Recovery monitoring checklist

Daily — five minutes

In this order. The order is the point: triage before detail.

DAILY RECOVERY REVIEW

[ ] 1. Who is missing data?
       Anyone who has not checked in for 3+ days.
       Disengagement is usually the first thing to slip.

[ ] 2. Who has moved away from their own normal?
       Not who is lowest. Who has CHANGED.

[ ] 3. For each of those, what moved?
       Sleep / HRV / resting HR / soreness / motivation

[ ] 4. Does the context explain it?
       Hard session, travel, illness, work, poor night.
       Most flags resolve here in under a minute.

[ ] 5. Anything unexplained AND persistent?
       -> message them. Question first, not a plan change.

[ ] 6. Stop.
       Everyone else does not need you today.

Weekly — twenty minutes

WEEKLY RECOVERY REVIEW

[ ] Whose baseline has drifted across the block?
     Slow decline matters more than any single day.

[ ] Who has been flagged repeatedly?
     Same athlete three weeks running = programme question.

[ ] Whose check-in compliance is falling?
     Address the habit before you lose the data.

[ ] Did I act on last week's flags?
     Monitoring nobody acts on is admin.

[ ] Anything in the weekly questionnaire I skipped past?

[ ] Which athletes have too little data to assess at all?
     Be honest about this rather than assuming they are fine.

What to deliberately ignore

As important as the list above. These are the things that consume attention and change nothing.

A single low morning

Day-to-day variation has mundane causes — a late meal, a drink, a disturbed night. Acting on one reading trains you and the athlete to over-react.

Comparing athletes to each other

Cross-athlete comparison of recovery data mostly measures individual physiology. It reliably points you at the wrong person.

Composite scores in isolation

Useful as a prompt, but look at what moved underneath before deciding anything.

Athletes who are stable

The hardest habit. If someone has not changed, they do not need reviewing today — that is what makes the routine survivable at forty athletes.

Frequently asked

How long should daily monitoring actually take?

Five minutes for a roster of thirty, if you are triaging rather than reviewing. If it takes forty minutes you are reading everyone, which is the thing that stops happening by week three.

What if I have no wearable data at all?

The checklist works unchanged on check-ins alone. The signals are coarser but the process — who is missing, who has changed, does context explain it — is identical.

Should I tell athletes when they are flagged?

Usually, and as a question rather than a verdict. "How did Tuesday feel?" gets you a better answer than "your recovery is low", which tends to produce either alarm or defensiveness.