Fitbit’s Daily Readiness Score is Here to Motivate You

Fitness trackers and watches are far removed from the days of just counting steps or stairs or a GPS workout. Today, your fitness device should do so much more, by giving you more advanced heartrate metrics, sleep scores, breathing rate, etc. And if your tracker is really good, it’ll try to predict how rested you are for the day with a score that can set you up to push your fitness to another level or maybe dial it back some.

Fitbit is the latest company to get in on this trend with their own Daily Readiness Score. They first announced Daily Readiness back with the launch of the new Charge 5, but said at the time they were still working on it before pushing it to several devices. This week, it is ready and you can start accessing this feature right away if you have Fitbit Premium.

Available now on the Charge 5, Sense, Versa 3, Versa 2, Luxe, and Inspire 2, the Daily Readiness Score from Fitbit uses your level of activity, heartrate variability (HRV) during sleep, and recent sleep patterns to provide you with a score each morning. That score (your Daily Readiness Score), starts at 100 (super ready!) and drops as its 3 key metrics are measured (if you drank too much or should just rest).

If you have a supported device and Fitbit Premium, you’ll wake up to your new score with Activity, Recent sleep, and Heartrate Variability bars that describe how it came up with your score. In the screenshot above, you can see a score of 90 that is rated as “Excellent readiness” because this person had light activity the day before, moderate sleep, and a high HRV. Fitbit is then recommending they get after it for the day with at least 50 minutes of Zone training or high intensity workouts.

The app will also let you know if you have “Good” or “Low” readiness and then recommend activities for those levels. You get the idea.

To use this new Readiness score, Fitbit Premium will run you $9.99/mo or $80 per year.

Is having a score like this worth paying for? I’m a WHOOP user and I can tell you that it is fully built around a daily readiness. I love the idea because I like to put my body through pain 5-6 days a week and it lets me know how hard I should go each day. Seeing Fitbit do a similar feature is a good thing, I think, because it can be a pretty big motivator for those looking to achieve fitness gains. However, if you use Fitbit casually and don’t need it to tell you how hard to work, then yeah, it’s probably not going to be very beneficial.