Blog post by Marco Altini

Physiological stress comes from different sources, all having an impact on our ability to deal with additional stress and therefore of maintaining or improving our health and performance. 

In this post we'll see an example of how a morning measurement of your physiology taken with HRV4Training using the phone's camera, can be a very effective way to capture changes in physiological stress in response to such training and lifestyle stressors.

We will also see how the visualizations and analytics available in HRV4Training Pro make it really easy to identify periods of higher stress. 

​In particular, we can see in the image two large drops below normal values, highlighting significant stress on the body:

• Running a marathon
• A few days out of the ordinary around New Years

Blog post by Marco Altini

​As part of my new master's in high-performance coaching at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to start a research project with the Dutch Triathlon Federation, using HRV4Training to monitor physiological adaptations to a training camp (more on this later, the goal is to publish our research, so I am sure we'll have more to report later during the year).

I am really grateful for this opportunity. I found an amazing environment at Dutch triathlon, with knowledgeable and humble coaches and athletes, and I can't wait to keep learning from them and to try to provide a little contribution to their work.

​Thank you for having me yesterday at the facilities during performance testing, and all the best for the upcoming season.

I use it everyday before I get out of bed to determine the intensity of my daily training.  I have learned how much poor sleep (been fighting insomnia), travel, and diet can affect your HRV and health.

The historical data is the 'journal' of my progress. The daily score keeps me from being overambitious. It is my opinion that this is vital for ALL levels of athletes and fitness motivated alike. Just look at my profile pictures...I am proof that it is okay to be okay.

I am currently using HRV4Training to prepare for my 10,800 mile charity ride (30 miles a day for 365 days) for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society this 2020 and will be using it as well to train for the Race Across America (LLS Team). 

LLS will be helping me promote the event with the hope of getting folks active and aware of their health and health metrics. 

The screenshot below shows the past 6 months of Shawn's data. This is taken from HRV4Training Pro, which makes it easier to understand when changes in physiology are significant, as your daily scores and baseline are always contextualized with respect to your historical data (or normal values, the larger band).

In the screenshot below we can see my over training and how my body reacted ... poorly. The latter data (last circle) shows that my tapering is helping bring my numbers back up.

I am not a pro but my goal is to show folks that there is life after cancer. 

This week we share a great read put together by Peter Glassford including a few case studies of data collected on athletes he coaches using HRV4Training Pro. You can find the article here.

"Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and resting heart rate are great ways to monitor your body and get objective feedback on how your body is handling the training you are putting in. It is important (and valuable) as a gauge of your ‘fitness’ because it also does not discriminate between training stress, work stress, bad sleep stress, or 5 shots of tequila stress! This is a common criticism of TSS or other output measures that are telling you the training stress of your workout but not the stress/strain your body is experiencing from that workout nor from the above lifestyle stressors"

The Overview screen in Pro makes it really easy to understand when stress is significantly higher than normal (HRV baseline going below your normal values), and it is probably a good idea in these cases to slow down a little, as shown by recent research on HRV-guided training.

Similarly, positive adaptations to increased load (stable or higher baseline) provide additional confidence in the work being done, as Peter shows consistently in the blog post below. This is an important point that is often misunderstood, as you accumulate more training load and get in better shape, your HRV should be stable or increasing, highlighting how you are responding well to your training (despite the high load, this is what positive adaptation is all about!).

Thanks Peter and enjoy the read everyone.

You can try Pro at https://www.HRV4T.com and use code BIGPICTURE for 10% off

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Peter is a Registered Kinesiologist and Certified Cycling Coach who has been instructing MTB skills since 2000. His coaching clients are mostly busy, masters-aged offroad cyclists who want to optimize their health and performance while balancing family and work. ​He races Mountain Bikes but dabbles in many other disciplines including BMX, cyclocross, running and triathlon. Peter is also the co-host of The Consummate Athlete Podcast with his wife Molly Hurford.

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Blog post by Marco Altini

I had a great time talking about stress, performance and HRV4Training with Matt Fox of Sweat Elite. You can find the podcast at this link.

Matt has spent quite some time in Kenya and Ethiopia as part of his work at Sweat Elite, and provides great insights on the lifestyle of elite athletes training there. We also discuss our own data during marathon training and the combined effect of training and lifestyle stressors on the body. You'll also learn a bit more about how HRV4Training started, recent research on HRV-guided training and the implications of a stressful lifestyle in terms of injury risk and performance. 

Alright, enjoy the podcast!

In this post, I’d like to show how you can use a simple morning measurement of your resting physiology to gather useful information about your body’s response to training and lifestyle stressors.

In particular, we’ll look at two case studies using data from me and Alessandra in the two months leading to the New York City marathon, while dealing with additional non-training related stressors (work, university exams, etc.).

We’ll see how stress piles up and how the contribution of training and lifestyle choices has a cumulative impact that is reflected in your body’s physiological state (your HRV). Hopefully, the case studies will be helpful to better understand how you can apply similar principles to your own case so that you can better manage stress towards improved health and performance.

We have just released an improvement in HRV4Training Pro that lets you easily identify periods of significantly higher or lower values in the subjective tags you are tracking with HRV4Training.

In particular, the update adds normal values to the plots under the Overview page. The normal values represent the expected value for a certain parameter, given the past two months of historical data. This means that any values outside of this range will be easy to spot (for example days in which you slept much less than normal), and most importantly, you will be able to easily see when your baseline tag (7 days moving average) is outside of your normal values, highlighting how some major change is occurring. Without normal values, it can be difficult to understand if things are just fluctuating in a trivial way, or if there is a larger change that we should be more cautious about. 

Let's look at a few examples. Below is the data from an athlete that has been prioritizing sleep quality, and we can see that despite some normal variation and a few data points that are particularly high or low (in this case associated to traveling), the baseline never gets outside of normal values, hence confirming that sleep is going well and should not be a major issue or the cause of any significant changes in baseline physiology (e.g. changes in HRV):

Below is another example where we look at muscle soreness during marathon training, we can see some peaks here and there, followed by periods of recovery as we alternate long and easy runs, as well as the major impact of the race towards the end, and how long it took subjectively to go back to normal:

And finally, here is a complete example where we can look at changes in resting physiology (HRV), training load and subjectively annotate lifestyle stress, during 2 months that include a few business trips (color coded in the first plot), periods of higher lifestyle stress (due to work and traveling, as shown in the last plot), and marathon training (plus marathon day, the peak in acute load towards the end of the second plot).

Using the latest visualization in Pro, it is easy to see when lifestyle stress was much higher than normal for this person, and how only the combination of high load (e.g. the marathon) and high stress brought HRV below normal values, showing that we had significant stress on the body (and staying in that condition for several days, with a difficulty to getting back to homeostasis quickly).

On the other hand, periods with high stress earlier where managed better, for example by reducing training load:

This case study above shows what we know very well already, stress is cumulative and we cannot isolate training and lifestyle stress or think that training is not affected by everything else going on at any given moment in our professional or personal life. 

Yet, a simple marker such as HRV, measured in a well defined context (first thing in the morning while in a rested state), can capture stress deriving from all sources and help us make meaningful adjustments to maintain things in check. 

​We hope you'll enjoy the latest update. 

If you have an HRV4Training account, you can try Pro for free by logging in here.

Blog post by Marco Altini

Just a quick announcement that all new iPhones are already compatible with HRV4Training, you can see a short video on an iPhone 11 here on our instagram.

​As you know the new iPhone has 3 cameras, hence some changes were required. In particular, you will need to use the camera in the corner, as shown here:

As usual, please double check our camera based measurement best practices, to make sure you'll collect high quality data on which meaningful analytics can be derived. ​

Below you can also see two minutes of RR intervals data collected with the phone and a Polar chest strap, showing the usual agreement between the two, as reported in earlier validation studies.

Enjoy!

Collecting high quality data is always the first step, but of course what we want to do is to make meaningful adjustments using that data. How do you do that? Here are some links that can help understanding the relation between physiology, training and lifestyle stressors:

• Case study
• The big picture

In this post we highlight a small update we implemented to make it easier for coaches and teams to monitor HRV trends.

In particular, we have seen from published literature how 3 to 5 measurements per week can be sufficient to monitor an athlete baseline, and similarly we have seen from practical experience that many teams prefer to measure in the 3-4 days in the middle of the week, far from games (for a more comprehensive overview of these aspects, check out this blog post).

Yet, lack of daily measurements makes it more difficult for coaches to get a quick overview of the team status in HRV4Training Pro, as some data might be missing. See for example the panel below where we have missing data for one athlete:

Some of the professional teams we work with do their research, and they know well that the important bit is to look at baseline changes with respect to normal values, as covered here and also in state of the art interventions showing improved performance when following HRV-based advice (see an overview here).

​Hence, lack of a daily measurement should not be a problem, we could for example use the athlete's past week of data, compare to her or his normal values, and then show feedback based on the comparison between HRV baseline and normal values.

This is exactly what you can do by enabling the "Force HRV advice" in your Coach Panel:

At this point you will be able to get visual feedback on the missing athlete's HRV trend:

Which can of course be confirmed by opening the Overview page and looking at the data, in case you'd like to dig deeper:

We hope you will find this addition useful to keep track of your team physiological data efficiently and effectively. 

​Enjoy

Blog post by Marco Altini

​
We have released a new feature in HRV4Training Pro: Training Monotony.

In case you want to jump right in, and check out our latest feature, simply login at HRV4T.com with your HRV4Training credentials, then navigate to Insights / Training Load Analysis

As a coach, you can access these estimates for all your athletes from the Coach Panel.

In general, low monotony (a value below 1.5 for example) is preferable so that different training adaptations can be triggered, while allowing for sufficient recovery to the body. Low monotony is normally associated to a polarized training and other periodization methods alternating high and low intensity workouts. 

On the other hand, a high value for training monotony indicates that the training program might be ineffective and lead to stagnation, or lack of improvement. Hence, if your score tends to be higher, it might be time to try something different. 

Here is for example a month of workouts of varying intensity and duration, resulting in very different relative efforts (the training impulse metric available in Strava and used for this example):

You can see how training monotony is indeed very low:

On the other hand here we have a week with very similar workouts (second row in particular):

Which corresponds to the yellow spike in monotony below, an indication that the stimulus recently has been always quite similar on a day to day basis, which might be unproductive for performance:

​We have new designs for our running singlets, you can find them at this link.

Enjoy!

​Cardiac decoupling relates to your cardiac drift during an aerobic effort. What’s your cardiac drift? Basically, your heart rate increasing as a result of your body getting fatigued, during the second part of a workout.
​
To determine your cardiac decoupling, we compute the relation between output (pace or power) and input (heart rate) during the first and second half of a workout.

​Intuitively, if heart rate increases at the same pace during the second part of a workout, or if your pace reduces in an attempt to keep your heart rate below a certain value, it means that your aerobic endurance for the distance is not well developed. Similarly, a ratio close to one or below 1.03–1.05 shows that your heart rate does not drift much during the second part of the workout, which is a sign of good aerobic endurance.
​
Here is 6 months of data, which include about 4–5 months of very good training in between two injuries:

In this post, we provide an overview of the main findings deriving from the past years of applied research in team settings. We’ve talked often about data analysis, looking at the big picture and the coefficient of variation as effective ways to monitor individual responses to training and lifestyle stressors, as highlighted for example in this case study. But what about team sports? In a team settings, a few questions pop up: can we derive anything meaningful from absolute values (for example assessments every few months instead of longitudinal monitoring)? How often should our team players monitor? When are the best days to do so? And most importantly: what are the main signs of positive and negative adaptation to training in different phases of the season? We all know each athlete responds differently, so how can we use measures of internal load such as HRV to adapt training based on individual responses?

We’ll go over the main studies answering these questions and provide guidelines for you so that you can make the most of HRV4Training Pro with your team. I’ve broken up this post in two main sections, one covering the most important points to remember and a longer one covering quite a few studies for the ones that are more interested in the details. ​

Quick announcement that we have integrated Samsung's dedicated PPG sensor in HRV4Training. The sensor should be available in the Galaxy S6, S7, S8, S9 and S10 (in the images below you can see the S7). In this case we use the infrared light, and therefore the flash will not be used. 

In this post, we cover a few insights derived from recent research on HRV and the menstrual cycle, including a journal paper just published by Patricia Doyle-Baker and her group at the human performance lab, University of Calgary, using HRV4Training. 

This is the first study ever to monitor HRV daily during the menstrual cycle to understand the impact of different phases of the cycle on autonomic activity (which is crazy if you ask me, considering that it's 2019). Anyhow, we are glad HRV4Training made it possible to finally collect real life data with high compliance and I hope this write up will be useful to better analyze your own data or your athlete's data, so that you can include an additional piece of information in the decision making process.  ​

In literature, the relation between menstrual cycle and HRV is investigated to understand if the menstrual cycle can act as a confounding factor when analyzing HRV data, for example because of changes during the different phases of the cycle that would require to interpret the data differently. The first potential confounding effect of the menstrual cycle brought up in literature is at the population level, so for analysis that look at sex differences in HRV features. This is not really something too relevant in our case, as we always stress that data should be analyzed at the individual level, with respect to your historical data, and not compared to others (Aubert et al, heart rate variability in athletes). Many studies in literature have shown that regulation of the ANS is modified during the menstrual cycle, hence the need to further investigate the relationship with our marker of parasympathetic activity, rMSSD.

A second and more relevant aspect, tightly coupled with what just discussed, is that if different phases of the cycle have an influence on autonomic activity, then even at the individual level HRV data might be affected by the cycle phase, which should be accounted for when we look at our data. HRV analysis in women may be inconsistent if HRV cannot be considered stable across the menstrual cycle or if the expected differences are not accounted for. This can be an issue as interpretation may lead to inappropriate conclusions. 

​In this post, I'd like to show some data to highlight a few important aspects when analyzing your heart rate variability (HRV) data. In particular, I'd like to cover some misconceptions about the relationship between training and HRV as well as the importance of lifestyle and psychological aspects (context!).

We'll use my own data collected between January and April 2018, so 3 months in which I went from best shape of my life to injured and then back to training regularly post-injury, but in poor shape (detrained). We'll look at:

1. The basics: acute response to high-intensity training
2. The more interesting stuff: positive long term adaptation to high intensity and high volume training
3. Context: negative response to poor lifestyle choices following an injury
4. Feedback loop vs fitness marker: assessing full (physiological) recovery
5. Putting it all together

I hope this case study can be a good starting point to identify useful ways to look at your data using HRV4Training Pro.

Blog post by Marco Altini

​In this post we’ll show two methods we have implemented in HRV4Training Pro to let you easily track changes in aerobic endurance while preparing a running or cycling event, so that you can analyze your progress:

• Aerobic efficiency
• Cardiac decoupling (currently in Beta)

Using these two methods and analyzing changes systematically over time with respect to your historical data, it should be easy to track improvements (or lack thereof) over time and make meaningful adjustments to your training plan.

​Learn more at this link.