Hooper Index
Also known as: Hooper-Mackinnon Index, Wellness Score
A 5-35 readiness score that sums five 1-7 self-ratings: sleep quality, muscle soreness, fatigue, mood, and stress. Lower is better — 5 is "feel great on every axis," 35 is "every axis at its worst." Captured once per calendar day via the daily prompt.
Formula
hooperIndex = sleep + soreness + fatigue + mood + stress
Each axis: 1 = best, 7 = worst. Total range: 5..35.Example
Sleep 3 (decent), soreness 4 (moderate), fatigue 4, mood 2 (good), stress 3 → Hooper Index 16 (lower-middle, generally well-recovered).
How Afitpilot Uses This
We persist the five axes plus the computed hooperIndex per calendar day. The coach drawer plots the last 14 days as a line chart with gaps for missed days; the athlete Profile view adds a per-day submission history table. We do not currently surface daily "alerts" off a single high Hooper value — drift over multiple days is the readable signal.
Hooper Index — calibration
| Who / Context | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Well-recovered baseline | Hooper 8-12 | Athlete reports 'feeling fresh' on most axes |
| Mid-week training | Hooper 14-20 | Some accumulated soreness and fatigue is normal and expected |
| End of hard block | Hooper 22-28 | Persistent values here for 3+ days suggest a deload is due |
| Severe overreaching | Hooper 28+ | Original Hooper threshold for cumulative fatigue intervention |
Known Limitations
- •Counter-intuitive direction (high = bad) is the literature convention; we keep it for cross-study comparability but it costs a small cognitive tax every glance.
- •Five axes summed equally treats sleep and stress as identical-weight contributors. Some research suggests sleep, soreness, and fatigue carry more predictive weight than mood and stress — we may trim or weight in v2 if drop-off forces the issue.
- •Index hides axis-level detail — a Hooper of 18 from "all 4s" looks the same as 18 from "sleep 7, others 2.7 each," which are very different stories.
- •Day-to-day swings are large. A single bad-night Hooper does not constitute a trend; we recommend reading the 14-day chart, not the latest dot.
What We're Improving
Science Context
The index is a trimmed adaptation of Hooper et al. (1995), originally a 7-item athlete wellness questionnaire developed for swimmers. We use the 5 most-reported items in modern team-sport literature. Validity studies (e.g. Buchheit 2013) support the index as a sensitive marker of accumulated training stress at the group level, with the usual caveat that within-athlete daily noise is high. Treat it as a 14-day drift signal rather than a daily verdict.