Case study: Shawn on managing training load

Shawn Watson is a Stage 4 Lymphoma survivor. He goes by the moniker “World’s Okayest Cyclist” with the vision of helping others who are or have struggled with health issues to get moving.

​Shawn uses HRV4Training every morning to monitor his progress.

How do you use HRV4Training?

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 data

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.

In the plot below you can see the same data, but color coded by detected trend. The detected trend in HRV4Training is a combination of resting heart rate, resting HRV, coefficient of variation of your HRV, and training load. 

We can see how the detected trend captures maladaptation to training, even a bit earlier than training load is reduced, showing how this information could be used to better manage training intensity and training volume, so that we can avoid ending up in a situation of maladaptation to training. 

You can learn more about these topics at this link.

Anything else you'd like to add?

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