Unpopular opinion: your recovery score is probably lying to you right now, and it's not the wearable's fault.

I've spent the last few months building dashboards on top of WHOOP/Oura/Garmin data for athletes, and the #1 issue I see isn't bad hardware — it's that people treat the score as a single truth instead of a blend of inputs that can individually break.

Three failure modes that quietly wreck your score without you noticing:

1. Sensor drift after firmware updates. Your baseline HRV can shift 5-10ms after an update with zero notification. If you don't recalibrate your baseline window, every score after that is measured against a stale reference point.

1. Sleep stage misclassification from position changes. Sleeping in a new bed, with a partner, or in a different room changes movement patterns enough that some algorithms misclassify REM as light sleep for a few nights. Score tanks, nothing is actually wrong.

1. Recovery scores don't account for training type. A score built mostly on HRV + RHR treats a heavy leg day and a chess tournament the same way if your sleep was equal. If you're only looking at the single number, you're missing the context that actually predicts whether you should push or pull back.

The fix isn't a better wearable. It's building a simple personal dashboard that logs score + training load + subjective fatigue side by side for 2-3 weeks. Patterns show up fast — you'll start seeing exactly which inputs move your number and which are noise.

Curious what wearable everyone here is running and whether you've noticed the same drift after updates.