Heart rate variability: Tracking wellness, and accepting things I can’t control.

I’ve been riding the struggle bus with exercise lately (raise your hand if you’re with me!).  It’s possible that I’m not prioritizing my own health and fitness enough (I’m not).  It’s also possible that I have limited time available where I’m not working or parenting (which is accurate).  And it’s possible that, when that window of time pops up and I’m free to exercise (like right now, for instance), I’m just not physically capable of busting my butt in the gym.  And maybe there’s science behind this.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the physiological phenomenon of variation in the time interval between heartbeats. It is measured by the variation in the beat-to-beat interval (For more details, click here).  What does this have to do with fitness?  Essentially, the inconsistency of time between heart beats is a reflection of autonomic nervous system function.  In plain English, if you have a bad night of sleep because your kids woke you up twice and the cat-alarm clock meowed at 4:30 to go outside (any resemblance this example has with my life is purely coincidental…), the hypothalamus region of your brain sends a signal to the rest of your body to relax certain bodily functions.  The take home message?  I… I mean, you… literally can’t push yourself too hard as you pound the pavement at 6 am, because your brain said so.

The cat-alarm clock, doing his thing at a regular hour.

HRV can also be used to track recovery, to detect over-training, and to aide with exercise prescription. Following HRV can actually help avoid injury.  It might make sense to realize that HRV and your autonomic function can be negatively impacted by not only sleep, but also stress, poor diet, dysfunctional relationships, and lack of exercise to name a few things. For more detail on how HRV affects your well-being, click here.

HRV has been used for at least a couple of years with collegiate athletes to optimize training load and provide appropriate rest days, thus maximizing performance.  But, tracking HRV is becoming more mainstream for the rest of us.  With companies like Whoop and Oura Ring, it’s easy to track, but there are cheaper options as well. Elite HRV is a really simple app and monitor to be used each morning to get a snapshot of your general health.  Elite HRV can also be paired with a chest strap heart monitor. https://www.hrv4training.com/ is an app that requires no additional monitors and can integrate with apple watch, Samsung galaxy watch (or no watch), and many fitness services including Strava and Oura Ring.

The Oura Ring and Whoop Band.

HRV4training dashboard.

Maybe you don’t need a special app or monthly membership to tell you to sleep more or eat better.  Or, perhaps you need a reminder from your phone that it’s okay to not kill yourself at the gym 4 days in a row.  As a science brain and working mom with limited time to train, I am interested in tracking HRV to improve how I feel physically and mentally (because HRV is also linked to psychology, among other things).  I would imagine that those of you training for competitions and races might also benefit from the additional data.  But for the majority, perhaps just having the knowledge that sometimes it’s out of your control how hard you can exercise will be enough to cut yourself some slack, and maybe even see better results.

Do you track your heart rate variability? If so, how do you utilized this data?