Curriculum at a Glance

Understanding stress and its physiological impacts is crucial for understanding the connection between Heart Rate Variability and the body. In this lesson, we’ll cover the basics of stress and explain the importance of Homeostasis – the body’s process of maintaining balance.

Allostasis is the adaptive process the body uses to maintain homeostasis.  Allostasis and allostatic load are important concepts to understand in relation to HRV as the body’s ability to properly adapt will be reflected in a person’s absolute and relative HRV.  In this lesson, we’ll elaborate on the topic of stress and Homeostasis by delving into Allostasis and providing some biological examples of these processes at work.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) is the foundation for short-term and long-term physiological effects of stress on the body and is an important concept to understand when using HRV to guide training. A person’s individual response to various stressors can affect stress and recovery patterns seen in HRV trending analysis. In this lesson, we’ll cover both GAS and individual stress response to lay a solid foundation for understanding the body’s stress and recovery states as reflected in HRV.

In this lesson, we’ll introduce Heart Rate Variability, explain why it exists, review its historical and present day uses, and cover the mechanisms that cause Heart Rate Variability.

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is a division of the nervous system that controls subconscious processes in the body like digestion, breathing, and heart rate.  HRV is the most accurate, noninvasive measure of the ANS.  In this lesson, we’ll dive deeper into the two branches of the ANS: Parasympathetic (responsible for rest and recovery processes) and Sympathetic (responsible for flight or flight stress response).

The Vagus Nerve is a cranial nerve that connects the brain to the heart, lungs, intestines, and many other organs.  HRV directly measures the vagus nerve input on the heart.  In this lesson, we’ll explain the Vagus Nerve’s function and connection to HRV, as well as the Baroreceptor Reflex’s influence on the Vagus Nerve, Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia and how these affect HRV.

In this lesson, we’ll show you how to accurately and consistently measure HRV.  Important topics we’ll cover include: selecting a measurement duration, deciding how frequently to measure HRV, taking measurements during rest vs. active states, choosing measuring positions, and taking group measurements.  We’ll also discuss the effects of breathing patterns on HRV measurements and the different types of devices and monitors used to measure HRV.

In this lesson, we’ll discuss the different methods used to analyze HRV measurements including Time-Domain, Frequency Domain, and Nonlinear.  We’ll cover the calculations involved in each method, what the indices and values mean, and the physiological mechanisms that affect each type of value.  We’ll also explain how to effectively analyze HRV trends over short-term and long-term events, the importance of contextualizing your HRV data with lifestyle factors, and the use cases for live HRV biofeedback.

Demographic factors such as age, gender, fitness level, and others can all affect Heart Rate Variability. That’s why it’s important to analyze people’s HRV within their individual demographics to more accurately compare and analyze their HRV measurements.  In this lesson, we’ll review some research detailing the effects of age, gender, and fitness level on HRV, as well as other important considerations like the effects of medications. You’ll also get a useful reference guide that breaks down average HRV metrics for each demographic.

A key reason HRV has become so popular is its validity and effectiveness in measuring health and longevity. In this lesson, we’ll discuss how HRV indices have been correlated with morbidity and mortality, including the leading causes of death. We’ll also cover how HRV is the best noninvasive biomarker to effectively measure health status and monitor treatment progression.

Nutritional and environmental factors are obviously important for optimizing overall health. In this lesson, we’ll discuss how HRV can be used to identify inflammatory responses from nutritional and environmental stressors and review some examples and studies that demonstrate this connection.

One of the most common applications for HRV is training program optimization for performance athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike. That’s because HRV is the best objective measure of an individual’s fitness level and is key for understanding an athlete’s recovery levels.  In this lesson, we’ll cover the relationship between different HRV indices and training stress/recovery status.  We’ll discuss how to identify over-training, under-training, and functional overreaching conditions, as well as the different training factors that affect HRV and some basic guidelines for tailoring training using HRV data.

Emotional and mental health is just as important as physical health to overall well-being and performance.  In this lesson, we’ll review several example case studies demonstrating how HRV analysis and biofeedback training can be used to successfully identify and treat different emotional and mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

Rest and recovery are crucial for achieving health and performance goals. In this lesson, we’ll review the importance of recovery, explain how to identify recovery states using HRV trending, and cover different active techniques used to expedite recovery.

In this lesson, we’ll briefly summarize the different lifestyle factors that can affect HRV to help you make effective decisions when trying to optimize HRV, health, and performance.

HRV guidance can help you create an individualized approach for your clients and patients that increases participation, results, and satisfaction.  Many coaches, personal trainers, consultants, health practitioners, rehabilitation specialists, and first-responder organizations are already utilizing HRV monitoring to optimize their programs – and you should too!  In this lesson, we’ll discuss how integrating HRV analysis and coaching services can differentiate your business and can provide a better experience for your clients, and also offer tips on analyzing common HRV trends, utilizing HRV consultations, and how to use HRV in group training.

Jason is the Founder of Elite HRV, the Heart Rate Variability platform preferred by Olympians, pro sports, doctors, research organizations, and over 600,000 health and performance seekers. Over the past 9 years he’s been on the cutting edge of HRV technology, using his experience to help people and organizations across the world implement HRV into their lives and careers. Prior to founding Elite HRV, Jason specialized in developing sensor-driven data analytics systems for the energy industry, focusing on making complex data actionable. Jason has also been a health and performance coach and personal trainer, and truly enjoys teaching others how to optimize their health and performance to become their best self.

Bachelor of Business Administration – Information Systems (Texas A&M University)

• Elite HRV: Founder, CEO, Head of R&D, 2014-present
• Health & Performance Consultant, 2012-2015
• Marathon Oil Corporation: Systems Designer & Information Systems Educator, 2009-2015