The 100 Point Recovery System: A Five Dock Guide

What a 100 point recovery system actually is

A 100 point recovery system is a scoring method. You assign a point value to each recovery behaviour that matters in your week, the total adds to 100 for a day, and you score yourself honestly. Instead of saying "my recovery has been pretty average lately", you get a number you can compare week to week.

It isn't a product or a protocol owned by anyone. It's a way of making something vague into something you can track, which matters because most athletes who come into our Five Dock clinic with a nagging calf or a grumbling patellar tendon can describe their training in detail and their recovery in three words.

One way to weight the 100 points

There's no official allocation. The version below is an example, weighted the way we'd weight it for an adult playing club sport two or three times a week. Adjust it to your situation rather than treating it as fixed.

• Sleep, 40 points. Hours in bed and consistency of bedtime, split roughly evenly.

• Nutrition, 20 points. Protein across the day and eating enough total food to cover training.

• Hydration, 10 points.

• Stress and downtime, 15 points. Work hours, commute, caring load, time not looking at a screen.

• Low-intensity movement and mobility, 10 points. Walking, easy bike, the five minutes of hip work you keep skipping.

• Everything else, 5 points. Massage, compression, sauna, contrast showers.

The weighting is the useful part. Sleep carries nearly half because sleep is when most tissue repair and training adaptation happen, and because a bad week of sleep cannot be offset by anything in the bottom two categories. Compression boots sit in the 5 point bucket for a reason.

Score the week, not the day

A single 62 out of 100 tells you nothing. Seven days of scores tells you plenty. Patterns show up fast: the Thursday night work deadline that drops sleep to five hours before Saturday's game, the Sunday where you eat one proper meal, the three-week block where the score never clears 70 because you've been travelling.

Write the number in the same place you log your training. If you're using a training app or a notes file, put the recovery score next to the session. That pairing is what makes it worth doing.

Recovery points mean nothing without training load

A score of 85 is fine if you trained twice. It may be well short if you played a full game Saturday, ran 40km across the week and lifted twice. Recovery is only ever relative to the load you're asking the body to absorb.

So pair the score with something simple on the load side. Total weekly running volume, number of hard sessions, minutes played. When soreness or a niggle shows up, you can look back at both columns instead of guessing. Most of the recurring hamstring and Achilles problems we assess have a spike on one side or a trough on the other in the fortnight beforehand.

Where objective testing fits

Self-scoring is subjective, and athletes are not reliable judges of their own fatigue. Numbers off a force plate are harder to argue with.

At our Five Dock clinic we use AxIT force plates and the VALD ForceFrame to measure things like single-leg jump output, left-right asymmetry, and isometric strength at the hamstring, groin and shoulder. Retesting the same positions after a heavy block gives you a comparison point against your own earlier numbers. If a mid-season retest shows a meaningful drop in output on one side, that sits alongside your recovery scores and your training log as part of the picture, and it changes the conversation about what the next fortnight should look like.

This is assessment, not prediction. The value is in having objective data to review rather than relying on how your legs felt on the warm-up.

A realistic week for a club athlete

Take a 34-year-old playing Saturday football, training Tuesday and Thursday nights, working full time in the city.

Monday is the easiest day to score well and the one most people waste. Sleep in, walk, eat properly, do the mobility work. Tuesday and Thursday are the hard ones, because training finishes at 9pm and you're eating at 10. Plan the post-training meal in advance so the nutrition points don't vanish. Friday night sleep is the single highest-value thing in the week and the one most often traded away. Sunday is for low-intensity movement, not another gym session dressed up as recovery.

Scored across a season, that week tells you more about why the calf keeps flaring in round 12 than any single consultation will.

When the score isn't the issue

Recovery habits help with general fatigue and soreness. They don't address a structural problem. Worth getting looked at if soreness is still there 72 hours after a session, if pain is sharp rather than dull, if it's waking you at night, if one side is clearly weaker, or if the same area has flared three times in a season.

If you're tracking your recovery and the same niggle keeps returning anyway, come in and get it assessed properly.

Read more about our recovery services.

If you would like it assessed at our Five Dock clinic, you can book a free injury assessment.