The Unbroken
Glossary.

Recovery-led training is an approach to endurance training that places recovery context beside the planned work rather than treating a fixed schedule as untouchable.

The principle underneath it is simple: you adapt to training during recovery, not during the work itself. The hard session is only a stimulus. The fitness is built afterwards, while you rest. So in a recovery-led system recovery leads the plan, and the right training follows it, instead of the other way around.

In practice that means a day the body is ready, you push; a day it is not, you back off or restore, and you lose nothing by doing so. It is the opposite of the default endurance answer, which is to add more volume regardless of how you are. Read how the whole method works on the R.A.C.E. Framework and the science of it on Recovery.

Nervous-system-first training is Unbroken’s term for reviewing autonomic signals before deciding how to handle the planned session. HRV, sleep and athlete feedback can add useful context, but none directly measures whether the whole body can absorb a hard session.

The autonomic nervous system includes sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Training, work stress, poor sleep and ordinary life can all influence it. Reading trends can support a decision to keep, reduce, move or replace a session; it cannot guarantee adaptation or prevent burnout. The Mind page covers breathwork and meditation within that wider context.

The Protocol Score is a daily summary produced by the Unbroken Protocol app. It brings heart rate variability, sleep, recent training load and a short athlete check-in into one view to support the day’s training decision.

The point of one number is to reduce noise, not erase uncertainty. The score should be read beside symptoms, the session’s purpose and athlete judgement before deciding what today needs. See the exact product boundary on the app page.

The R.A.C.E. Framework is Unbroken Protocol's recovery-first method, in four sequential stages: Recover, Align, Condition, Execute.

Recover restores the nervous system first. Align fits training to your real life, not an idealised one. Condition applies the minimum effective dose of the right swim, bike, run, and strength work. Execute is the simple systems that hold up when life gets messy: race-week protocol, pacing, and contingency. The full explanation lives on the Method page.

Heart rate variability is the natural variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. It changes for many reasons and should be interpreted against an athlete’s own baseline and measurement conditions.

The key discipline is reading the trend, not treating one morning number as a verdict. A persistent change can justify a closer review, but the training decision still needs sleep, recent load, symptoms, movement and athlete feedback. More on how it is interpreted on Recovery.

CTL, ATL, and TSB are three measures that track the effect of training over time. CTL (chronic training load) is your rolling fitness, ATL (acute training load) is your recent fatigue, and TSB (training stress balance) is the difference between them, often called form.

Read together they answer a different question than HRV. HRV tells you about today; the load numbers tell you about the trajectory: whether you are building fitness, holding steady, or digging into fatigue that will need paying back. The app tracks all three. The danger is reading any one alone, which is why recovery-led training pairs them with the nervous-system signal.

The readiness check-in is a short morning self-report inside the app, where an athlete logs how they feel across a few nervous-system markers. It adds the subjective signal that device data alone misses, and it feeds into the Protocol Score.

Devices cannot observe the whole athlete: a stressful week, poor sleep they already know about or the session that left them flat. A short self-report records that context; combining it with device data creates a broader view, not a guaranteed measure of readiness.

The minimum effective dose is the smallest amount of the right training that still drives adaptation. Unbroken aims for it deliberately, because extra volume the body cannot absorb adds fatigue and injury risk without adding fitness.

This is the "Condition" stage of the R.A.C.E. Framework in one phrase. For the time-limited age-group athlete it is liberating: the goal is not the biggest week you can survive, but the smallest week that still moves you forward, leaving room for life and for recovery to do its work.