Two of the most common wearable metrics, demystified.
If you've connected a wearable, two numbers show up constantly: heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate (RHR). Both are useful recovery signals — understanding what they mean makes them far more actionable.
Your RHR is simply how many times your heart beats per minute at rest, typically measured first thing in the morning. A lower RHR generally reflects better cardiovascular fitness; a noticeable upward shift from your personal baseline can be an early sign of illness, poor recovery, or accumulated training and life stress.
HRV measures the tiny variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. Counter-intuitively, higher variability generally reflects a nervous system that can flexibly shift between "active" and "recovering" states, while lower variability is often associated with sustained stress, poor sleep, illness or overtraining.
Both metrics are noisy day to day — a single low HRV reading isn't a verdict. What matters is your trend against your own baseline over one to two weeks, which is exactly the same rolling-average philosophy behind the FAD Score itself.
Once wearable integrations are live, THE FAD will be able to fold HRV and RHR trends directly into your Exercise and Stress signals instead of relying solely on self-report.