Five most read articles on the HRV4Training Blog

Blog post by Marco Altini

​It's been a bit over a year since we started the HRV4Training Blog. The intent of this blog is to cover and provide educational material on many different aspects of HRV analysis and physiological measurements, as well as to document insights we derive continuously by analyzing our unique dataset. ​Overall, we had about 120 000 page views on the website during the past 12 months:

Top five

Here is a list of the 5 most read articles of the past 12 months (reads/day were considered only for the period of time the article has been published):

• Heart rate variability normal values, where we explored the relation between HR and HRV in different subpopulations. A more recent update including data from more users was also recently published at this link. While we are naturally curious about other people's values and these numbers can help getting some perspective, it's important to remember that physiological data is particularly meaningful when analyzed longitudinally within one individual (meaning that you should only look at your own data, after collecting a few months of measurements under the same conditions).
• Hardware for HRV, what sensor should you use? Where we cover limitations of most (all?) wrist-based optical sensors and show how chest straps are as accurate as ECGs. A broader comment on these aspects can be found on Quora.
• Heart rate variability using the phone camera. In this post we cover many details of our unique camera-based HRV measurement, showing the same accuracy as a chest strap. Recently we further extended these validations with many trials under different conditions, that will be published soon. Check out the plot below for a nice comparison of ECG and PPG peaks as detected by HRV4Training.

• HRV monitoring for strength and power athletes. A guest article by PhD candidate Andrew Flatt, covering important aspects of HRV monitoring outside of what is typically  more discussed in terms of aerobic training.
• Interpreting HRV trends. In this post, we analyzed years of research from top scientists in the field (mainly Buchheit, Laursen and Plews) and came up with a set of algorithms to automatically detect trends and understand more on the big picture at the individual level, in terms of adaptation to training plans and risk of overtraining or accumulating fatigue. This analysis is present in HRV4Training under Insights / HRV Trends, and subsets of the analysis can be used to follow other recent developments in sports science, such as the works of Vesterinen et al and Flatt et al, discussed here.

This is a good set of HRV-related topics, ranging from technology to interpretation of trends. So, if you haven't read them yet... happy reading!