What is a Recovery score? Works with WHOOP and Apple Watch

Recovery comes down to three things: heart-rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate (RHR) and last night's sleep quality. Higher HRV, lower RHR and better sleep mean a higher score. Vita combines these into a 0–100 score and flags whether today leans 'go hard / moderate / recover'.

A rough guide: 67–100% is the green zone — your nervous system has rebounded and the day suits high-intensity or breakthrough work. 34–66% is yellow — you can perform, but there's little margin; moderate intensity or skill work fits better. Below 34% is red — your body is explicitly asking for rest, and pushing through tends to buy low-quality training plus elevated injury and illness risk. Remember the score is calibrated to your personal baseline: the trend against your own last 2–4 weeks matters far more than any single day's absolute number.

Recovery isn't mystical — the HRV, resting heart rate and sleep behind it are all highly responsive to lifestyle. Seven levers, ranked roughly by payoff:

• 1. Keep a consistent sleep window — similar bed/wake times lift HRV more reliably than an extra half hour of sleep
• 2. No alcohol within ~3 hours of bed — alcohol is the single most common recovery killer; even one or two drinks visibly suppress overnight HRV
• 3. Finish dinner 2–3 hours before bed — late digestion raises resting heart rate and suppresses HRV overnight
• 4. Follow hard days with easy days — alternate load and recovery instead of stacking intensity
• 5. Daylight exposure + regular Zone 2 cardio — the two slow variables that raise your HRV baseline over months
• 6. Cool, dark, quiet bedroom — more deep sleep flows straight into a higher score
• 7. Manage stress on purpose — breathing work, meditation or a walk; psychological load hits HRV as hard as training does

One low day is noise — daily variation is normal. The usual suspects: alcohol the night before, a hard or long training session, short or fragmented sleep, travel and time zones, psychological stress, oncoming illness (recovery often dips 1–2 days before symptoms), and the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. What deserves action is a pattern: three or more days below your normal range with resting heart rate rising in parallel — that's the signal to cut volume, prioritise sleep, and if needed take a full rest day.

If you wear a WHOOP, Vita uses your WHOOP recovery data directly, then layers on Apple Health and lab reports to build cross-source, long-term trends a WHOOP alone doesn't show — and the AI coach turns them into concrete actions. On a low-recovery day it looks at your week's strain and sleep debt and tells you whether that means full rest or 20 minutes of easy cardio. Without a WHOOP, Vita computes the same score from Apple Watch HRV and resting heart rate.