// Effort score
One number.
Every sport.
Effort is a single 0–12 score for any session, built from one signal every sport produces: your heart rate, and how long you held it. A Saturday metcon, a Tuesday 5K and a long Sunday ride finally sit on the same chart.
A metcon and a 5K
are not comparable.
Most tracking apps hand you a different metric per sport: pace and distance for a run, tonnage for a lift, a round count for a metcon. Each is right on its own terms and none of them stack. Train across three disciplines and you end up with three logs that cannot answer the one question that matters — was this week harder than the last one?
- Pace and distance say nothing about a lifting session
- Tonnage says nothing about a long ride
- Three sports, three logs, no shared scale
One signal
every sport gives.
Whatever you are doing, your heart is reporting how hard it is. Effort reads that stream and weights each moment twice — by how deep into its zone your pulse sat, and by how long it stayed there. Add the slices up and you get one number between 0 and 12 that means the same thing on a barbell, in a pool and on a bike.
- Time in zone — where the session actually went
- Depth in zone — how hard, not just how long
- No sport-specific inputs, so nothing to normalise
// Effort score
The questions people actually ask.
- What is a good effort score?
- There is no universally good number, because the scale measures how hard a session was for you, not how hard it would be for anyone else. As a rough guide: 1–3 is easy movement or recovery work, 4–6 is a steady aerobic session, 7–9 is a hard metcon or a threshold effort, and 10–12 is a race, a test or a genuinely brutal day. What matters is the pattern across a week, not any single figure.
- How is the effort score calculated?
- From your heart rate and the clock, nothing else. Every reading is weighted twice: by how deep into its zone it sits, and by how long it lasted before the next one. Those weighted slices are summed across the session and mapped onto the 0–12 scale. Because the only inputs are pulse and time, the same arithmetic works for a barbell session, a swim and a bike ride.
- Why 0–12 and not 0–100 or 0–10?
- A 0–100 scale implies a precision the underlying measurements do not have — nobody can tell a 63 from a 66. A 0–10 scale invites people to read it as a percentage of maximum. Twelve points give enough resolution to separate an easy day from a moderate one while keeping every value meaningful on its own.
- Do I need a device to get an effort score?
- Yes. The score is built from your heart rate, so it needs a device that records it and writes it to Apple Health or Health Connect. It does not have to be an expensive one — a basic chest strap or an entry-level fitness band is enough, and so is any watch you already own. What matters is that heart rate reaches the app; the brand does not.
See it on your own training.
Effort, recovery, boards and groups — every feature, broken down.