Applications for Measuring Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
Applications for Measuring Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
Level 3: Pro
Welcome Players! If you compete in an endurance event and aren’t tracking HRV, you’re already behind the competition. Having a finely-tuned insight into the state of your nervous system can help you make better training decisions to improve performance. For other sports that require long practice times and are physically demanding, the intelligent application of HRV can lead to a more productive training session and improve performance at the right times.
Contents:
Heart Rate Variability
Endurance Training
Skill Sports
Traditional Sports
Health Monitoring
Heart Rate Variability
Let’s set the stage.
HRV is a collection of measurements that are reflective of the balance between our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. Understanding these metrics can allow us to gain valuable insight as to the state of our nervous system, which can be used to gauge overall recovery (both physical + mental) from physiological stress.
For a more in-depth primer on HRV, check out the following article:
Understanding your body’s recovery from physiological stress can be a significant advantage for the competitive athlete. It can also provide a more refined approach to training methodologies, utilizing data to inform decision making as it relates to programming intensity and recovery.
An important point to make when working with HRV is that the data does not make the decision for you.
HRV data is best used as an objective measure to match with all the other components of your training, acting as both a safety net and system validator.
When used appropriately it can prevent overtraining syndrome, accumulated fatigue, and decreased performance due to stress. It allows you to quantify the impact of lifestyle stressors on training, and gives you the best chance at making the right decision for YOU at any specific point in time.
HRV for Endurance Athletes
Probably the greatest impact consistent HRV measurements can have on an athlete are those competing in endurance sports. These can include but are not limited to:
Running
Cycling
Swimming
Any combination of the three (biathlons, triathlons, ironmans, ultras, etc.)
Crew (rowing)
Cross-country ski
Why is HRV so useful for endurance athletes?
It comes down to careful balance these sport require between high training volumes, variable training intensities, and necessary exposure to the sport itself.
Put simply, endurance athletes must train A LOT.
While a majority of their training occurs in low-intensity zones (80-90% of volume in elite competitors), this means their total time spent training must be high as well.
Roughly speaking, training intensity and training volume are inversely correlated.
Train at too high of an intensity for too long and the athlete risks over-training. At a severe level, this can set them back weeks or even months of a training cycle. At a more moderate level this can inhibit their performance for upcoming training sessions or in competition. There a risk of injury and burnout, and even if they’re not actually declining they will not be progressing optimally.
Train at too low of an intensity for too long and the athlete will stop progressing and possibly even cause adaptations that are counter-productive to their performance goals.
Measuring and tracking HRV solves this problem.
By utilizing consistent HRV measurements you can gauge physiological recovery to a point where you will be able to catch any signs of over-training syndrome, before it happens!
You will be able to tell if their body is adapting properly to training, which is an encouraging and reassuring sign for a dedicated athlete. Knowing when to increase volumes/intensities at the appropriate time will give them a competitive edge against the field.
These two key points are what makes HRV data so valuable!
It is a tool to be added into the athlete training toolkit, not a means to an end.
Take an elite marathon runner.
They run 4-7x/week, resistance train 2x/week, cross-train 1x/week, and still have real-wold life and responsibilities to tend to (work, job/career!). Just balancing out these components can be difficult enough for some, and yet for the elite competitor this is a given. They now have to worry about matching up training intensities, pace, volume, and aerobic & aerobic conditioning. All while getting better every week and avoiding injury.
How can they apply HRV?
Simply by taking consistent measurements every morning they can associate increases in training variables with how their body responds. Days when their HRV is responding lower than normal (compared to their individual baseline) are indications that stressing their body might lead to unfavorable results, whereas days of greater HRV are indicative of a positive adaptation response and validation to continue training.
This careful balance of push + pull is what makes training, training.
To balance effectively is to improve over time! To balance inefficiently is to be exposed to injury and negative performance.
HRV for Skill Sports
Endurance training is certainly a perfect match for HRV applications, and so are many individual skill sports that replicate the same training demands with different stimuli.
These sports include but not limited to:
Golf
Tennis (& all racket sports)
Boxing/Martial Arts/Wrestling
Ski/Snowboarding events
Auto racing
These sports all require immense amounts of compounded skill practice in order to compete at the highest level and succeed. For most of them, the skill of the sport is more valuable than the physical preparation of their body (the combat sports might be the only exception here), which is a rare trait to find in sport.
Their use of HRV is less about gauging the intensity of the training and more about making sure that when they are practicing for skill they are doing so in a positive fashion.
All forms of learning, including musculoskeletal movement, is a function of the nervous system. To learn a new language, it takes repetition and practice for the brain to learn how to speak. To learn a physical skill, the nervous system needs repetition and practice to learn how that move is executed properly.
While the act of practicing is indeed a physical motion, the learning itself still occurs in the brain, not the muscle itself. The old saying “muscle memory” is highly misleading in this regard.
So in order to maximize the efficiency that our nervous system learns, it’s important to expose it to learning opportunities when it is at its most acceptable for stimulus. Similar to how you can’t actually learn any useful information by staying up all night the day before a test, your body won’t improve in a meaningful way with extended practice periods in an environment of a fatigued nervous system.
A basketball player practicing free throws at the beginning of practice will have a much more positive response than at the end of practice.
While coaches say that “in order to perform when you’re tired you have to get used to playing tired”, this is antiquated. Everything we know about human physiology tells us that this method of practice is least useful.
Athletes that participate in skill sports then can not only use this HRV data to time their practices according with the physiological readiness of their nervous system, but also to allow for great adaptability in their overall training.
Let’s take a look at a professional golfer.
They must balance golf swing practice for:
Multiple types of swings (driver/irons/chipping/putting)
Resistance training
Physical conditioning
Strategical planning (course management).
Their style of competition is also vastly different, with most major tournaments consisting of 4 consecutive days of competition not including practice rounds.
It is realistic to say that for a golfer there is at least one component of their game they can always be working on regardless of physical condition, and HRV data can help them make the right decision.
The highest-impact of stressors for them would be
Physical conditioning
Resistance training
Full-effort long-club swings (drive, long irons, etc.)
A combination of physical and mental recovery is necessary to maximize the benefit of training these variables.
If the athlete has just come off a high-intensity day of practice, and they have lifestyle stressors that is impacting their ability to recover (as measured by HRV), they can use that data to adjust the following days’ practice to a lower-intensity form of training. Chipping/putting for example, or utilizing it as a low-intensity conditioning day.
With this approach instead of continuing to grind and prevent their nervous system from achieving appropriate levels of recovery, they can both improve at their sport AND allow for a return to baseline. Over the long-term this leads to an incredible increase in practice efficiency and would prevent a majority of poor performances due to lack of training structure.
An example in the positive direction would be using HRV to gauge ability of intensity, where on peaks in the program where HRV is progressing as expected more intense plyometric sessions can be had along with training for speed
Traditional Sports
Traditional American* sports, such as the big 4 are logistically much more difficult to implement HRV data. Logistically it’s difficult to implement individual solutions to team-based activities.
American Football
Soccer (futbol)
Baseball
Basketball
Hockey
Each of these sports have a relatively large number of players per team.
If some players have acceptable levels of recovery as measured by HRV, and some members do not, there will be no change based off the data. A coach can’t conduct practice with half a team.
Individual monitoring can occur but there is a limit to how much that data can be used to inform decision making because decisions are made at the group level, not the individual level.
From my experience working with players in the NFL, I’d be comfortable saying that most, if not all players are operating at some form of negative physiological readiness throughout the season. It’s pretty remarkable the level of performance they are able to achieve in such sub-optimal environments.
Health Monitoring
There is a very legitimate use case for the general population in monitoring HRV.
There is lots of data on HRV responding to acute illnesses and conditions days before symptoms appear. Increase resting heart rate followed by disturbed sleep and then disrupted HRV have all been shown ahead of COVID and other viral infections.
It can also be extremely useful for frequent travelers who have a difficult time maintaining energy levels or sleep schedule. Knowing how you are responding in changing environments can be used to make changes in diet, routine, exercise, and illness.
With a small investment of 5 minutes a day you could be gaining insights that can help improve the quality of your life and performance for the activities you do. Or for the athlete, could be the difference between being 100% for the game, or 85%.
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. The content is purely educational in nature and should be filtered through ones own lens of common sense and applicability.
Want to leave a comment or question? Let’s start a discussion 👇