Your watch already knows. Now it changes the session.
Sleep, HRV and resting heart rate from Apple Health, compared against your own trailing normal — and used to change what today’s session asks of you.
One month free, then A$24.99/month. Cancel any time. iPhone and iPad.
What goes wrong without it
Wearables produce a great deal of data and almost none of it changes anything. You get a score out of a hundred, you look at it, and then you do the session you were going to do anyway.
A readiness number that does not alter the program is decoration.
What the app actually does
With your permission, Train Smart reads sleep, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, workouts, heart rate, cardio fitness, energy, distance, steps and body mass from Apple Health. Each metric has its own switch — you can grant sleep and refuse everything else.
Those signals combine with how you say you feel and what you did yesterday into a readiness score. The score then does something: it scales the session. A genuinely poor day — short broken sleep, HRV well below your own baseline — reduces the working sets you are prescribed. A good day leaves them alone.
The comparison is always against your own trailing baseline, never against anyone else’s numbers. That is not a design preference; it is what the monitoring literature supports, and the papers are on our sources page.
The parts that matter
- Ten metrics, each with its own switch
- Sleep, HRV, resting HR, workouts, heart rate, VO₂ max, active and resting energy, distance, steps and exercise minutes, body mass. Nothing is read that you have not granted.
- HRV against your own normal
- A single day’s HRV reading means very little. A sustained drop below your own rolling baseline is one of the earliest signs you are carrying fatigue, and that is what the score responds to.
- Training-load warnings
- The app tracks your acute load against your four-week chronic load and flags a sharp climb — the pattern the IOC consensus statement associates with raised injury risk.
- A manual answer always wins
- If you tell the app you feel fine, that beats what the watch inferred. The watch fills in when you have not answered, not over the top of you.
- No sync button
- Data arrives via a live observer query rather than a button you have to remember to press. Sleep and Body Battery-style scores are computed here, because HealthKit does not expose them.
Is this you?
Anyone with an Apple Watch who has ever wondered whether the readiness score on it means anything.
Recovery & readiness — questions
What data does Train Smart read from Apple Health?
Does it work with Garmin, Whoop or Fitbit?
Does the readiness score actually change my training?
Can I use the app without any of this?
Start training properly
Pick your sport, answer a few questions, and your first week is built before you leave the kitchen.
One month free, then A$24.99/month. Cancel any time. iPhone and iPad.