In my greater social circle, there seems to have been a recent spike in cardiac events and diagnoses in people who were typically thought to be ‘healthy’. Every other week seemed to bring news of someone’s relative or friend who had suffered a fatal or near fatal cardiac episode.
I understand that as I get older, these things will become more prevalent.
Yet it has me begging the question as to why?If you are close to me, you would know that I hold very little faith in the information that has been given to us regarding nutrition and health over the last 40 odd years. A complete fuck up? Or something more sinister from the powers that be? Lining the pockets of big corporations and slowly but surely, deteriorating the health of the human population and the environment.
But that is for another time. If you are interested in a short video summary see here.
I also have plenty of links on my twitter.
The purpose of this post is to dive into the information around Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and it’s use in performance and recovery.
I have started collecting HRV data in order to gather some objective measures to guide my training schedule.
I feel a huge part of optimal performance and ‘Becoming Unbreakable’ is finding the balance between recovery and stimulus. What I have found over the years playing football, soccer, basketball and more recently, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, is that typically I push too hard and wind up beaten, injured or sick.
It is a difficult thing managing work/life stress with the desire to train and perform at high intensities. In my work life, I am seeing a host of young kids and adults breaking down through unreasonable training loads and competition schedules. I have found myself on repeat, informing well-meaning parents and coaches that the body needs time to recover appropriately from the given stimulus.
Pushing too hard for too long is a recipe for disaster.I have been banging on about breathing for a while now, and most of you may well know my ‘Performance Ecosystem’ philosophy on health. This is all dynamic. As I continue to put the pieces of the puzzle together, my views are constantly evolving. My research and experimentation with breathing retraining and it’s effect on the body, and more in depth, the autonomic nervous system has lead me to HRV to aid in optimal performance.
HRV may or may not be the holy grail of biomarkers. However, when used appropriately, it seems to provide very usable and useful data to guide training and health.
HRV is essentially the difference in timing between beats of your heart.Consistent, metronome-like beats are considered “poor variability” and therefore less than optimal and have been linked with poorer health outcomes. Difference or variability in the beat-to-beat interval is ideal.
For those who want to read more in depth, see here.
HRV gives us a snapshot into the autonomic nervous system drive and allows interpretation of response to stress (training, life, work). This paragraph from http://www.hrv4training.com summarises well:
“Simply put, monitoring parasympathetic activity via HRV can provide insights on physiological stress, with higher level of stress resulting in lower HRV. For example, in the context of sports, heavy training is responsible for shifting the cardiac autonomic balance toward a predominance of the sympathetic over the parasympathetic drive. This means that heavy training will reduce HRV and by monitoring HRV we can possibly optimize training, reduce the risk of overtraining and ultimately improve performance.”
— http://www.hrv4training.com/blog/heart-rate-variability-a-primer
This has lead me to become more mindful about training and responses to physiological stress. Each morning I take my HRV measurement and adapt training around my results. I am currently using http://www.hrv4training.com app and it is proving very effective.
I understand everything has its flaws, but used with a variety of measures, both subjective and objective, we can gather data to improve our performance in the sport and life.
In keeping this relatively short, I'll post some links to HRV and disease/health in part 2.
For now,
I still plan on training hard, but I endeavour to train smart. Stay tuned.
If you are interested or have any questions, hit me up or DM me on Instagram.