Wearable metrics cheat sheet
One page on what each number is, how much weight it deserves, and what to do when it moves. Written for the coach reading someone else's data, not the athlete reading their own.
The metrics
Confidence is how much a single reading is worth on its own. Everything here should be read against the athlete's own baseline rather than any population range.
| Metric | What it reflects | Confidence in one reading | When it moves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sleep duration | Time actually asleep | High — hard to measure wrong | The most actionable metric there is. Ask about it before anything else. |
| Sleep consistency | Regularity of sleep and wake times | High | Slow to change and worth coaching directly. Often explains a noisy HRV series. |
| HRV | Autonomic state overnight | Low — very noisy day to day | Only act on a multi-day trend. One low morning is usually nothing. |
| Resting heart rate | Baseline cardiovascular state | Medium-high — more stable than HRV | A sustained rise across days is one of the more reliable signals available. |
| Readiness / recovery score | A vendor composite of the above | Medium — but it hides which input moved | Treat as a prompt to look underneath, never as a verdict. |
| Steps / daily activity | Non-training movement | High | Useful context. A collapse in general activity often precedes an athlete telling you anything. |
| Self-reported soreness | Perceived tissue state | Medium | Read against the session that caused it. Soreness with no session to explain it is different. |
| Self-reported motivation | Psychological state | Medium | A slow drift down across a block is one of the earliest warnings a coach gets. |
The short version
If you remember nothing else from this page.
Copy and paste — no signup
1. Compare an athlete to THEMSELVES, never to the squad. 2. Trend beats any single reading. Especially for HRV. 3. Sleep duration is the most actionable number you have. 4. Resting HR rising over several days is worth a conversation. 5. A composite score tells you SOMETHING moved, not WHICH thing moved. Look underneath. 6. The athlete knows why. The sensor does not. 7. Not enough data is a valid answer. Say so instead of assuming they are fine. 8. None of this is diagnostic. Anything that looks like a health concern goes to a medical professional.
The limits of all of it
These are training-context signals produced by consumer hardware. They do not detect illness, injury or any medical condition, and they should not be used to overrule how an athlete says they feel or what a clinician has told them. Their value is in prompting the right conversation earlier.
Frequently asked
- Which single metric should I watch if I only have time for one?
- Sleep duration. It is the most reliably measured, the most actionable, and it explains a large share of movement in everything else on the list.
- How big a change is worth acting on?
- There is no universal threshold and any number given would be invented. Significance depends on how variable that athlete normally is — a five percent move matters for someone very stable and is noise for someone who swings widely.
- Can I use this with athletes who have no wearable?
- The bottom half applies unchanged. Self-reported soreness, motivation, energy and mood support a baseline of their own without any hardware.
Have this applied automatically
Loadwell reads these signals against each athlete's own baseline and tells you which ones moved, so you are not doing the comparison in your head.
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