Why you need to include heart rate variability in your health, performance and longevity schedule
WHAT IS HEART RATE VARIABILITY?
Heart rate variability is the variance in time between the beats of your heart. The greater this variability is, the more “ready” your body is to perform at daily tasks.
The periods of time between heart beats are known as RR intervals (named for the heartbeat’s R-phase, the ‘spikes’ you see on an ECG) and this is measured in milliseconds.
How measuring HRV gives you insight into your nervous system health
Heart rate originates from the nervous system.
You have branches of nerves that connect to your heart directly from the spinal cord (which is ultimately connected to the brain).
Since your heart rate is not under direct conscious control (or at least very limited) the nervous system that innervates the heart and other organs that operate automatically fall into the category of the autonomic nervous system.
This nervous system has two branches:
The parasympathetic nervous system (sometimes referred to as “rest and digest”) uses input from internal organs (eg. digestion). It causes a decrease in heart rate.
The sympathetic nervous system (sometimes called “fight or flight”) reflects responses to stress (eg. exercise) and it increases your heart rate.
Your overall HRV is the product of these two competing branches sending signals to your heart.
So you might well ask at this point:
What’s a normal HRV for my age?
or is my HRV good compared to others?
These are good questions but HRV is highly personalised.
Your lifestyle, training, daily stresses, diet, genetics are all unique and hence, comparing your HRV to others tends to not make much sense.
All we would stress is that HRV tends to abruptly decline as your get older (relative to where you started from) and endurance-based athletes, tend to have higher HRVs than purely strength-based athletes.
So the takeaway point is that you want to do as much as can to keep it elevated for optimal health, performance and potentially, longevity.
Why elevated HRV is a strong indicator of fitness and resilience
An elevated HRV indicates that your body is able to adapt to stress from the environment.
This includes both lifestyle and work stressors (eg. presenting to your board or getting a piece of work done by a deadline) as well as exercise-based ones (such as increasing your training frequency or volume).
If we monitor HRV during the day we would typically see HRV drop during highly sympathetically-dominant activity (such as hard exercise) and rise during parasympathetically-dominant activity (such as meditating, lying down, sleeping)
However, if you’re not doing something active a low HRV could indicate your body is working hard for some other reason (eg. lack of sleep, poor diet, chronic stress, overtraining or illness).
Since you’re not acutely aware of HRV (unless you monitor it), tracking HRV is a very powerful tool to aid in recovery, planning your training and remaining healthy.
Monitoring HRV trends is crucial
As you start to use a HRV monitor, you will notice that your HRV varies greatly from day to day as mentioned above.
What really matters though is the trends in HRV and this why the data from a HRV monitor gets more useful over time
Here’s the HRV from one of our amazing clients.
You can see that as his body composition started to optimise, there is a gradual increase in HRV, indicating that his resilience is growing and autonomic nervous system is getting healthier.
What did our client experience as HRV rose?
– Better sleep quality
– His diet has radically overhauled
– He’s taken his supplementation as recommended
– He’s balanced life stressors or taken steps to mitigate them
– He’s done his training (but not over trained).
What have we done with this data?
– We’ve started to ramp up his training gradually because his body is ready for more. This will mean better and faster improvements
– We’ve kept his diet in check and added additional stress management tools (such as dopamine fasting) to see if we can boost HRV further
– We’ve modified his supplementation to ensure he still needs it monitoring for changes in HRV
How to boost your HRV today
Let’s say you’ve got a HRV device such as Apple Watch, Oura ring or Whoop or maybe you’re just keen to make some changes that might improve it.
Here’s some easy ways to do so:
A Balanced Training Program. Constantly over training or doing too much before your body is ready will lead to a gradual reduction in HRV. If you’ve started getting sick, feeling very fatigued or unmotivated to train you might have an imbalanced training program and need to back off or invest in a personal trainer
Hydration and Nutrition. Ensuring you drink 2.0-3.0L of water with electrolytes / minerals as a starting point for hydration will ensure you are maintaining normal blood pressure and oxygenating tissue. Nutrition and HRV can be highly variable but typically, keeping things simple by eating to a schedule (not random meals or skipping them) and reducing the amount of processed foods, sugar and caffeine can improve HRV,
Reduce your alcohol intake. Alcohol tends to adversely affect everyone in terms of HRV and in some, it can reduce HRV for several days.
Balance your circadian rhythms. In general, you should aim to get sunlight as much as possible during the waking hours of the day and then minimise light exposure into the evening (typically, 15-17 hours after waking to avoid bright lights is a good rule of thumb). Secondly, getting into good sleep hygiene habits is something we constantly emphasise with our clients. Sleep will improve HRV pretty dramatically if you’ve been sleep deprived.
Why we use Whoop as our HRV monitoring device of choice
There are a decent number of HRV devices on the market but Whoop is our personal choice.
Just to be clear we don’t get paid or have ANY affiliation with Whoop.
We just think it’s pretty awesome.
– Whoop calculates HRV using RMSSD (the root mean square of successive differences between heartbeats) and we feel this is the most accurate way to approach calculating HRV.
– Whoop monitors heart beat 52 times in a second even when you are not active. Compared to the Apple Watch (which monitors every few minutes when not active) the data is more rich and detailed.
– Whoop’s schematics and health reports are easy to understand and we’ve found the journalling to be accurate.
Here’s a short of typical Whoop Performance Assessment (Rick’s to be precise – don’t judge, he has young kids so the sleep is ‘sub-optimal’ and in the red quite a bit)
This is just a snapshot (there’s way more cool data) but as you can see it Whoop makes it easy to understand where your training and recovery overlap.
– Lastly, and possibly most importantly, Whoop is not a smart watch, it’s a training and recovery aid so it doesn’t distract you with notifications.
The device can also be incorporated into Whoop’s range of performance clothing so even if you do a contact sport, you won’t need to worry about damaging the device.
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