The Daily Athlete Score (DAS) is an exciting new feature in the Freeletics app – one score to rule them all and give you comprehensive insights into your fitness level. But how can you make it work for you? We’ll walk you through the ways you can use your DAS to better understand your fitness level and adapt your training for even better results.
ICYMI, the Daily Athlete Score uses over 100 data points, including those from the past 90 days of your training, and compares it to millions of other (anonymized) users around the world to give you one statistic for your current fitness level. It takes the metrics consistency, speed, strength, stamina, and skill into account to generate your personal score that you can build on. It also takes Coach sessions and any other logged trainings or runs into account, helping to further personalize your future Coach sessions. It’s important to remember that your DAS is dynamic, meaning it will change often over time.
How should you understand and use your DAS?
By checking your DAS and the score breakdown in your profile, you can understand where you’re performing well vs. many other Free athletes and which areas could use improvement. Remember: The purpose of the DAS is not to aim for a score of 100 on each metric every day. While this could happen, it’s simply not possible to be at 100 for every metric every day. Your goal should be to improve (potentially gradually) and have an optimal score for each metric. It’s not unlikely that improving one area will marginally affect another – positively or negatively. For example, if you try to get as fast as possible, your strength score may go down, and vice-versa.
There are many things that could affect your score, just like your general fitness, such as sickness, injury, your period, or your mental health. This is totally normal, so try not to see a drop in your score due to these circumstances as a step backwards. Instead, try to see it as an opportunity to understand how elements affect your body and fitness daily. For example, a respiratory infection is known to affect your strength, speed, and stamina, but not your skill. Your DAS will help you understand your body and your fitness ability in more detail, backed by data. But remember, a performance score of 100 is great, but not the ultimate goal. The only metric that you should aim to keep at 100 at all times is consistency – because consistency is key!
How can you improve your score?
There are many ways to improve your overall score. As the DAS is made up of two key levers (consistency and performance), the first way to improve your score is by improving your consistency by always training on the Coach days you selected in the Coach settings. You can also improve your score by improving the different performance metrics (skill, stamina, strength, and speed). Here you can see the logic for how each metric is calculated in order to understand how to improve it.
Our advice is to try and optimize each metric and pick one focus area to push towards 100. For example, if your goal is to gain strength, you’ll want your strength score to be as high as possible, and while you should aim for the other scores to be high as well, your speed score will probably not be near 100 as well.
DAS aims to motivate you by showing you the facts about your fitness and benchmarking your potential with other similar Athletes to give you an accurate picture of where you stand. If your score is relatively low and makes you feel demotivated, turn it instead into a reminder of your potential and let it be the driver for change and progress instead.
DAS and competition
Competition is a divisive topic – some love it, while others hate it. That’s why we did not design the DAS for competition. Instead, you should see it as a basis for comparison, as everyone’s score is calculated based on their age, gender, and performance data points. You can use your score to compare yourself to people in different demographics where you would otherwise have no basis for comparison, or use it to understand your fitness level more dynamically. As there are so many elements (beyond age, gender or even injury, sickness, and menstrual cycles) that make us different, we should all use the score to encourage ourselves to progress and be better than yesterday.
