Tutorial Understanding Activity Cost

Understanding Activity Cost

Activity Cost answers a question recovery apps usually leave unanswered: what does each kind of activity actually cost you, the next morning? Not in the abstract — learned from your own history, in your own Charge points.

You'll find it in the Insights tab, in a section called Activity Cost, once you've tagged a handful of the same activity.

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What it tells you

For each activity type you've tagged enough times, NOOP shows a small card with three things:

• Next-morning cost — how far your Charge the next morning typically sits below your rest-day baseline after this activity. A cost of "−8" means mornings after this activity your Charge is usually about 8 points lower than a normal rest day.
• Days to baseline — roughly how many days it takes your Charge to climb back to your normal level after a session.
• A plain-English line, e.g. "Sessions like this usually cost you about 8 Charge points the next morning and take about 2 days to bounce back (n=6)."

So instead of guessing whether that long ride or hard tennis session is why you woke up flat, you get your own personal pattern.

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How it's worked out (and why it's honest)

A few deliberate choices keep this trustworthy rather than hand-wavy:

• Your own rest-day baseline. The "normal" it measures against is your Charge on untouched days — and crucially, it excludes the days right after a session. If it counted those, an activity's own after-effect would quietly drag the baseline down and hide its cost. So the comparison is genuinely activity vs. a clean rest day.
• It waits until it's sure. An activity stays silent until NOOP has seen it enough times (a handful of sessions). Below that it says nothing rather than guessing. Once there's enough, the card is tagged Building (a first read, treat it as a hint) or Solid (a confident pattern). The n= count shows exactly how many sessions it's based on.
• It's a descriptive average, not a verdict. This is the typical pattern across your sessions — not a claim about any single workout, and not a statement that the activity caused the dip (a bad night's sleep, a late meal, or life stress all land in the same number). Read it as "sessions like this tend to…", because that's exactly what it is.

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How to get the most out of it

1. Tag your activities. Activity Cost only learns from sessions that carry a type — your tracked workouts and any manual sessions you label (Tennis, Run, Lift, etc.). The more consistently you tag, the sharper it gets. (Untyped/auto-detected sessions are pooled into a single neutral "Activity" bucket.)
2. Give it a few weeks. It needs several sessions of the same type before a card appears. Early on you'll see fewer activities; the list fills in as your history grows.
3. Use it to plan, not to panic. If "tennis costs ~10 points and takes ~2 days," that's useful for spacing hard sessions — not a reason to avoid the thing you love. The point is to know your own cost, then decide.
4. Watch the confidence. A Building card is an early hint; wait for Solid before reading too much into the exact numbers.

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A note after you log a session

When you save or relabel a workout for an activity NOOP already understands, you may see a one-line note like "sessions like this usually cost you about N points…". That's the same Activity Cost figure, surfaced at the moment it's relevant — a quick heads-up on what tomorrow might look like.

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Like everything in NOOP, this is computed entirely on your device from your own strap data — nothing is uploaded, and there's no account. If you find Activity Cost useful and want to chip in, a one-off tip is always optional and appreciated: BTC bc1qn2gkl7wslwpws06mvazjn2uu689zlkv7kg3kf5.

See also: Tracking a Workout · Charge, Effort & Rest