Today's Load should build you.
A 12-minute morning measurement on the beat-to-beat intervals from your chest strap turns what it observes into one clear decision for today — with the reason beside it.
Free for iPhone and iPad. A compatible chest strap is required.
You can always push.
The harder question is:
Should you?
Every athlete faces the same three questions.
How much today?
Can my body handle it today?
Will this build me — or just drain me?
What matters is not just what you can do today.
It's what today's response builds next.
Measure. Decide. Build.
- Measure
- See clearly what your body can handle today.
- Decide
- Choose one clear response for today: TRAIN, REDUCE or RECOVER.
- Build
- Use today's right response to support adaptation and build tomorrow's capacity.
Turn today's response into tomorrow's capacity.
Build does not mean more.
Sometimes building means adding load.
Sometimes it means reducing it.
Sometimes slowing down.
Sometimes stopping.
Sometimes resisting the impulse to push.
Sometimes recovering.
Build is not a specific action.
It is the right response to
current reality.
RECOVER is not the opposite of building.
It can be the most organized form of building that day.
TRAIN can build.
REDUCE can build.
RECOVER can build.
The action changes according to the current reality of the organism.
The purpose does not.
The goal is not to do more today.
The goal is for today's decision to build tomorrow's capacity.
Today's Load should build you.
Not just today's performance.
Tomorrow's capacity.
Turn today's response into tomorrow's capacity.
The problem
Training is meant to change capacity.
But the decision that starts that process — how much to ask of your body today — is usually made from indirect information.
Most mass-market wearables estimate how much you can train today passively, from an optical sensor at the wrist or finger, over a single night, through a model you cannot inspect.
You get a score. But the real question is not the score.
What response will today's load create — and is that response likely to build you?
What Today's Load does instead
It asks your nervous system a question and grades the answer. Standing up is a small, repeatable challenge. How your heart rhythm answers it, and how paced breathing moves it, is a measurement of the state your regulation is in this morning — not a prediction from yesterday's training load.
Everything is computed from RR intervals: the exact time between one heartbeat and the next, read from your chest strap. Nothing else feeds the decision.
No readiness score. No estimate from a model. Just a measurement of how your system responds to controlled demand this morning.
That response becomes the basis for today's load decision — so today's decision can serve tomorrow's capacity.
The 12-minute protocol
Each morning you lie down, stand up, then do both again while breathing with the orb — five slow breaths a minute. Standing up is a small, repeatable challenge for your nervous system. How your heart rhythm answers it, and how paced breathing moves it, is what the measurement reads.
The four signals
Twelve minutes, one protocol, four questions. Each signal answers one of them.
Response
How clearly your body answered standing up.
Rebound
How fully your calm-down system settled back after the challenge.
Stability
Whether your rhythm stayed steady through the position changes.
Reserve
How much regulatory headroom the system showed across the challenge-and-return.
One decision, and the reason for it
The four signals are not blended into a points total. They are read together under one fixed logic. The app tells you what shaped your morning.
The answer arrives in one of three families, plus a refusal:
| TRAIN | Your regulation held up. Today can carry load. |
| REDUCE | Something is short of a full go-ahead. Train, but less. |
| RECOVER | Your regulation did not hold up this morning. Today is a recovery day. |
| NO READ | The data was not clean enough to score. You get a refusal, never a guess. |
Every state ships as colour and shape and word, so nothing depends on seeing colour.
The decision is not the endpoint
TRAIN, REDUCE and RECOVER are different responses to different realities.
The right response today creates the conditions for productive adaptation after the load.
Over time, that is what matters: not how often you trained harder, but whether your decisions helped build capacity.
Today's response. Adaptation. Tomorrow's capacity.
Why you can trust the answer
It is deterministic. The same beats always produce the same answer. The engine is byte-frozen and checksummed file by file; a corpus of 65 real recorded sessions is replayed against it on every change, and all 65 must match exactly.
The logic is fixed. Nothing learns in the background, nothing drifts between releases, and an engine change is a versioned event with evidence attached — not a silent model update.
You get the reason, every morning. Every number on screen is the engine's own, and the decision always arrives with the four signals and what shaped it.
And one thing we do not publish. The engine's exact thresholds are not published. What we do publish is what makes it trustworthy: the logic is fixed and identical for everyone, and the same beats always give the same decision.
Our honesty rules
The measurement engine decides. The words around it only explain — they never overrule it.
Every number on screen is the engine's own. We never invent one.
A bad read is refused, not dressed up. NO READ is an answer, never a score.
The AI explains, and only when you ask. The written analysis is produced from the engine's own result — it can never change the decision, and it runs on demand.
Today's Load vs your watch
Different measurements. Different questions.
Your watch (Garmin, Whoop, Oura) and Today's Load will sometimes disagree. That's not a malfunction on either side — they answer different questions.
Countdown-style recovery numbers (like Garmin's recovery hours) are mostly bookkeeping about the dose. After a long ride it takes the workout's load and estimates how long that dose typically takes to clear, then counts down — lightly adjusted by sleep and overnight readings. Four easy hours is a big dose, so the countdown is long, whatever your body says this morning.
Score-style recoveries (Whoop, Oura) lean on overnight measurements instead — closer in spirit to Today's Load, but passive: an observation during sleep, not a challenge you respond to.
Today's Load starts with a measurement of the state — because the quality of today's load decision depends on knowing what your regulation can actually demonstrate this morning. A standardized 12-minute challenge, on beat-to-beat data from a chest strap, scoring what your regulation actually demonstrates right now — not what yesterday's dose predicts it should be.
So after a long easy session, it's normal to see: watch says "38 hours to recover", Today's Load says TRAIN. A fit system clears an easy dose overnight; the countdown can't see that — the measurement can. In a hard training week the same gap appears: dose models accumulate and eventually just say stop, while a daily measurement can see whether you're actually holding up — and can catch the morning you genuinely aren't.
When to respect the watch anyway: a 12-minute autonomic read does not see muscle glycogen, muscle damage, or a sore knee. After a race that wrecked your legs, your nervous system can look fine while your muscles are not — there, the dose number carries real information. Know which question each number answers; don't ignore either.
What it does not measure
This measurement reads your autonomic regulation. It does not measure glycogen, muscle damage, soreness, or sleep itself — those are context you bring to the decision.
Nor does it measure adaptation or capacity directly. Your body adapts; the measurement shows what is true this morning, and the decision shapes your response to it.
Today's Load is a training tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose anything, and it makes no claim about illness, blood pressure or heart rhythm disorders.
Getting started
You need a chest strap that reports true beat-to-beat intervals. The Polar H10 is the reference the measurement was built on. Which straps work →
Free, with no subscription or ads. Available for iPhone and iPad.