HRV is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat. This variation is controlled by a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is subdivided into two large components, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight mechanism and the relaxation response
Sport science technologies come in many different forms. I have worked in the are of sport technology for nearly two decades. While I was working at a Fortune 50 company I was leading a group called the “Technology Taskforce” that was a small group of experts that their entire job was to evaluate up and coming technologies all over the world that could help athletes (and regular individuals) improve performance, reduce injuries, improve sleep, wellness and overall human performance. We would review thousands of products per year and this unique environment afforded me the opportunity to be exposed to great companies (large and small) and outstanding researchers. From this experience I then developed the first Sport Technology graduate class in the US that was focused on practical application of commercially available technologies that help coaches, athletes, teams, leagues better monitor, test and train athletes. In this course we reviewed various technologies including HRV, GPS, Recovery Modalities, Velocity Monitoring Devices, Optical Sensors, Strength Assessments, Isokinetic Assessments, Speed/Power Testing, Physiological Monitoring Devices (Glucose, Sweat, Blood, Oxygen etc) among other areas. We would review the published research, perform in-depth review articles on the various topics and also use the various technologies in real world practical settings. The students in these graduate classes were Athletic Trainers, Strength & Conditioning Coaches, Chiropractors, Data Analysts, Researchers, Sports Coaches so the diversity of discussion was outstanding. From this background it provides a very good framework to review various technologies now and in the future. At our Institute we work with dozens of companies in various technologies that are designed to help improve human performance. Over the course of the next number of months we will provided some information on various topics of sport technology in a highly practical way. Most of this information will be in the Kovacs Academy for the membership who are subscribers. However, in this first installment on our blog I will cover some of the basics around HRV.
Below is a chart that I developed to help sport science students, researchers, coaches and practioners better understand the categories of monitoring. As you can see HRV falls in the INTERNAL/OBJECTIVE category. This allows us to monitor some internal metrics of the body in an objective way. This takes away the subjective (potential error) that many coaches/athletes may face when trying to evaluate how an athlete is feeling at any given moment or at the end of sessions.
The RECOVERY timeline after a hard workout, tough training session or tough match follows a rather consistent response with respect to human physiology. How we monitor this and then how we use this information to help individuals recover faster and better is a huge part of next level success. This is many times were the athletes or coaches, really struggle to understand when/how to increase or decrease volume and intensity.
Many commercially available HRV measurement devices and the accompanying software are available on the market today. Many of them are hardware and software companies combined and some of them are just software companies that allow you to integrate with a certain type of hardware.
Here are some links below to a number of the HRV hardware and software companies. You can review the differences between companies. As you can see a number companies are heavily invested in this space and this will only help to continue to improve the quality of analysis and provided even better data in the future. The next 5 years will see an explosion in these types of monitoring devices that will become more accurate, easier to use and truly will be able to help in a real and impactful way with training, monitoring and recovery.
Below are the major differences between measuring Heart Rate (the image on the left that was from a real life high intensity interval training session) and the information on the right which highlights the R-R interval differences when analyzing Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Below is a general slide around some of the top line concepts around how HRV works and what it is actually measuring and also what it is trying to then estimate in a larger context of “how” the human body feels. From this base information it is trying to then estimate how this information indirectly can be used to provide insights into how an athlete is feeling. The term READINESS is used by many companies to provide a simple score.
Individuals and companies have simplified it to a point that many people think the higher the HRV score the better recovered (or less stressed) an individual is and the lower the HRV score is the more stressed (or under-recovered) the individual is. This is a major simplification of complex technology and a simplification of how the human body works. Trying to provide a snapshot in time of how an athlete may be feeling and are they ready for the next scheduled training session is the goal, but one metric cannot tell us the entire story. Challenges still exist with using one metric (i.e. HRV) to understand the complexity of the human body. However, it can be a very useful tool that can be part of a larger monitoring portfolio. I go into detail on this topic in our Academy site with an hour long webinar on this topic as well. It is also available in our LIVE with Dr. Kovacs course as well.
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