Personal baseline worksheet
Almost every recovery mistake comes from comparing an athlete to the wrong thing. This is the worksheet for working out what normal looks like for one person, and whether today is actually different.
Why a personal baseline, and not a threshold
It is tempting to want a number — an HRV below which an athlete is under-recovered, a resting heart rate above which something is wrong. No such number exists, and anyone offering one is guessing.
Resting HRV differs by a factor of three or more between people in equivalent condition. A threshold that flags one athlete every single day will never flag another, and neither result says anything about their training.
So the only question that transfers across people is a relative one: how far is this athlete from their own recent normal? That is what a baseline is, and it is genuinely all it is — an average of their own recent readings to measure change against.
The worksheet
One row per metric you track for one athlete. Fill the recent normal in once a fortnight; the rest daily or whenever you are reviewing.
Copy and paste — no signup
PERSONAL BASELINE — [athlete name] — [date] Baseline window used: last ____ days (7-14 is typical) Metric Recent normal Today Direction Context Review? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sleep hours ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N Sleep quality ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N Resting HR ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N HRV ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N Energy ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N Soreness ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N Motivation ____ ____ ____ ____________________ Y / N How many metrics moved in the same direction? ____ How many days has this been true for? ____ Does context explain it? (session, travel, sleep, life, illness) > Decision: no action / watch / ask them / adjust
How to fill it in
- Pick a window and keep it
- Seven to fourteen days of that athlete's own readings. Shorter and the average moves so much per reading that you are measuring the window rather than the athlete; much longer and it stops reflecting their current state.
- Exclude today from their normal
- Otherwise a bad day drags down the very average it is being compared against, and the deviation you calculate is smaller than it really is.
- Count how many moved together
- One metric moving is weak evidence. Three moving the same way is considerably stronger, and this is the single most useful line on the sheet.
- Count the days
- One morning is usually last night. Several consecutive days is a pattern. Both go in the decision.
- Write the context before deciding
- Most deviations have a mundane explanation, and forcing yourself to write it down stops the number driving the decision on its own.
Try the calculation
The arithmetic behind a baseline, for one metric. Enter an athlete's recent readings and today's value. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent — the numbers stay in your browser.
Enter recent readings and today's value to see the comparison.
What a deviation is not
A percentage below someone's average is not a diagnosis, a readiness verdict or a reason to change a session on its own. It is a prompt to look at context and, often, to ask a question. Anything unexplained and persistent belongs with a medical professional rather than a training adjustment.
Frequently asked
- How big a change is significant?
- There is no universal figure, and any number quoted here would be invented. Significance depends on how variable that athlete normally is — a 5% move matters for someone very stable and is ordinary noise for someone who swings widely. Comparing the size of today's move to their typical day-to-day movement is the honest version of the question.
- How long before an athlete has a usable baseline?
- About two weeks of consistent readings. Before that, the right answer is that you cannot yet tell — which is a legitimate thing to record rather than a gap to fill with assumptions.
- Does this work for subjective ratings too?
- Yes, and it should be used for them. Some athletes rate everything a 4 and some never go above 3. A 3 means something quite different depending on which one you are looking at, which is exactly the problem a baseline solves.
- What if an athlete changes device?
- Start the baseline again. Different hardware measures differently, so a comparison across a device change is measuring the device rather than the athlete.
This, across every athlete and every signal
Loadwell keeps a rolling baseline per athlete for each metric, counts how many moved together, and sorts the roster by it.
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