Sleep & recovery

The smallest section, and deliberately so, because the honest evidence base on recovery methods is thinner than the market around it. It holds a meta-analytical review of how acute sleep loss affects physical performance, a systematic review of sleep interventions aimed at athletes, and an evidence-based framework for choosing between post-exercise recovery techniques.

The signal is that sleep is the recovery intervention with the strongest evidence behind it, and that most of the rest is small, situational, or poorly supported. This is also why Leo reads your readiness from how you say you feel rather than from a wearable score: the papers here measure the consequences of sleep loss on performance, not the accuracy of consumer devices at detecting it. If you tell him you slept badly, that is data. He would rather have that than a number from a ring.