Building a meaningful daily advice

Blog post by Marco Altini
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When providing daily advice (color-coding and message) in HRV4Training we combine your physiology and your subjective feel (outputs) . However, we do not use or include your behavior, for example your activity / training (input).

this is a key difference from what you get in terms of readiness or recovery scores in most wearables. Why is that?

The whole point of assessing your state, either objectively via heart rate variability (HRV) or subjectively by feel, is to determine how you responded to your given circumstances. You already know the input (behavior) and are assessing the output (physiology or feel).

In other words, if I train hard or more for a few days, I want to assess how I responded (output). Including activity (input) in my assessment would mean penalizing me regardless of my body's response. For athletes (of any level), this method is particularly ineffective: it hides information.

If you train, there is absolutely no point looking at readiness or recovery scores to assess how you are responding to a given training stimulus as these scores confound your response with your behavior. Is the score low because I responded poorly, or just because I did more?

This approach not only provides you with poor information about your actual response, but fools you to believe the tool works. You go hard or do more, and they tell you you need to recover. In fact, you might be doing very well and be ready for another big training block.

This is not to say that your behavior does not matter: it is key context you can use to understand what could be driving changes. However, it should not be used to determine your response (output). You want to learn about the output of the system (physiological or subjective response) given the input (behavior and other).

There are many nuances that are worth understanding a bit better if we want to make good use of available technology. Hopefully, this explains a bit why it is worth assessing your physiology and feel, while you can ignore most (all?) made-up scores.