We don't invent your recovery score — here's what that actually means

An earlier version of the Recovery screen in MIDO XI showed HRV in milliseconds, resting heart rate in bpm, hydration in litres, and a six-region soreness map. It looked exactly like every other recovery dashboard.

It was also, for almost every player using it, completely made up. None of those numbers existed anywhere in the product. There was no wearable connected, no lab test, nothing measuring HRV at all — the screen was rendering plausible-looking numbers that nothing had actually produced.

The rebuild

The current Recovery page records exactly what a player actually reports: four scores, each 1 to 5 — energy, soreness, sleep, mental state — and a note. That’s the whole input. A readiness figure is derived from those four numbers by arithmetic simple enough to check by hand, and the page says plainly what it is not measuring and what device would be needed to measure it for real.

When a player connects a WHOOP strap, the picture changes — genuinely, not cosmetically. Recovery score, HRV, resting heart rate, blood oxygen and sleep stages start showing up, sourced from the device and kept visibly separate from the self-reported scores. They are never averaged together into one number. A device reading and a player typing “4 out of 5 for sleep” are different kinds of fact, and blending them would just be the same invented-number problem with better production values.

• A missing HRV reading renders as “not measured,” never as zero.
• A night WHOOP itself couldn’t score stays unscored — no number is invented to fill the gap.
• Self-reported and device-measured data are never combined into a single figure.

A recovery number a player might use to decide whether to train has to be either real or absent. There is no honest third option.

This is a small page in a large product, but the rule behind it runs through everything: separate what was actually observed from what is inferred, and never let one quietly become the other.