Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about HRV or have heard us talk about HRV on the podcast. Well today, we are discussing HRV: what is it, what does it mean & how you can use it as a strength athlete.
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Mary:
And what are we talking about, Kristin?
Kristin:
HRV. You guys have heard us talk about that on the podcast. HRV stands for heart rate variability. A lot of you have asked us to elaborate on this. And so we are finally doing it. I think of all of the metrics…I track 12 different metrics in my app.
Mary:
Hot damn!
Kristin:
You guys know I’m a data nerd. I love to see trends in my athletes and help them be as recovered and strong and fueled as possible. If I could only track one measurement, this is the one.
Mary:
Yup. Yup. And we’re going to explain why, and hopefully by the end of this, you think, “Oh, I should get on that.” And then we’ll tell you where we love, where we’d like to get our stuff, because we do have a favorite.
Okay. So what is HRV? HRV is the measurement of your autonomic nervous system, or what’s called the ANS. So, there’s these two systems of your autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic SNS, and the parasympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight and that is in response to internal or external stimuli. This will stimulate your blood glucose to get you some energy, because if you’re in fight or flight, you need that quick energy to either escape the predator or fight the person or whatever, you know? Normal everyday people things. Your pupils will dilate to give you more alertness, and it’ll also increase your heart rate. So, you need to get that blood glucose to all extremities so you can get that energy quick to make the decision to flight or fight.
Kristin:
This is what you experience when you have to do public speaking, if you aren’t a public speaker. Everything seems a little bit blurry and your heart’s beating out of your chest.
Mary:
You’ve got the jitters.
Kristin:
Yes. That is your sympathetic nervous system kicking into overdrive.
Mary:
Yup. And that itself is activated to overcome ideally short-term situations. So like Kristen said, public speaking, training is another one. If you remember that you have to do something and the deadline is in five minutes and you have to go run and do it really quick.
Kristin:
When you wake up and realize you overslept. That’s another one that gets you out of bed.
Mary:
Yeah, exactly. So then the parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite. It’s the rest and digest. And that is associated with recovery. This system conserves energy, it’ll constrict your pupils, it’ll aid in digestion, and also will slow your heart rate because you don’t need that blood glucose in all of your extremities, because you’re not doing nothing. You’re relaxed.
Kristin:
And you’re sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, eating some Cheetos.
Mary:
This is when your body can use energy for other things, rather than active activity. It can use that energy for recovery. And this is meant for long-term. You need your parasympathetic nervous system to grow faster, stronger, and to be healthier.
So both of these systems are always working and both are needed to maintain a homeostatic balance and your body. So you guys have heard us talk about homeostasis so many times, but it’s this idea of balance in your body. And you do need your sympathetic nervous system activated when you’re training because it would be horrible if you had your parasympathetic nervous system activated, and you were just chilling while you were training. You would probably get injured and really wouldn’t get anything done.
So, with every single heartbeat in your body, your nervous system is saying slow down or speed up based on all the feedback from your senses, your emotions, internal and external stimuli, whatever it is – your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system are responding. Your body’s responding to all these external stimuli. So that should give you a good idea of what this autonomic nervous system is. And so HRV then is a measurement of the balance between the two.
Kristin:
Yes. Which is super cool because we can determine potentially overtraining or under recovery, and we’ll get into what all of those things mean, but we can look at your HRV and we can look at the trends, look at the averages, and make some decisions about what to do.because you are either balanced or you are out of balance. And when you are out of balance, you can be overly sympathetic, or you could be overly parasympathetic. The worst one is being overly parasympathetic, because that usually means that you are already over-trained. You get there by being overly parasympathetic for too long.
Mary:
Overly sympathetic?
Kristin:
Overly sympathetic for too long and then you become overly parasympathetic. Usually, not always, but that tends to be the trend. And the people that research this show that once you are overly parasympathetic, you really need to do something, you need to rest.
Mary:
Cause basically you’ve used up all your body’s energy and you’ve stimulated it for so long that it needs so much extra time to catch up. Cause if you think about it, if you’re always activated in your sympathetic nervous system, so you’re always in flight fight, things are always going, your body doesn’t have time to repair tissue to do all the internal things that are not directly related to fight or flight.
Kristin:
Right. Because it’s thinking of spending this entire time fighting off you know…
Mary:
It thinks it’s going to die.
Kristin:
Right.
Mary:
And so why would it repair your muscles if it’s just trying to keep you alive?
Kristin:
Exactly.
Mary:
Okay. So then how is HRV measured?
Kristin:
So this is really cool. This is my favorite thing. A lot of people, cause they hear heart rate variability. So they say, “Oh, I’m just going to take my pulse and then use some sort of math to figure out the variability.” It doesn’t work that way.
You need to use a device that can actually detect what’s called the RR intervals. So literally the space between the time between your heartbeats. So, if you ever see a cardiogram where you can see the little “beep beep” you know, the little peaks and valleys, it’s the peaks. Those are the RR intervals they’re called. And it’s the time between those intervals. That is your heart rate variability.
So basically. Mary, you had a really good way of describing this. Do you want to go with that?
Mary:
Yeah. Okay. So you have your heartbeat that is measured in beats per minute, and that gives you your heart rate. How many beats your heart completes in a minute. That’s pretty simple to measure. We can all do that. Find your jugular vein, or you can find a vein on your wrist. Boom, no problem. Free. You can, you can measure that for yourself.
HRV takes your heart rate and looks at the fine lines, which is what Kristin was saying, which is literally what it does. It looks at the fine lines of your heartbeat. So HRV measures the distance between successive heartbeats. So boom, boom. How long happened between that boom and boom? And it asks, is this a short time or a long time? And if it’s short, that gives us information. If it’s longer, that gives us information.
Kristin:
It’s how it changes between heartbeats. It’s the change. It’s that variability. We want a lot of variability in our heart rate, which sounds weird. It sounds like you don’t want that, but you actually do want a lot of variability. Maybe one beat it’s 0.8 and another one it’s 1.1.
Mary:
Yeah. And so each person’s HRV is going to be a little different. We each have our own unique circumstances and that is going to cause a variation in between our heartbeats. That’s going to be different for each person.
My stressors in my life are different than Kristen and her stressors in her life. And so our HRV is going to look a little different on average over time.
Kristin:
Right and because part of it is looking at the overall health of your body which is really interesting. And a lot of what we’re talking about is the tip of the iceberg with this. HRV is a rapidly growing area of study for disease management and detection so there’s so much new information coming out all of the time on this. And everybody has, like Mary was saying, a baseline. Your baseline might be an unhealthy baseline, or it may be a healthy baseline, but everyone’s number is going to be different. Mary’s HRV trends are going to be way different than my HRV trends.
But one of our favorite companies to measure HRV through, our resources, I guess is a company called Elite HRV. They have a free app, they do have a finger monitor that you can use that’s their own, but it’s also compatible with some other devices as well. But they have a lot of ground breaking research and information on HRV. And I really love their information.
One thing that they talk about is the average of their users, and their users’ average HRV is 59.3. Now, one thing to keep in mind, Elite HRV is used by number one, a lot of really health-conscious people and number two, a lot of elite athletes. And so the data might be a little skewed, right? Like, that 59.3 might not represent the average of the entire population. Maybe just the average of their users. But they said that 75% of their users’ scores fall between 46.3 and 72. So if you’re listening to this and your average HRV is in the twenties, even though that’s normal for you, that might signal a problem.
Mary:
Right. Well, okay. So let’s take a step back and talk about what is a low versus high HRV score and what does that mean?
So, as Kristen said, it’s all out your personal baseline and yes, low is low is low. If you’re having consistently low HRV scores and let’s say your HRV score is lower one day, but then higher the next, it’s still low overall. And so things in your life need to change in order to increase your baseline HRV so that way you’re just a healthier overall person.
Cause if you’re low, that means your training is suffering, your nutrition isn’t good, you’re probably not sleeping well, your stressors in your life are really high. And so you have to manage that first to increase your baseline. And it takes a long time for that to happen. Especially if you have stressors in your life that you can’t immediately get rid of, you know right?
Kristin:
Work.
Mary:
Right, you’ve got to figure out how to manage it and reduce your stress.
So, low signifies that your body’s sympathetic nervous system is more activated than your parasympathetic nervous system. That means you are engaged in flight or fight. IT can signify your body’s inability to recover, which as athletes, we want that recovery. That’s what’s going to help us grow, be stronger and just be healthier overall.
It can be indicative of a poor night’s sleep or increased work from the previous day. So if you have a really, really shitty night of sleep, you can have a low HRV score for a day. Ideally it should recover the next day as long as you’re paying attention and doing the things you need to do to recover that score.
It can also be low the previous day if you have, I think I said increased work, but also a poor night’s sleep will do the same thing. If you have a poor night’s sleep, your HRV score will be lower. So that means really pay attention to the next day and try to get more sleep.
Or a low HRV score can be a chronic response to stress and can lead to overall health decline. This is what we’re talking about, low is low, is low is low. If you are, I would say below the average, below 46, even that’s where we really need to take a step back and be like, “Hey, okay, what else is going on that we need to address to get us up?”
And then a high HIV score, or higher we’ll say, signifies that your body’s parasympathetic nervous system is more active, so you’re in more rest or digest and it has positive health benefits. So you’re recovering well.
Kristin:
But the two are still balanced. High is showing more of a balance, where low is showing more of an unbalanced and it can be unbalanced in either direction, but those are kind of the trends. So it gets a little bit complicated, but I think that’s a really good, simple way to look at it.
So yeah, like I said, that average reading for at least HRV now. So every company that has HRV monitoring capabilities has their own database that they don’t share with each other. Whoop has their own, Oura ring has their own, Elite HRV has their own. They’re not all published together and studied together, but if you’re falling outside of the 40 range, if you’re falling down into the thirties, twenties, teens even I’ve seen – that is a cry for help from your body.
And even if…so for me, my HRV is high. It’s always high, it’s in the seventies, always. So for me, a bad score is in the sixties. If I’m in the sixties, things need attention. So, it’s not just the average among people, it’s also your average that matters.
This is where we get into how to use this information as an athlete. And it’s really interesting because you can do a few things with monitoring your HRV. You could simply say, “Oh my gosh, I had a crappy HRV score today. I’m maybe gonna take a rest day.” Now when I first started really getting into HRV and the research and using it to guide my own decision-making, I was not going to take a rest day. I was competing at a very high level and the way I used it was you know…and I also had a strict schedule, right? I trained these days because that’s what fit around my work schedule and that’s how it had to be. I didn’t have the luxury of just taking a rest day. So, what I did was I looked at, “Okay, what are all of these other factors that impact our recovery and our HRV?” So sleep, alcohol use, nutrition, work and family stress, illness, all that kind of stuff.
You guys have probably heard me talk about before that a very common time for an athlete to get sick is during meet prep. Why? Because we tend to be overreaching, a little bit under-recovered, and a lot of times, that’ll show up in the HRV. We’ll see an HRV decline leading into meat prep. Not always, but sometimes. Especially if you are dieting to make weight. That’s where it really, really has a huge impact. So you’re overreaching, you’re a little under-recovered purposely. I mean, we do this ourselves on purpose, right? We might be a little insane, but and then if you’re dieting, nutrition is huge for recovery. And this is why Mary and I, we are nutrition coaches, but I see myself more as a recovery coach. Yes, I’m a nutrition coach, but
Mary:
Re-branded.
Kristin:
Yes. Yeah, nutrition is a huge part of our recovery and I realized that I was missing this piece with myself and with my athletes. And this is when I went, ERRRR. I’m not just doing macros anymore. I now track all these 12 things with my athletes because it makes a huge difference.
So, these are stressors on our body besides…exercise and training is a stressor on our body. It is used to make us stronger, right? We put ourselves under stress, our body mounts a response that makes us stronger. Some things don’t make us stronger. Some stressors don’t make us stronger such as alcohol use, poor sleep, and mental stress.
Mary:
Right. Well and our bodies can only get stronger if we allow them to, meaning that we create an environment for our bodies to get stronger. If you are not sleeping, if you are drinking heavily and you’re in a…Listen, I’m all for you having and enjoying your alcohol. Whatever, enjoy it. But as Kristen and I have said so many times, there’s a time and place for everything. If you have big goals that are important to you and you’re prepping for a meet, that might not be the time for you to have a few beers, right? That’s going to really impact your recovery. Kristen has some interesting anecdotal evidence involving alcohol and HRV.
Kristin:
So a lot. So a lot of my athletes track their HRV and we find that for most of my athletes, if they have, I don’t want to say a heavy night of drinking, but say several drinks in a night, it takes on average two to three days to recapture their baseline HRV.
Now, does that mean that they shouldn’t do it? No, but they shouldn’t do it right before a meet. That’s one thing I track, when I see that decline. I’m like what happened here? “Oh yeah. I had a few drinks on Saturday night.” Okay, cool. No big deal. It bounced back a few days later, everything looks good. So just because something might have a negative impact on your recovery doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t do it. But being aware of it will allow you to make appropriate changes. So you go, “Hm, okay. Had some drinks over the weekend. I’ve got a really heavy trading week this week. What do I need to do to make sure that I recover as best as possible?” That might mean eating extra food. That might mean going to bed earlier. That might mean canceling some plans with people or canceling some meetings or doing whatever you need to do to decrease your mental stress.
Mary:
Yeah. And some of you might be listening to this and thinking, “Wow, these guys are buzzkills. Oh My God. They take away all the fun in life.” Let me tell you…the more I track and manage my recovery, even though I’m not really training that much, just recovery as a person and balancing my stressors and making sure that I am taking care of myself, the better my experience of life is. I’m not so stressed. I’m not overly exerted in everything and my body feels good.
So yes, it can seem at first, it’s like with anything it’s like, if you try to jump in head first and do a thousand things, it’s going to be overwhelming. But if you start to make small changes, daily, weekly, monthly to help improve things over time, you’re going to feel better. So like, yeah, it might seem like a lot to track your sleep and track your HRV and track your nutrition and track your soreness, but it’s gonna pay off in the long run.
Kristin:
Well, I say this all the time that I think knowledge is power. So, you know trends about yourself when you track them, you have an idea of how things affect you, and it can guide your decision-making in a very empowering way. You can say, “Oh, my HRV is really low and this person wants to go out to lunch this week and then I’m supposed to meet this person for drinks…maybe I shouldn’t do all those things if my recovery is already low. And I really care about my training and want to make sure that my training goes well this week.”
Or maybe it can go the other way. Like, “I look like I’m recovering really well. I could probably handle doing a few extra things this week.” Or :Hey coach, I look really, really recovered. Maybe we can push a little harder in the gym this week.” You know?
When you have that data about yourself and you understand how things affect you, it can really push you to make really informed decisions. And you might just say, “I know that this thing’s going to negatively impact me. And it doesn’t really matter this week. So it’s okay. I’m going to do it anyway because I want to do it.” And that’s okay.
Mary:
It’s just like when we talked about sleep debt. If you are getting enough sleep all the time and you have one shitty night, everything should bounce back fine the next day. Like it really shouldn’t impact you too much. But if you’re already coming from a place of a lot of bad sleep and you’re in a high sleep debt, a really bad night of sleep is really going to affect you because you’re already at a loss.
The same thing goes with your HRV. If you are, if you are sleeping well, if you are getting good nutrition, if you are taking care of yourself, your mental health, your physical health, when you have a bad night of sleep or a bad day of training or a heavy day of training, it’s not going to impact you as much as if all those things that I mentioned are already in a bad space.
So, we’re all about balance here. We are all about having a well and balanced experience as an athlete and a person on this earth. Start by – if you haven’t already started tracking your sleep – start tracking your sleep, start looking at your sleep. Start making sure that you’re getting quality sleep. Focus on your nutrition. The two biggest things of recovery, no matter what anyone else tries to tell you, those are the two biggest things: sleep and nutrition. If you’re eating enough and sleeping enough, you can then start addressing other problems.
If you can, start tracking HRV, start looking at your data saying, “Well, am I in the twenties? Holy shit, I’m in the twenties. What do I need to do?” You know, maybe you do some research and figure out how to get yourself out. Or maybe you hire coaches who understand recovery and track recovery. I have to tell you, and this is no dig on other coaches ever, but when I did macro tracking and I was an athlete and I did hire coaches, I don’t remember any of them ever tracking recovery. And now that I know so much about it, why would you not track recovery as a coach?
Kristin:
Absolutely. I mean, I stumbled upon this because you guys have heard me talk about, I decided to potentially cut a weight class for Worlds is what I wanted to do, was maybe I’m going to compete in this lower weight class. Well, let’s just do a local meet at that weight class and see how it affects me so that I know before I go to this really big meet, if that’s really what I want to do, because I might crash and burn. And guess what? I crashed and burned. My recovery tanked. And that’s when I really started looking at this stuff and I was able to find my ideal body weight, body fat percentage by tracking my HRV. And that’s how I stumbled upon it and now I use this with all my athletes and several other metrics as well, but was because I was like, there had to have been some warning sign. How did I not see this coming? And I didn’t, I just didn’t see it coming. I was naive to this idea.
So, I really particularly like to track HRV when somebody is in a caloric deficit or, I think the two places where it really, really shines and allows me to help my athletes make good decisions is if someone is already very lean or someone is in a caloric deficit, because there are…sometimes we’ll see trends like, I think you’re so lean in order to maintain this level of leanness. You’re eating so little that you’re not recovering. So you either need to cut back on your training or we need to add more food.
Mary:
Yeah. And for me, for someone who doesn’t track macros or have athletes track food intake, HRV is such a wonderful way for me to manage and track their recovery. And then when we see maybe a trend down, we can start looking like, “Okay, your sleep is fine. That tells me it’s likely you’re not eating enough. So, let’s for the next week, add in some extra food here and see how that does.” It’s just wonderful. It’s just a wonderful thing. So if you can, if you have the ability, Kristen and I love Elite HRV the app is free like she said. They do sell a finger monitor for you to measure your HRV. That’s like $150 or something. And I believe that they are compatible, like the app is compatible with some devices. But usually I just recommend my athletes get the finger clip to measure. It’s easier that way. And then Whoop does it as well. So I know a lot of you guys are really big into Whoop. Whoop will do it.
Kristin:
There’s another, I have a lot of athletes that use the Oura Ring.
Mary:
That’s one. So it’s out there. There’s ways for you to do it.
Kristin:
Some Fitbits and Apple Watch do monitor HRV. From what I’ve read in the research, it may not be like the gold standard for getting really accurate RR interval readings, which is what you need for HRV. So, that remains kind of in question. I have athletes they do use Fitbit and it does seem to line up with, their scores do seem to line up with what’s going on in their life. But just from the research though, those are kind of like question marks.
The other ones that we mentioned I know are really good. So get yourself a way of measuring your HRV and just start tracking those trends, put it in a spreadsheet if you need to, or you know, cause the app usually will show you a week at a time, but I like looking at it over a long period of time. Especially if you are training really hard, if you’re in meet prep or if you are dieting. But it’s good all the time.
And so one thing I’ll mention is that if your HRV dips one day, it’s really not a big deal. We’re supposed to see these trends, right? These are the changes in our body. It’s when it doesn’t bounce back or it’s kind of just staying lower, like going up and down quite a bit. That’s when we need to go, what’s going on here?
I have some athletes who, when they train three days back to back, we know that after that third day, their HRV is going to be crap. And then it comes right back the next day. If it doesn’t come right back the next day, then we need to go, “Ooh, what do we need to do?” And for some people that means implementing emergency carbs. So give you extra food to help you recover and for some people that means getting extra sleep, like we’ve talked about. Stress management techniques and just looking at your general health, like is something else potentially going on? Because that’s where all the research is all trending right now, is how is this helping us detect and manage illness and disease?
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