Holiday weight gain prevention and stress busting using Heart Rate Variability (HRV)!
You are likely falling behind if you aren’t looking at certain data for athlete training and development. Alan Couzens shares his expertise integrating software and data analysis into both recreational training and elite level sport.
Chronic stress is a feature of modern life. It often comes from hidden, unexpected, hard-to-pin-down sources. With appropriate tracking, heart rate variability (HRV) can help identify these sources of chronic stress.
Multiple readings taken in a row can sometimes produce different results. Here are a few reasons this can happen.
The Morning Readiness gauge indicates your state of relative balance. In other words, it is comparing your HRV values to your recent past and telling you whether your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is in a similar state or if it is swinging widely outside of your norm.
A higher HRV is generally a good thing, but there are exceptions which the app picks up on. You want your HRV to gradually increase over time (weeks, months, years). If you have taken a few Morning Readiness readings, you know that your HRV can go up and down slightly from day to day. This is normal and generally healthy.
Grey: You see this indicator type on your first Morning Readiness reading (or if you haven’t taken a MR reading in a while). The grey indicator with a score of n/a shows that you need to establish a baseline of a few days to compare to before you can start receiving Morning Readiness scores, indicators, and recommendations.
Presentation on Heart Rate Variability at UC Berkeley during Ancestral Health Symposium. How Heart Rate Variability relates to stress and ancestral living.