Inputs
8 sources
Recovery, sleep debt, five vitals, hydration, cycle phase, travel, training plan, and your own check-in.
Feature
Today's Plan
Most health apps hand you six scores and leave the synthesis to you at 7am. Today's Plan does the synthesis, and tells you what it concluded.
Today's Plan is a single screen that reads every other coach in Apex Health: Recovery Coach at once, recovery, the sleep ledger, the early-warning vitals check, hydration, cycle phase and any detected travel, and turns them into three or four concrete actions in priority order. A raised vital or a time-zone change outranks the training advice, because it changes what the training advice should be. It can optionally replace the generic 7am notification.
Output
3–4 actions
Any more and it stops being a plan. Ordered so the most consequential is first.
Verdict
Push / Steady / Recover
One word for the day, with the reasoning stated underneath it.
Why synthesis is the hard part
Individually, every signal in a recovery app is easy to read. Recovery is 74 %. Sleep debt is 5.2 hours. Wrist temperature is up 0.4 °C. Hydration is 1.1 L short.
Together, they are a puzzle. Does an elevated temperature override a good recovery score? Does a five-hour sleep debt mean you should skip the interval session your plan calls for, or just shorten it? If you flew yesterday, how much of today's low reading is travel rather than fatigue?
Those judgements are exactly what a coach does, and exactly what most apps leave to the user at the least analytical moment of the day. Today's Plan encodes the priority rules explicitly.
How the priority order works
Actions are ranked, not listed. The order reflects what would most change your day if you ignored it:
- A raised early-warning level comes first. If several vitals have moved away from your baseline together, no training recommendation below it is worth reading. See Early Warning.
- Travel next. A time-zone shift or altitude gain invalidates the scores rather than adding to them, so the plan explains what your numbers will do rather than acting on them.
- Then training. The verdict, the strain ceiling for the day (adjusted for cycle phase where relevant), and what your training plan had scheduled.
- Then sleep. Tonight's bedtime, and what it would do to your debt balance.
- Then the supporting habits. Water still to drink, caffeine cutoff time, and any zone 2 shortfall for the week.
One deliberate behaviour worth calling out: if your recovery is high but your training plan scheduled a rest day, the plan says so rather than quietly telling you to train. The rest day exists so the hard sessions land.
It states its reasoning
Every verdict carries the sentence that produced it: a 9 hour sleep debt is deep enough to cap what today can return, or your measured recovery and how you feel both point the same way.
This matters more than it sounds. An unexplained verdict is something you either obey or ignore, and most people eventually ignore it. A verdict with its reasoning attached is something you can argue with, which is the only way it earns trust over months.
Common questions
Does Today's Plan need an Apple Watch?
It works better with one. The recovery verdict, sleep ledger and early-warning check all depend on overnight heart and sleep data, which in practice means an Apple Watch or another device that writes those signals to Apple Health. Without any overnight data, the plan falls back to the inputs it does have, such as hydration and your own check-in, and says plainly that it cannot call the day.
Can it replace my morning notification?
Yes, optionally. When enabled, the generic 7am reminder is replaced with the day's actual verdict and the top three actions. It is scheduled as a one-shot rather than a repeating notification, specifically so a verdict computed days ago can never be re-delivered as though it were today's.
Does it tell me to skip training often?
No. In most people's data the majority of days land on a steady verdict, which means train but hold the intensity where you finish better than you started. A recover verdict is reserved for genuinely low recovery, a deep sleep debt, several vitals off baseline together, or the first day after crossing time zones.
Wake up to a verdict, not a spreadsheet.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach turns the Apple Health data you already generate into one clear decision each morning. Free, private, and entirely on your device.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach provides general wellness and fitness information computed from your own data. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified professional for medical concerns.