Blog post by Marco Altini One of my favorite guest posts on our blog was written a few years back by Andrew Flatt. Andrew is a brilliant scientist and coach and has dedicated much of his time to investigating the relationships between HRV, training load and other stressors, in a variety of sports and athletes. The full article focuses mostly on strength and power athletes, and can be found here. However, I believe some aspects are really applicable to any sport, and I'd like to report them here and show a little example using my own data collected with HRV4Training and the Pro platform. Quoting Andrew: "Highly trained individuals are more likely to see a pronounced decrease in HRV the following morning in response to a training session if: 1. The training stimulus is considerably greater than the individual typically experiences (an abrupt increase in load 2. The training stimulus is novel or different from what the individual is accustomed 3. Training is otherwise normal, but non-training related stressors are affecting recovery" Point 3 is the one I'd really like to focus on in this post. Non-training related stressors are key. There's a whole body of research looking for example and how injury risk can increase due to high stress regardless of any changes in training, see psychophysiological models of injury for example. Needless to say, our capacity to handle stress is limited, and this exactly why HRV measurements are useful: they provide an overall marker of stress In my view, non-training related stressors are an often overlooked great reason to use HRV monitoring, despite the fact we all understand well that if something is bothering us (issues at work, at home, financial concerns, etc) we can hardly focus and perform optimally. As a recreational runner, I love to try to make a bit of progress, pushing myself to higher loads from time to time. When I manage to do so gradually and consistently, over longer periods of time ( > than a year for example), I do not expect my HRV to drop during an acute high-load block, as my body is well conditioned, and should assimilate the stimulus properly. When we add other stressors though, the situation can easily change, and this is exactly why it is important to objectively monitor physiological stress and individual responses to stress (in a generic way), so that we can get the full picture. It would be really naive to think that the only thing that matters is training, and all we do in the remaining 22-23 hours of our day is irrelevant. Lets look at some data: Above we can see three plots, with daily measurements collected over 3 months, first thing in the morning using the HRV4Training app:
We can also look at the correlation between physiological data and subjective metrics, in the Explore Correlations page that you can find under Insights in HRV4Training Pro: In the plot above we can see again the strong baseline correlation between heart rate variability measured first thing in the morning, and lifestyle stress. As you can see "work stress" for me is typically the largest factor behind drops in HRV, especially when looking at the big picture (baseline more than day to day correlations).
Alright, hopefully this post gives you a more practical view of what to expect and how to interpret the data, always remember that multiple stressors play a role at the same time, and it is therefore beneficial to look at the data over longer periods of time, including normal values and baseline changes, and contextualizing physiological data (HRV or HR) with respect to your subjective annotations and training load. This is all computed for you in HRV4Training Pro. take care! Comments are closed.
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