Restwise Review

Restwise advertises superior performance through intelligent recovery. The text from their website explains it best:

"Restwise takes the science of recovery out of the lab and puts it into your hands. Answer a brief series of research-based questions on the Restwise website every day, and the resulting Recovery Score will, for the first time ever, quantify your body's state of recovery.

Too little recovery, and you slowly grind yourself into an insidious, perpetual state of over-reaching. Push this condition too far and you’re facing full-blown over-training.
Too much recovery, and you never introduce enough stimulus/stress to trigger physiological adaptation. You never get fitter, stronger and faster."

This all sounds really technical and makes you think only of athletes the caliber of Olympians and professionals. But what about the regular person just trying to stay in shape? Or how about the person who isn’t tiring their body by doing cardiovascular, but by weight training? Can it provide useful information for these people?

As Jeff Hunt, one of the brains behind Restwise told me, “Honestly, when my partner and I conceived of Restwise we thought it would only be relevant to endurance athletes, but as our scientist told us from the outset and as the market has proven, Restwise is equally useful for power athletes, as well as athletes in skill and intermittent sports. Our customers now include professional rugby teams, weight lifters, winter sliding sports teams, race car drivers, sailors, in addition to the more obvious, runners, swimmers, rowers, triathletes, cyclists, Nordic skiers, etc.”

I’ve always wondered if I could be pushing myself a little bit harder and reaching a better level of fitness. While I’m far from an Olympic athlete, I still thought it would be nice to know how my body was handling the workload placed on it. Often I’ve felt too wiped out to go to the gym for a workout. Was this because I was simply being lazy, or was my body trying to tell me that it legitimately needed a break?

The system works by measuring around a dozen markers of your recovery level, which you measure and record every day by logging in to their website. It then crunches this data and generates a “recovery score” indicating how prepared your body currently is for additional work. You then know whether you can/should push hard or take it easy that day. Rather than me trying to describe it, you might as well watch their short video that takes you through the process here.

The package that I received in the mail contained and letter of introduction, the OLED Pulse/Oximeter, a nice protective case and lanyard for it, some Restwise stickers, and some instructions.

Findings So Far

If you aren’t working your body very hard and don’t have even the occasional big day, Restwise can be fairly boring. It’ll just be telling you day after day that you’re at 80 or 90 percent of capacity and ready to go! Obviously, you have a lot more potential if you’re willing to put in the effort to work harder. So if you’re feeling tired, you’re really just feeling lazy. Sorry.

The only “hardware” you need to use the Restwise system is a Pulse/Oximeter which you use every day to take your our resting heart rate and oxygen saturation (SP02) level. At the time of writing, you can get their basic LED version free with the Restwise subscription, but I opted for the fancier OLED version for a small extra cost. While it looks like something that might come as a prize in a cereal box, once you turn it on it enters the realm of being “super cool.” You can change the display orientation so that it’s readable which ever way you have it attached to your hand and also have it show a real time graph of your heart rate.

Once you use the system for a while, you’ll begin to get a feel for predicting what your score will be. In a way, it trains you to be more in-tune with your body. However, the advantage it has is that it keeps you honest when you’re trying to tell yourself that you’re tired, but the truth is that you’re simply being lazy.

If you have a desire to maximize your potential, whatever your sport or level, or simply want to know whether your fatigue is due to overload, Restwise can help you. It’s also great at keeping you on track and in-tune with your body as it becomes a part of your everyday routine.

I’m looking forward to really testing it out this winter when the snow flies and I begin scaling mountains to find untouched powder for my backcountry skis. I'll report back then. Stay tuned!