HRV - Heart Rate Variability

HRV - Heart Rate Variability

“Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measures the variation in time between each heartbeat, acting as a key indicator of autonomic nervous system health.. It is primarily used to assess physical stress, guide recovery for training, monitor mental health and detect signs of illness or chronic conditions.”

With modern smart watches and other health trackers/sleep trackers, people are now able to get a baseline for their HRV and sleep quality much more easily. This can then be used as a road map to help improve the quality, not just the quantity, of sleep/recovery.

By tracking your baseline HRV and improving its score alongside STIs (systolic time intervals), you can have much larger performance gains than simply increasing work capacity for a limited V02 max increase. Think of V02 Max as your car’s maximum speed, and HRV is the engine’s health. Constantly training at redline – max effort will not improve performance as there is no time to properly recover, possibly leading to overtraining.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950456/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5447093/