Apex Health: Recovery Coach
Your body, decoded daily.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach reads the Apple Health data you already generate (HRV, resting heart rate, sleep, workouts) and turns it into one clear verdict every morning: how hard to push, when to rest, and why. An on-device AI coach checks your own numbers before it answers. Nothing leaves your phone.
01 What Apex Health: Recovery Coach does
One verdict. Then the whole picture.
Trackers hand you charts and leave the thinking to you. Apex Health: Recovery Coach reads your numbers and makes the call: a single daily readiness verdict, backed by coaching for hydration, strain, sleep, stress, and training load. Everything that can run on the device, does.
Daily recovery verdict
A single readiness score from HRV, resting heart rate, and sleep, with one plain-language line telling you how hard to push today.
Strain and training load
Tracks the load of every workout against your personal baseline and tells you when to back off before you dig a hole.
Sleep, scored honestly
Duration against your personal need, plus efficiency and deep/REM composition, with an oversleep penalty so more isn't blindly better.
Energy and live stress
A body-battery reading of what you have left, plus an intraday stress signal from real-time heart-rate elevation, not just the inverse of recovery.
Apex Age healthspan
Turns VO₂max, resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, and activity into a biological-age estimate: how old your body reads, and why.
On-device AI coach
Ask Apex Health: Recovery Coach anything about your day. It reads your own numbers and answers in natural language, all on Apple's on-device Foundation Models.
02 What's new
Version 2.1: from numbers to a plan.
2.0 made the numbers trustworthy. 2.1 makes them tell you what to do. A daily plan now reads every coach in the app and answers the morning question directly, the metric screens show exactly how each score was reached, and Apex Health: Recovery Coach reaches the places you actually look: the watch face, Control Center, the Lock Screen, and Siri.
- Today's Plan. Reads your recovery, sleep ledger, vitals, hydration, cycle, and travel, then gives you the three or four things to actually do today, in priority order.
- Sleep ledger. A rolling 14-night debt balance that credits catch-up sleep, plus a circadian regularity score built from when you actually go to bed and wake, including weekend drift.
- Early warning. Resting heart rate, wrist temperature, HRV, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen watched against your own baseline. It speaks up only when several move together, or one stays off for days.
- What things actually cost you. Per-dose next-morning effects of alcohol and caffeine, and which dietary patterns track with your better days, measured from your own logs.
- Training zones, and workouts on your wrist. See your week's time in each heart-rate zone and whether it is productively polarized, then send a structured session straight to the Apple Watch Workout app.
- Recovery protocols that measure themselves. Breathwork, NSDR, mobility and more, each reading your heart rate and HRV before and after, then re-ranking by what demonstrably works for you.
- Watch complications and Control Center. Recovery and hydration on your watch face, and controls to log water or open Apex Health: Recovery Coach from Control Center, the Lock Screen, or the Action button.
- App Lock and a data inventory. Lock Apex Health: Recovery Coach behind Face ID, and see a measured, itemized list of everything stored on your device, with a one-tap erase.
Some scores move in this release, and each change is explained in the app's release notes. Stress in particular reads lower: the old calculation carried a floor that made a completely normal day register as half-strained. Where a number changed, it is because the old one was wrong. We wrote up the thinking behind 2.1 in the journal.
03 The scores, explained
Transparent numbers, not black boxes.
Every score is a transparent estimate built from your own data. Here is what each one actually measures.
Recovery
Compares your HRV and resting heart rate against an exponentially-weighted baseline that excludes the current day, then blends in sleep, making the score more responsive and less skewed by outliers.
Strain
Computed against your personal 30-day activity baseline on a diminishing-returns curve, so an average day reads mid-range and only genuinely hard days approach the ceiling.
Sleep
Blends duration against a personalized need (shared with the Sleep Coach), efficiency, and deep/REM composition, with an oversleep penalty and no double-counting between iPhone and Apple Watch.
Energy
A running read of what you have left in the tank that drains proportionally to how depleted you already are, so late-day exertion costs more.
Stress
A live signal derived from recent heart-rate elevation, an independent reading, not simply the inverse of your recovery score.
Apex Age
Starts from your date of birth and adjusts using VO₂max, resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, and activity. Correlated cardio factors are dampened and the total adjustment is capped, so fitness isn't triple-counted.
04 Everyday coaching
The small things, handled.
Hydration coaching
A daily water goal that adapts to the weather and to the day's active energy, with one-tap logging from the app, your wrist, or a widget.
Journal & meal scanning
Log drinks and meals in seconds, including on-device camera meal scanning and barcode lookups. Nothing from the camera is ever stored or uploaded.
Apex Coach
Natural-language coaching and insights that read your own numbers first, powered entirely by Apple's on-device Foundation Models.
05 The Toolkit
Focused coaches, one tap away.
Beyond the daily verdict, Apex Health: Recovery Coach includes a toolkit of focused coaches and utilities for when you want to go deeper.
06 On every screen you own
Wrist, Home Screen, Lock Screen.
Apple Watch app & complications
Recovery at a glance, plus one-tap water and journal logging that syncs back through Apple Health. Watch face complications and Smart Stack widgets put recovery and hydration on your wrist, scored on the watch itself with no phone round-trip. Structured workouts you send from Apex Health: Recovery Coach appear right in the Workout app.
Widgets, controls & Live Activities
Home Screen widgets and Live Activities for your recovery score and hydration, plus Control Center, Lock Screen, and Action button controls to log water or jump straight to a screen. Ask Siri for your strain, sleep, or energy. Day-scoped totals reset cleanly at midnight, and background delivery keeps everything fresh without opening the app.
07 Privacy
Nothing leaves your phone.
Your health data is read with your permission, processed on your device, and stays there. Truestep runs no server that receives, stores, or processes your health data. There is nothing to breach, nothing to sell, and nothing to subpoena.
No ads, no tracking
No analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracking SDKs of any kind.
Never sold, never shared
We do not sell, rent, or share personal data, not with advertisers, brokers, or anyone.
On-device AI
The coach runs on Apple's on-device models. Your questions and answers stay on your hardware.
One coarse weather call
The only network request sends approximate (~1 km rounded) coordinates to the keyless Open-Meteo API for hydration. Nothing about you is attached.
App Lock, and a real inventory
Lock Apex Health: Recovery Coach behind Face ID, and see an itemized list of everything stored on your device with measured sizes, plus a one-tap erase. In the app switcher, your data is replaced by the Apex Health: Recovery Coach mark.
To keep a drink you deleted from reappearing after a reinstall, Apex Health: Recovery Coach stores a small list of deleted-item markers (random identifiers only, no health data) in your own iCloud key-value storage. Full details are in the Apex Health: Recovery Coach Privacy Policy.
08 Requirements
What you need.
- iPhone on iOS 26 or laterThe main app, journal, coach, and toolkit.
- Apple Watch on watchOS 26 or laterOptional, but recommended for overnight recovery data.
- Apple Health dataHRV, resting heart rate, and sleep are needed to compute recovery.
- Free for everyoneNo subscriptions and no in-app purchases.
09 How Apex Health: Recovery Coach compares
Free, where the others charge.
Recovery bands and smart rings put the same daily verdict behind hardware to buy and a subscription to keep paying. Apex Health: Recovery Coach runs on the Apple Watch you already own, on-device, for free. See the full breakdowns:
10 FAQ
Questions, answered.
How is the recovery score calculated?
Apex Health: Recovery Coach compares your heart rate variability and resting heart rate against an exponentially-weighted personal baseline that excludes the current day, then blends in sleep. The result is a single readiness verdict, computed entirely on your device.
Which devices and versions does Apex Health: Recovery Coach support?
iPhone on iOS 26 or later and Apple Watch on watchOS 26 or later, with Home Screen widgets and Live Activities. Data comes from Apple Health, so anything that writes to Apple Health works with Apex Health: Recovery Coach.
Do I need an Apple Watch?
Not strictly, but recovery scores rely on overnight heart and sleep signals, especially HRV recorded during sleep. An Apple Watch, or any tracker that writes that data to Apple Health, is what makes the daily verdict possible.
What does Today's Plan actually do?
It reads every other coach in the app at once, your recovery, sleep ledger, vitals, hydration, cycle phase, and any detected travel, and turns them into the three or four things worth doing today, in priority order. If a vital is off baseline or you have crossed time zones, that outranks the training advice, because it changes what the training advice should be.
Can Apex Health: Recovery Coach tell me I am getting sick?
No, and it does not claim to. Early Warning compares five vitals against your own recent baseline and tells you when several have moved together, which is a pattern that often precedes feeling unwell, a rough reaction to alcohol, or genuine overreaching. It is a training decision aid, not a diagnosis. Apex Health: Recovery Coach is not a medical device. If something stays off for several days, or you feel unwell, talk to a doctor.
Is my health data private?
Yes. Apex Health: Recovery Coach processes your health data on your device. It is never uploaded to our servers, never sold, and never used to train models. The only network request sends coarse coordinates to a keyless weather API to personalize your hydration goal. You can lock the app behind Face ID, and see an itemized inventory of everything stored locally with a one-tap erase. See the Privacy Policy for the full detail.
Is Apex Health: Recovery Coach free?
Yes. Apex Health: Recovery Coach is completely free for everyone, with no subscriptions and no in-app purchases. Joining the TestFlight beta is free as well.
Is this medical advice?
No. Apex Health: Recovery Coach provides general wellness and fitness information computed from your own data. It is not a medical device and does not provide diagnosis or treatment. Always consult a qualified professional for medical concerns.
Wake up to a verdict, not a spreadsheet.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach is coming to the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch. Try it early on TestFlight.