Heart Rate Variability: A more scientific approach to decide when to train

Feeling a little run down? Is life getting in the way of your training? Or…is your training getting in the way of your life? If you train, I believe you are doing it to improve in a specific area and do so for results. But what if I told you how you were training involved a lot of guesswork. And now your guesswork has led you down a mysterious and frustrating trend of regressing in those results that are important to you. Now imagine taking the guesswork out of the equation and you could monitor and manage your training to make those improvements. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is just the way to do that!

By getting an idea of whether your body is ready to train based on how it's dealing with stress, you can make safer
training decisions. On higher HRV days, when you have a high level of readiness, you can train hard. On lower HRV
days with a lower level of readiness, you can decide to take the day off or de-load the intensity and volume. 

I believe one should make exercise fit into the lifestyle rather than making the lifestyle about exercise.

HRV is measuring the body’s readiness to perform based on comparing the body’s stress level and ability to recover from it. Everything has an effect on the body, especially hard training sessions. This disruption causes stress on the body and alters it's ability to maintain homeostasis (the body's state of normalcy). Think of your body as a snow globe. Shaking it hard and continuously is the equivalent to the body while it's training. When you stop shaking the snow globe, it takes a few moments for the contents to stop moving, this represents the body trying to recover on a cellular level from the disruption. When the globe has recovered, you can begin shaking it again and continue the process. Start shaking it too soon and the globe takes longer to settle, again, very similar to your body. 

As mentioned above, the body is constantly trying to maintain homeostasis. This is important because this has an effect on whether the body can adapt to the different conditions and stressors you place on your body. In any result based goal, adaptation is key. As the body adapts and manages to handle more stress, it has the ability to improve in many fitness areas. In this case, adaptation is what's known as allostasis, how the body handles stress to keep us alive. This is important because it's not just preparing the body for an immediate threat but for future stress as well.

How does this relate to training? More importantly, is your body ready to train?

Each cup of water represents a level of stress. The cup with the
least amount of water has the least amount of stress. But when faced
with stress, it might not be able to adapt from it. The cup that is
balanced can handle some intense level of stress and recover from it
if given the time. The cup with the most stress is less prepared for more
stress. It requires rest in order recover. Otherwise, it will spillover or
in the case of training, overtrain. 

When it comes to training, I like to think of it in terms of cups of water. How full is your stress cup? A completely tired and stressed body will have more difficulty completing and performing strenuous tasks. Not only that, it will struggle to recover from it because the body will be accumulating it. As long as this is the case, the body will be in survival mode. At this point, further training will be counterproductive. On the other hand, a body that was challenged with an appropriate amount of stress given an appropriate amount of rest will be able to recover from it and be ready for future stress. As long as this balance is maintained, this cycle can lead to improvements because the body can learn to handle more stress gradually over time. The last level is someone with very little stress. Well, if there's very little stress, then it's never really challenged, right? This is similar to having too much stress with regards to not seeing results.

How does HRV work?

Are you tipping the scale in either direction?

HRV measures the Autonomic Nervous System’s (ANS) two branches, the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. These two branches are polar opposites of one another because of the internal struggle between stress (the sympathetic system) and the recovery phase (the parasympathetic system). Over stimulation of the sympathetic system means your body will struggle with adaptability to higher levels of stress because it’s fatigued. On the other hand, if the body is in an overly parasympathetic state, it’s not being stressed enough to adapt to a new level. This lack of stimulation will lead to insufficient results and performance. You want your body to be prepared so it can be loaded with an appropriate level of stress that it can
effectively recover from if given the appropriate amount of time. Following this cycle will help to aid in training improvements.

By determining your HRV, you can effectively decide whether you should:

·      Go hard

·      De-load by 20%-30%

·      Treat as an active recovery day

·      Take the day off from training altogether

Does this answer the question as to why your training session was more difficult than usual?

Don't take more of your pre-workout or blame
your fancy weight belt, or your running shoes for
regressions in strength, endurance, power
 or your physique. Take a deeper look into your
training program. Results are honest based.

Perhaps your problem stems from your training approach. Or maybe you are experiencing other forms of daily stress such as mental stress, financial stress, work stress, family stress, lack of sleep, poor nutrition habits, etc. Regardless of the stressor, too much continuous stress will lead your body toward exhaustion. And if you tie this in with training, you will go down the rabbit hole of overtraining, where despite how much you do and try, performance will suffer. It’s the perfect storm. If you are currently experiencing:

·      Chronic fatigue
·      Lack of motivation to train or perform daily tasks
·      Plateauing in your goals and performance

If the answer is yes, you are about to face a potentially steep decline from too much stress from your training (volume or intensity) than your body could handle and sufficiently recover from. The scale has been tipped in favor of your sympathetic system for too long.

More isn’t better, it’s just more! And by doing more, your body can't recover from the previous levels of stress you placed on it. As a result, it doesn't get the chance to improve.

A way to avoid this is to use HRV. Instead of waiting for your body to respond negatively, imagine being ahead of the curve because you already know your body’s needs.

Managing the body’s response to stress in all its forms: emotional, financial, sleep, nutrition, etc., is essential and will affect the body to some degree whenever you train. The obvious conclusion becomes rather than force training stress into your lifestyle, how about learning to make it fit within the boundaries of the body’s overall stress capacity. That should be the goal of training.  

If you are overly stimulated, you are over taxing the body too much. Yes, it needs some stress in order to adapt and improve but an over accumulation leads to fatigue. This means your body is more prone to sickness, lethargic behavior or worse, injury, if ignored over an extended amount of time. You are in desperate need of recovery, stat! In this case, you need to allow the parasympathetic system to catch up. This form is like when you feel groggy all day. If this is the case my friend, your body is probably trashed.

Isn’t it the American Dream to do less and get more in return?

How do you measure HRV? I recommend Bioforce HRV, although I’ve heard great things about ithlete HRV as well. Whatever you use, this great information only helps if you know how to apply it. If your body is trashed for weeks or months and you continue to not heed the information from your HRV, you run the risk of overreaching and potentially exhausting the body. At this point you will be overtraining. Your body can not handle that much stress and as a result performance, or worse, the body begins to suffer. That's your warning signal!

I’ve mentioned the body’s need for rest in order to balance out the training stress in previous writings.  Basically when to pull the trigger and go hard is a difficult assessment. This can be an easy fix now. I often say listen to your body, well, you can take listening to your body to a whole new level with HRV. Best of luck in your training!