable for the collection of longitudinal data, i.e. data collected over a continuous period of time. (A more detailed 5-point scale [or 7-point scale] can be more useful for the interpretation of a specific variable over a short period (few days) or for intermittent data collection, but not for longitudinal data collection). In addition, the majority of people have difficulty in differentiating between normality and abnormality, and with a greater scale of options this becomes increasingly difficult.

In determining a global fatigue state, the degree of abnormality for a single variable has little importance. What is important is if there is deviation from normality, how many of the variables show abnormality, and which variables show abnormality, as each carries a different weighting depending on the empirical strength of the variable.

Restwise is designed to provide a snapshot of how prepared your body is to absorb training that day, and the questions are meant to be answered first thing in the morning. You should take your resting heart rate while still in bed, note your urine shade on the first visit to the bathroom, weigh yourself before breakfast, and capture the more subjective information before your day changes the answer. True, it is hard to know how your mood is until you spill your coffee or to know how much energy you have before you stand up, but the key is not to let the day's events change your answers. So, it is OK to wait a while to answer some of the subjective questions or even to go back and change them, but you don't want the jerk who cuts you off on the way to work affect your mood score or the third cup of coffee to alter your answer to the energy question.

Here's what a lot of people do. Leave your phone and pulse oximeter on the bedside table and use the phone as an alarm clock. When it goes off, hit snooze and put the pulse ox on your finger. Note the readings. At this point you can do one of three things. You can make a mental note of them and enter them later when you answer the other questions. You can enter just those readings into the phone. Or, you can enter them and answer all the other questions at the same time. If you do, you can go back after visiting the bathroom, stepping on the scale, and having a few moments to ponder mood, appetite and energy level and update as necessary.

Even if you don't get to the second step before your first workout, you'll get a pretty good read, and over time you'll get better at answering the questions while still in bed, so you will be able to incorporate it into that morning's workout. But also keep in mind that much of the value in Restwise is in the results over time. A low score on a single day might not mean much, particularly the day after your longest run of the week, but if it fails to come up after a couple of rest days, it's a good sign that you are doing too much.

Embracing this goal means that you have also embraced a level of training stimulus that will, and should, result in periods of compromised recovery scores. But, remember, that this is the point of training: to load the various physiological systems to the point that they, and your body, is in a state of stress (fatigue) and then recover from that state such that you have introduced an adaptation resulting in increased fitness. The recovery score is a result/symptom of training and can guide your training decision process. For a test case on how effective Restwise can be in guiding Ironman training, read "(My) Secret sauce to a Sub 9hr Hawaii Ironman: Unconventional wisdom," by Sami Inkinen, appearing in Incurable Data Geek.

Of course, there are also ways to focus on recovery strategies which can ameliorate the impact of heavy training, thus increasing your body's ability to recover and thereby increasing the adaptation process... leading to better performance. Many of these strategies are the derivatives of the questions we ask in the application. Make sure you are getting plenty of sleep. Ensure that you stay hydrated. Try to avoid non-training stress. Pretty simple stuff, most of it. We are less inclined to support some of the more esoteric methods like EMS, various compression garments, ice baths, low-gluten diets, etc.... simply because the scientific data around these strategies is inconclusive at this point.

First, HRV is a valuable tool. Initially studied by the Finns in the mid-80's as an artifact of capturing precise HR data during exercise (Suunto, in fact, has most of the patents around measuring HRV. They call it R-R on their devices, and it plays a big role in the TE calculation. Have you noticed that even if you are crushing yourself several days in a row, so that both your PE and your quantified training load stays steady, your TE will steadily drop? That is the effect of HRV on the TE calcuation, because it is measuring how rapidly your heart contracts and how quickly it returns to a rested state. It has become a common way to talk about fatigue, as expressed in the variability of the cario-electrical patterns that govern heart rate.

Second, the science around HRV is not conclusive. By this, I do not mean that the studies undermine the idea of HRV as a valid marker. Rather, I mean that of the studies completed by third-party sports science teams (as opposed by the studies conducted by the companies marketing tools or systems based on HRV), no consensus has emerged as to its validity as THE ONLY marker that an athlete can track. In a sense, this is the holy grail - a single marker which can identify impending OTS - but HRV has not been demonstrated to be that solution. I'll refer you to this 2005 study by the ECSS, a fantastic position paper on the diagnosing and treatment of OTS.

Third, there is some debate about the validity of HRV when captured only at rest. Differences within a population's base R-R can explain a great deal of the variability in HRV values. This is why Suunto recommends that you capture your R-R both at work and at rest, although they do a terrible job of informing their users about this. However, this is being debated, and I think most companies who present HRV as the idea way to track recovery suggest that one does so at rest.

Fourth, HRV must be measured with incredible accuracy to be valid. There are a number of mobile applications which purport to capture HRV, but which do so via a light source probing a fingertip, similar technology for pulse oximetry. In short, there is no way that this is even remotely accurate enough to be valid. Remember that HRV expresses the interval between the cessation of one beat and the commencement of the next, compares each beat in a series, and then quantifies this difference against normative data. When you are pounding away at 180bpm, the interval is a fraction of a second. To detect differences requires a sophisticated device, and a lot of data crunching. Suunto does this really well, and I think Polar does it as well.

Fifth, and this is the big one, HRV when measured carefully and used for more than just a snapshot of your stress state, does a good job of expressing the fatigue in the muscles that drive the heart... but it can't tell you WHY they are fatigued. We talk a lot about TS vs. NTS, as that is one of the biggest challenges for athletes to integrate (remember your experience towards the end of your Bellingham Bandits enterprise - that was the result of a massive amount of NTS combined with a steady TS load). HRV offers the promise of articulating this better than any other single, quantified, marker. Seriously, it is a great measure. But taken alone, it won't really tell you anything. It would be like if you went to the mechanic with a car that was running poorly and your mechanic said "The engine isn't working." Great. Really helpful. Yes, the engine isn't working... but WHY isn't it working, and what do you need to do about it?

In summary, we like HRV. In fact, we are talking with a few companies to integrate HRV into our algorithm, possibly replacing (or augmenting) RHR as a key marker. But as a stand-alone marker, purporting to give you all the information you need to define training load? No way. There is a good reason that FirstBest had a great deal of commercial success initially in Europe, and has been basically discarded: promising technology, great idea... inconclusive (at best) results. And I think that all of these companies that are springing up to market HRV are doing so because it is such an easy thing to capture - it sounds like the proverbial silver bullet: Just take one measurement and you will get fitter, faster and stronger! Just follow my plan! etc. etc. As you well know, there are no short-cuts. Measuring HRV is promising, for sure, and it is better than NOT measuring HRV... but there is no demonstrated correlation between capturing HRV and improved performance. Some day, perhaps, but not yet.

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