Health & Recovery
How RepTrack reads the signals your watch records — recovery, strain, stress, sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, wrist temperature, exercise minutes, heart-rate zones — and turns them into scores against your own baseline. Plus the activity metrics (steps, energy, distance) and how to train when you have no wearable at all.
Chapters
1How Your Recovery Score Actually Works
Most recovery scores hand you a number and hope you trust it. Here's exactly what RepTrack measures, why your "normal" reads as 70 instead of 100, and the one place we flatly refuse to make a number up.
2How Your Strain Score Actually Works
Strain answers a simple question: how much did today ask of your body? Here's how RepTrack puts cardio and lifting on one scale, scores it against your own normal, and shows a gap instead of inventing a number when data is missing.
3How the Stress Monitor Actually Works
RepTrack's Stress score never claims to read your mind. It tracks when your heart rate runs above your own calm baseline, how the timeline works, and every place we refuse to guess.
4Heart-Rate Zones and Your Real HRmax
Heart-rate zones are only as good as the max they're cut from, and 220 minus age misses badly for a lot of people. Here's how RepTrack finds your real HRmax, what each zone means, and how to train with them.
5Sleep and Recovery: Why RepTrack Grades Your Sleep on a Fixed Bar
Sleep does the actual repair work, and it's the one recovery signal RepTrack refuses to grade on a curve. Here's why your score measures sleep against a fixed bar instead of your personal average, and which levers actually move the number.
6HRV and Recovery: What the Gaps Between Your Heartbeats Actually Tell You
Heart rate variability is the single best physiological window into how recovered you are, but only if you read it right. Here's what HRV actually measures, why a trend against your own baseline beats any single number, and why some wearables can't give it to you at all.
7Resting Heart Rate: The Quietest Recovery Signal You Own
Your resting heart rate is one of the oldest, cheapest recovery signals in existence, and one of the most misread. Here's why the number itself barely matters, but its drift from your own baseline tells you when to push and when to back off.
8Respiratory Rate: What Your Breathing at Night Tells You
Your watch counts breaths per minute while you sleep. It's a steady nightly vital, and a sustained move away from your usual band is worth noticing. Here's what RepTrack measures and why we report the shift without grading it good or bad.
9Blood Oxygen (SpO₂): What Your Watch Can and Can't Tell You
SpO₂ is the percentage of oxygen your blood carries, usually sampled during sleep on supported Apple Watches. Here's how RepTrack reads it, what 95–100% actually means, and why missing data is often normal.
10Wrist Temperature: Your Nightly Baseline Shift
Series 8 and later track how your wrist temperature shifts night to night, not your absolute body temperature but the deviation from your own baseline. Here's how RepTrack reads those shifts and what they can mean.
11Exercise Minutes: What Counts Toward Your Ring
Exercise minutes aren't the same as workout duration. They count minutes of brisk effort toward your Apple Watch ring. Here's how RepTrack displays them and how to read them next to Strain and logged workouts.
12No Wearable? Here's How RepTrack Reads Your Training Readiness
No wearable? RepTrack won't fake a recovery score: it shows Training Readiness built from what it actually knows: your logged training and how you say you feel. Here's what goes into it, why the honest label matters, and how to use it to call a push day or a back-off day.
13Daily Steps: What the Number Actually Means for Your Health
Steps measure how much you move, not how recovered you are, and the 10,000 target was a 1960s marketing slogan, not science. Here's what your step count really predicts and the target the evidence actually supports.
14Active Energy and Total Burn: What Your Watch Is Really Telling You
Your watch reports calories burned with impressive precision, but the number is modeled from heart rate and motion, not measured. Here's what active energy and Total Burn actually mean, and how to use the trend instead of trusting the digits.
15Walking and Running Distance: The Aerobic Base Under Your Lifting
Distance is the honest measure of how much easy aerobic work you actually do, and a strong aerobic base makes you recover faster between sets and train harder for longer. Here's why lifters underrate it, and how to add it without wrecking your recovery.
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