Every number in the app has a purpose. Here's a plain-language guide to the indicators Elivated tracks — and how they make your training smarter.
Training load measures how much stress your body accumulates from exercise over time. Elivated tracks two types: acute load (last 7 days — how tired you are now) and chronic load (last 28 days — your fitness base). The ratio between the two tells you whether you're in a danger zone.
Running too far ahead of your chronic load is the #1 cause of running injuries. Elivated monitors this ratio continuously and flags it before you feel it.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is the variation in time between heartbeats. It's measured in milliseconds. A higher HRV generally means your nervous system is recovered and ready to absorb training stress. A lower HRV signals fatigue, illness, or overtraining.
HRV is one of the most sensitive markers of recovery — often showing stress before you consciously feel it. Elivated reads it via Apple Health and uses it as the primary input for your daily readiness score.
A 0–100 score computed every morning that tells you how ready your body is to train hard. It combines HRV, resting heart rate, sleep duration, and recent training load into a single actionable number.
80–100: Go hard. Your body can absorb intensity today.
60–79: Train, but keep it moderate.
Below 60: Easy day or rest. Seriously.
Your fitness score is a rolling measure of your aerobic capacity based on completed training. It rises when you train consistently and adapts with your long-run paces, tempo efforts, and overall volume. It drops when you take extended time off — but typically much slower than it rose.
Think of it as a simplified VO2 max proxy. It's not a clinical measurement, but it's a reliable trend indicator. An upward trend over 4–6 weeks means your training is working.
Pace zones are effort ranges, each with a specific training effect. Elivated calculates your personal zones based on your recent performances and uses them to specify exactly how hard each workout should be.
Zone 1 — Recovery: Very easy. Active recovery, warm-up, cool-down.
Zone 2 — Aerobic base: Conversational pace. The zone where endurance is built. Most of your miles should be here.
Zone 3 — Tempo: Comfortably hard. Short sentences only. Threshold work.
Zone 4 — Hard: Race pace for 10K efforts. High intensity.
Zone 5 — Max: Full sprint. Anaerobic. Short intervals only.
VO2 Max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise. It's widely considered the gold standard of aerobic fitness. Lab tests require a mask and treadmill — Elivated estimates it from your running pace at known effort levels.
The estimate isn't clinical precision, but the trend is what matters. A rising VO2 Max estimate over 8–12 weeks of structured training is a reliable sign your aerobic engine is growing.
Your resting heart rate (RHR) is the number of times your heart beats per minute while you're at rest. For most adults, 60–80 bpm is normal. Trained runners often drop to 40–55 bpm — a marker of a strong, efficient cardiovascular system.
Day-to-day spikes in RHR (5+ beats above your normal) often indicate fatigue, mild illness, or inadequate recovery. Elivated monitors your personal baseline and uses deviations as an early warning signal.
Sleep is when your body repairs muscle, consolidates training adaptations, and resets your nervous system. Without enough quality sleep, training stress accumulates without the recovery to match it — leading to overtraining and stagnation.
Elivated reads sleep data from Apple Health (Apple Watch, or compatible sleep tracking apps). Duration, consistency, and quality all factor into your next morning's Recovery Score.
Elivated's injury risk index combines training load ratio, recent volume increases, recovery patterns, and pace changes to produce a risk level from Low to High. It doesn't diagnose injuries — it identifies the conditions that typically precede them.
Research shows that runners who spike their weekly mileage by more than 30% in a single week have significantly higher injury rates. Elivated keeps your load increases within safe ramp rates automatically.
Download Elivated and let the data do the talking.
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