Readiness is a trend, not a verdict. HRV, resting heart rate and sleep are useful when you compare today with your own recent baseline — not against anyone else, and not against a single number. Two or three signals pointing the same way is a signal. One is noise.
What the three common signals mean
Heart-rate variability (HRV) reflects the balance of your autonomic nervous system. It swings a lot day to day, which is why a single reading is close to meaningless and a seven-day average is useful.
Resting heart rate is slower to move and easier to trust. A rise of several beats over your own baseline, sustained for more than a day, tends to mean something.
Sleep is the one most riders under-weight. Duration matters, but so does consistency — going to bed at wildly different times costs you more than most people expect.
None of these is a fitness score, and none of them says anything about your health. They describe how your body is coping with the load you have been putting on it.
Why you compare yourself with yourself
Absolute HRV values vary enormously between people — by age, genetics, measurement method and time of day. A number that would be alarming for one rider is entirely normal for another.
What is informative is deviation from your own recent baseline, measured the same way at the same time of day. Which is also the practical catch: a measurement taken at a different hour, or after a different evening, is not comparable to yesterday's.
The signs that beat any score
Before you look at a number, check three things you already know:
- Motivation. Not wanting to ride once is normal. Not wanting to ride for several days when you normally do is information.
- Power at a given feel. If the effort that usually sits at a comfortable pace now costs you noticeably more, your body is telling you something the watch has not caught up with yet.
- Mood and irritability. The least measurable and often the earliest.
When these disagree with a green score on a screen, trust these.
What to do when the signals point down
The choice is rarely train or do not train. Usually it is: keep the session and reduce the intensity, keep the intensity and cut the volume, or swap the hard day with an easy one later in the week.
Moving a hard session by a day costs you almost nothing. Completing it badly costs you the session and the two days after it. That trade is not close.
And if the pattern persists for more than a week or two, or comes with symptoms that feel like more than training fatigue, that is a conversation for a qualified professional rather than an app.
Your numbers, explained the moment you ask.
The awkward part is that reading these signals well takes a coach's judgement, and most riders are reading them alone at 6 a.m. with a number on a screen and no idea what to do about it.
Peakfy computes readiness from your HRV, resting heart rate and sleep, and then — the part that actually helps — changes today's session to match, and tells you in plain language why it changed. When it says ease off, you can ask what it saw. It is a sport-science training tool, not a medical device, and it does not diagnose anything.
Questions riders ask
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