Recovery, read against your own baseline

Three inputs, weighted, scored against you

The score is heart rate variability (40%), resting heart rate (30%), and sleep quality (30%). HRV and resting heart rate are read against your own rolling baseline, not a population norm, so one bad night doesn't tank the number and one great night doesn't inflate it. Resting heart rate counts in reverse: lower reads better.

Log HRV and resting heart rate by hand each morning, or sync a wearable and skip the typing. The score treats both sources identically. What it needs is a consistent signal, not an expensive one.

Today's score bands into three reads: primed (70+), ready (40+), or prioritise recovery (under 40), alongside a training-readiness callout. Under the number, a factor breakdown shows exactly how much each of the three inputs contributed against your baseline, plus trend views over 14, 30, and 90 days so a slow slide shows up before it becomes a bad week.

Deterministic suggestions, never an AI guess

Elevated resting heart rate against your baseline surfaces an "ease back" prompt. Several low-scoring days in a row surfaces a deload flag. Every suggestion is a rule you can read, evaluated the same way every time on the same inputs, and it's never generated by a language model. The recovery module doesn't write coaching prose about your morning; it computes a number and, where a rule fires, says which one.

Pro members also get recovery-versus-performance correlation: whether your scores actually track how your training sessions have gone, so you can see if the number is worth trusting for your body specifically.

Recovery informs training. It does not override it.

This is the one place MuscleBuddy's four modules connect most directly. Training reads it directly: an optional autoregulation setting lets your wearable's recovery reading feed session-by-session load decisions, on top of the reactive deload logic every member gets, which triggers off your lifts actually stalling (three working sessions on an exercise without progress, or the same pattern across enough muscle groups to warrant a broader pull-back) rather than off a single morning's number. The score never quietly cancels a session or rewrites a program on its own.

Recovery and Nutrition read the same daily check-in on the same days: the sleep and resting-heart-rate inputs that build your recovery score sit beside the weigh-in that moves your calorie target, so a rough week shows up in both places at once instead of looking like two unrelated dips. Upkeep's medication and appointment cadence often explains the gap the other three modules can only flag: a resting heart rate that jumped the week a new prescription started, or a missed check-in that lines up with an appointment, reads as context instead of noise. And a coach's Alerts widget rolls stalled lifts, missed check-ins, and low recovery scores into one glance across a roster, so a bad week is visible to the person coaching you as soon as it's visible to you.

A declared condition (POTS, hypermobility, and others) can shift how the three factors are weighted, because for some people a raw resting-heart-rate reading is noise rather than signal, and scoring it like everyone else's would actively mislead the training plan. That's a correction to a wrong assumption, not an adaptation you opt into.

Sync a device, or don’t

MuscleBuddy reads recovery data from Android Health Connect (which covers Samsung Health, Pixel, and Fitbit synced through Google) and from cloud integrations with Whoop, Oura, Withings, Polar, and Google Health. Connect one and HRV, resting heart rate, and sleep flow in automatically each morning.

There's no iOS HealthKit integration and no MuscleBuddy watch app today, on either platform. If you're on an iPhone or you'd rather not connect anything, manual entry produces the exact same score from the exact same formula. Nothing about the number changes based on how the inputs arrived.

Part of your daily check-in, not a separate chore

Recovery inputs live inside the same one-minute daily check-in as sleep, fatigue, soreness, motivation, and stress. There's no standalone vitals screen to remember. If you connect a wearable, the numeric fields fill themselves; you're only ever asked for what the app can't get another way.

Share your recovery dashboard with a coach if you have one, and they see the same score, the same factor breakdown, and the same trend you do. Turn sharing off and it's yours alone. Recovery is health data under MuscleBuddy's privacy rules: it never appears in a feed, a leaderboard, or an export to anyone but you and, if you choose, your coach.