Heart Rate Variance

pilch

Anybody using this? What do you think? I've been taking readings for 3 months now using ithlete, got a good baseline and i'm interested to see if it picks up early signs of over training and the onset of illness as they claim, initial signs look promising.

mentalalex

generally speak, if your not fully recovered from a session your resting HR will be higher (above what it normally is)
and with illness your HR would be higher than normal, it can give good indications of illness* and over training, but if you were over training you would know about it.

Use it more to see if your recovered or not,
*keep records of days you know you are tired, so you can compare etc.

A

pilch

mentalalex wrote:

generally speak, if your not fully recovered from a session your resting HR will be higher (above what it normally is)
and with illness your HR would be higher than normal, it can give good indications of illness* and over training, but if you were over training you would know about it.

Use it more to see if your recovered or not,
*keep records of days you know you are tired, so you can compare etc.

A

Cheers, that's not HRV though, Heart rate variance is the difference between heart beats averaged over a static time period. It is a more accurate way of measuring your recovery and readiness to train and/or over training, it goes down when you are tired and rises when you are fit/recovered.

Over training is not always easy to spot, especially in the early stages, once you have established a good baseline HRV gives you a very early indicator when things start to go pear shaped. If you are overtrained (as I was this season, which is why I started using it) it is a great indicator that helps you to climb out of the hole as soon as possible.