Is this an alternative/extra to Resting Heart Rate as a measure? Food for thought:
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is an accurate, non-invasive measure of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) – which responds to everything: how you exercise, recover, eat, sleep and perceive stress.
Unlike basic heart rate (HR) that counts the number of heartbeats per minute, HRV looks much closer at the exact changes in time between successive heartbeats.
By trending short HRV readings on a daily basis, our adaptive algorithms learn what your “normal” Autonomic Nervous System patterns look like, help you gain insights into your nervous system, stress and recovery activity, and then automatically guide you in improving those patterns over time.
Today, people use HRV to:
Improve resilience and adaptability
Reduce stress
Optimize training and recovery
Personalize nutrition and sleep
Improve mental health – mood, depression, anxiety
Improve mental performance and cognition
Identify risk of disease, morbidity and mortality
Measure systemic inflammation
Track progress and guide treatment plans
Re-balance the nervous system with live biofeedback
Objectively understand motivation and willpower
Provide early warning signs for changes in health, overtraining or maladaptation
Now that you can accurately and conveniently track your nervous system, you can make better health, training, and recovery decisions to reach your goals.
Your Nervous System in a Nutshell
Your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) controls the unconscious bodily processes and influences the functions of internal organs including:
Heart rate
Blood pressure
Body temperature
Electrolyte balance
Digestion
Respiratory rate
Pupillary response
Urination
Sexual arousal
The ANS consists of two branches:
The Sympathetic Nervous System controls your body’s “fight or flight” reactions in response to internal or external stressors. It stimulates blood glucose (to fuel your muscles), pupil dilation (to see tigers better), slows digestion/peristalsis (to focus energy on the present danger), and increases heart rate (to ensure adequate blood circulation to run or fight).
The SNS is ideally activated to overcome short term stress situations such as running from a tiger or fighting an intruder. But this same response also occurs when you exercise, perform challenging mental tasks, get into an argument or are in any high stress situation.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System controls your body’s “rest and digest” responses and is associated with recovery. Parasympathetic activation conserves energy, constricts pupils, aids digestion, and slows heart rate. The PSNS is meant to help build for the long term and is needed to grow faster, stronger, and healthier.
The SNS and PSNS control the same organs with opposite effects.
Both branches are always working and both are needed to maintain homeostasis (balance or equilibrium) in your body. With every single heartbeat, your nervous system is saying “slow down – speed up” based on feedback from all your senses, emotions, etc. A healthy nervous system has a balanced but strong push and pull between the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic branches.
Heart Rate Variability is a non-invasive measure of the ANS and the balance between the SNS and PSNS branches.
Why Does This Matter?
The Sympathetic Nervous System’s physiological response to stress focuses on short term survival in lieu of long term health. This acute response can become long term in the presence of stress from modern daily life such as work, relationships, financial, environmental, dietary, physical, lifestyle choices, etc.
Chronically accumulated stress from multiple sources can all contribute to drastically reduced health and performance over the long term. A significant amount of research published over the past 50 years correlates Heart Rate Variability to:
Disease risk and progression (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, autoimmune conditions, etc.)
Morbidity and mortality
Biological aging and health
Mental health, mood, depression, anxiety, PTSD
Physical performance (HRV is heavily used in elite endurance and team sports to guide training and recovery)
Injury prevention
Guided rehabilitation
Mental cognition
Now that you can accurately and conveniently track your nervous system, you can make better health, training, and recovery decisions to reach your goals.
What Do Heart Rate Variability Scores Mean?
Higher resting-state HRV scores signify the ability of the body to activate the Parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” response.
Higher heart rate variability is correlated with:
Increased fitness level
Better health
Better resilience
Youthfulness
Willpower
Calm, positive emotions
Lower resting-state HRV is tied to:
Reduced fitness level
Poor health
Increased disease risk and inflammation
Increased biological age
Negative emotions
Increased anxiety and depression
Lower resting-state HRV scores signify an activated Sympathetic “fight-or-flight” response or suppressed Parasympathetic activity. This can indicate the body’s inability to engage recovery mode or an exhaustion of recovery capacity. This can be a temporary response to a previous day’s hard workout or poor night of sleep. Or this can be a chronic response to stress that results in reduced health and increased risk of disease.
The average HRV score for Elite HRV users is 59.3 (on a 1-100 scale) with 75% of users’ HRV scores falling between 46.3 and 72.0. You may see different measures with different measuring systems - what is key is your personal trend........
Heart Rate Variability by Age and Gender Breakdown (average)
The Elite HRV users (based on the 35% of users that optionally input their age and gender details) are 13.9% females and 86.1% males.
AGE MALE FEMALE
18 - 25 68 65
25 – 35 64 61
35 – 45 60 58
45 – 55 56 57
55 – 65 53 53
65 – 75 52 49
Comentários