◆ The Signal
What your data
actually says.
How recovery scores are calculated, where wearable data quietly lies to you, and what to do about it. Written from the integrations themselves, with the sample size stated every time.
- Half-marathon training, with room to liftThree runs, two lifts and a readable 12-week schedule for runners who already train. Includes a four-day alternative, example gym sessions and changes for tired legs.
- Your first continuous 1,000m swimA repeatable pool progression for runners and lifters who can already swim short lengths. Includes eight main sets, full session distances and breathing cues.
- Two runs, one day, one chart entryBoth runs can sync and one can still disappear from a chart. Our endurance chart keeps one record per sport per date, and its tie-break can even change the total.
- One run, two clocks, two pacesFive kilometres can read as 5:00/km or 6:00/km without the distance changing. Strava separates moving and elapsed time; a downstream app can erase that distinction.
- A strength workout is not a lift logYour watch can record a strength session without giving a coaching app your squat sets. We traced the separate records and calculated what changes when load and reps arrive.
- Why your weekly recap flatters youA weekly card can hide missing data and measured setbacks for different reasons. We ran a three-gap week through our own recap to show what disappears.
- Your iPhone knows what you trainAn athlete connected Apple Health, was told it "doesn't break down workout types", and got a four-day lifting split with three rest days. His phone held four lifts, three runs and a 79-minute ride from that week. What HealthKit actually stores about a workout, what a phone-only athlete's list looks like, and the two reads that turn it into a wrong plan.
- Your squat stalls when you add runningInterference is real, measured, and smaller than the forum says. On our roster the one lift that met a strict plateau definition belonged to a hybrid athlete who was eating 61% of his protein target, and his squat was up 31% over the same nine weeks of running. The order to check things in, with the numbers behind each gate.
- Your sleep number is the night before lastTwo mornings running, a Garmin owner was told how she had slept, and both times it was the wrong night. The watch was right. Her app read Apple Health through a window that still held the previous night, and did not know the difference.
- Strava's kilojoules are not caloriesOne 15 km run, three numbers. Strava's Energy Output said 2,176 kJ, Strava's own calorie field said 1,333, the Garmin that recorded it said 1,333. Where the kilojoule figure comes from, why it lands on runs when the documentation says it cannot, and how long our own importer spent reading it as calories.
- Your morning read is not finishedAt 07:28 a real athlete's watch said resting HR 47, three above his baseline, and he was told to skip his session. At 11:24 the same night settled at 42, the best recovery of his week. How a recovery read gets written in pieces, why half of it can be yesterday, and the one signature that gives it away.
- Your workout shows up twiceOne 15-minute run from a real athlete exists three times in our tables, under Garmin, Apple Health and Strava, with two different calorie figures. How a session gets copied between apps, why the copies never quite agree, and what we measured across 776 wearable activities.
- Carbs on a cutProtein and fat get set first from your bodyweight. Carbs get whatever calories are left, so the whole deficit lands on the one macro that fuels your session. Below about 28 kcal/kg/day, no rearrangement of the split can fix it.
- Two protein targetsOne number is agreed in conversation and grades your morning check-in. The other is computed from your bodyweight and drives the rings. On our roster they disagreed for 10 of 25 athletes, by 19 g to 91 g, and the habit was the lower number every single time.
- Is your calorie target below your BMR?Most apps guard a calorie target with a flat floor of 1,200 or 1,500. We guard ours with a ratio against your own resting rate instead. It is the better instrument, and measuring it across our roster showed exactly how much weaker it is than it looks.
- Strava connected, no activitiesA connected Strava account that returns nothing usually is not broken. It is answering a narrower question than the one your app thinks it asked, and an empty list looks exactly like a rest week.
- How accurate is your TDEE?Every calorie target starts with a resting-rate equation multiplied by an activity factor. The equation is decent. The multiplier is a population range being used as a personal number, and the only thing that can check it is your own scale, weighed far more often than most people weigh.
- Body Battery says restA readiness score is not a second opinion on your training plan. Both of them partly encode the same fact, which is how hard you have been training, and on our own athletes' data the score tracked how much of the day they had already spent more closely than it tracked anything measured overnight.
- Why Strava shows no caloriesTwo different zeros with two different causes. One is Strava declining to do the arithmetic for most sports. The other is a number that exists on your activity page and is withheld from every app you connect.
- Your watch counted your commuteA weekly recap told a real athlete he had trained 22 times. He had trained about six. Every row was genuine, and the count was still wrong, because an activity your device records and a session your plan prescribes are not the same unit.
- Why Apple Health says you slept 15 hoursAn impossible sleep total almost always means two apps recorded the same night and something added them together. Apple's overlap design is deliberate, the deduplication is your app's job, and the damage lands somewhere you would never look.
- Why your recovery scores disagreeThree devices, one night, three different answers. The mechanical reason they disagree, which number is closest to ECG, and the decision rule that works whichever one you own.
- Morning weight or evening weight?Weigh in the morning is the easy half. The half nobody tells you is that your app keeps one reading per day, and which one it keeps moved a real athlete's calorie target by about 240 kcal a day.