Before there was a strap to tell you, you read yourself: a pulse under two fingers, the legs on the stairs, the head on waking. Then you called the day, and the day showed whether you were right. This page is that notebook. Take the read in the morning, check it at night, and over weeks it tells you one thing no device can: how good your own read is.
Morning read
Pulse: sit still for a minute, two fingers on the wrist, count thirty seconds and double it. Leave it blank rather than guess. Legs is how the body feels on the first stairs: 1 heavy, 3 ordinary, 5 light. Head is the mind on waking: 1 flat, 3 ordinary, 5 clear and willing.
Go is a full day, train hard. Steady is the ordinary day. Easy is back off. It is your call, made before the day, and the page only writes it down.
Evening check
How it went is your honest 1 to 5 against your own standard: 1 a wash, 3 ordinary, 5 one of the good ones. What the day was is what you actually did with it, not what you meant to. Rate it before you look at the morning's call if you can.
Your record
Entries
The honest limit, stated first. Everything on this page is older than any sensor. Coaches watched the morning pulse for a rise after hard days long before a strap could take it, and sports science later found that a few plain questions about legs, sleep and mood, the kind formalized in the 1990s as short wellness questionnaires, track training strain at least as well as the physiological measures they were tested against; a 2016 systematic review said so in plain terms. That is the whole case for this notebook, and it is a case for your judgement, not for the page. The page computes an agreement rate and a few averages and nothing else. It stays quiet until it has ten days with both a morning and an evening, because a verdict from less would be a guess wearing a chart. A read that turns out to be wrong often is not a failure; it is the finding, and the only way to get better at reading yourself is to keep the score. None of this is medical advice. A resting pulse that is suddenly and persistently far from your usual is something to ask a doctor about, not something to log around.