Why Is My HRV So Low? | Everything You Need To Know About Heart Rate Variability

this morning my HRV score was 35 what was yours my HRV this morning is just 39 which is quite low for me my HRV when I woke up this morning was 60 hey Heather and triathletes um I'm in Italy at the moment filming for gcn and my heart R variability was 62 my HRV last night was 32 which I know sounds really low what if there was one metric that could tell you everything you need to know about how well recovered your body is and how ready it is for the day ahead well let me introduce heart rate variability HRV for short a precise measurement of your heart's electronic signals that can reflect how well you've slept what your immune system is doing and how stress is affecting your body and all of this can be done with a small device worn on your wrist well it sounds too good to be true and certainly fascinating enough to Warrant a deep dive into this topic so better to finish my coffee and get changed I want to begin by clarifying that heart rate variability is different to resting heart rate so resting heart rate is a measure of the average rate at which your heart beats or the number of Beats typically reported per minute heart rate variability looks at the differences in the rate at which your heart is beating over that same period of time that was Emily capolupo from whoop who we'll be hearing more from later on in theory the higher the Vari ability between heartbeats the better now if you're used to tracking your training and your resting heart rate that could sound a little counterintuitive it's time for us to explain the beating of our heart is controlled by our autonomic nervous system which is made up of the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system see these as two antagonists that actually work together to balance each other out the parasympathetic nervous system or pns for short often referred to as rest and digest is the steady of the two so to speak and can slow the heart rate down the sympathetic nervous system or also known as SNS for short on the other hand is the fight or flight response it's the one that changes quickly and will reflect stress or exercise see them both as trying to do the opposite thing with your heart one to speed up the heart rate the other to slow it down well this results in a healthy balance but also a difference in that interval between each heartbeat the higher the variation shows that both aspects of the autonomic nervous system are working equally hard and the body is responding to both there is not one that is dominating the other on the flip side if one is dominating then it will result in a lower variability and you'll see a lower HRV number now we know a little bit more about how the intervals change we'll be taking a closer look at how that translates to our own HIV and what daily factors we need to consider but first how do we actually obtain this new fashionable metric now obviously we can't count by fi CU we are talking milliseconds here so you do need a device device to record your HRV and back in the day you could use a heart rate chest strap you could even use a finger monitor that you see in hospitals but these do require a certain amount of discipline and remember to do it at the same time every morning when you wake up and obviously other variables will come into play or you can however use wearables now there are a huge amount on the market that will give you HRV including wrist and ring variables and then you just don't have to think therefore it's probably time for me to introduce my new favorite piece of tech my whoop wristband whoop do Pride themselves on their HRV metric along with other health measurements but a lot of smart devices will give us these sorts of numbers sometimes they're a bit of an add-on so they might not be as accurate but just make sure that if it's something you're really interested in that you've got a device that will give you a good HRV and it might be worth investing in a device like this now the main thing is going to be consistency with when you measure it and how often you wear your device you get that number but each device will have different Al gorithms that they use to obtain that H ofing you don't really need to get bogged down with it too much would for example take a certain section of your sleep every night so that's basically something you're not going to have to ever think about or worry about but the main thing is if you're using it for personal use is consistency to get enough data that you can then have a reliable HRV and that's where you can really start to learn a bit about it and how yours is reacting ah that moment that we've all been looking forward to what do the numbers actually mean well you can imagine the feeling of suspense I had when I got my whoop and then I still had to wait another 5 days for the calibration to actually give me my HRV score I knew roughly what a good score was so you can imagine my disappointment when it was much lower than what I expected but also much lower than my peers well that was my first lesson HIV is personal and should really only be compared to you and it's easy for me to sit here and say that but still find it a little bit hard to believe and that's in part what actually triggered me to want to make this video and do some more research so I think it's time to bring in the expert to answer some of those questions well hi thank you so much for your time today Emily sure and thanks so much for having me what can we control that affects our HIV versus what can we not control so many things um you know if you just do controlled breathing like you know 5c inhale hold 5c exhale your heart rate variability is going to increase um so you can make it change like that by controlling the way that you're breathing um if I you know start doing a bunch of jumping jacks or like really get animated my heart rate variability is going to drop very quickly and so um there's a lot of things you can do that just make it go kind of acutely up and down um now as soon as I stopped doing those activities it's going to return to Baseline typically like higher heart rate variability It's associated with Better Health and so all of the things that you've been told are associated with health are going to be associated with increased HRV okay well that that probably answers my next question in a way but I was going to say is there a good number or a target number for uh HRV no um like I said you typically hire is better and like if you look at enough people you do see that Trend you shouldn't really have a goal of like oh I want to be at 80 milliseconds or I want to be at some number what you really want to look at is like as you are getting more fit what wherever you're starting from you should expect that HRV to be able to go up and so it's a really good indicator of your own progress um and why does the heart rate variability have the ability to vary so much compared to your resting heart rate like you know we don't really see that many dramatic changes in our resting heart rate I think it's because there's so many things that impact your heart rate variability it's like extremely sensitive measure your resting heart rate is this like blanketly measuring essentially oxygen Demand right so your heart rate will increase when we need to circulate more oxygen that just tends to be more stable at rest your hurry variability is responding to a whole bunch of things going on kind of behind the scenes I think people get confused because like they're both from the heart rate um but they're very very different measures wow with my age not being completely past it my health as far as I know is good and my exercise and sleep routine are fine for me I want to know what am I doing wrong I have been told that pregnancy can lower HIV a little bit but why is mine so low well turns out that I'm not the only one frustrated about this cuz quite a few of you guys have voiced the same of worrying about why your HRV might be low and I know it's not supposed to be a competition but we are all competitive at the end of the day aren't we so I asked the question why do we vary so much from person to person we know that what we're really trying to measure is the activity of your Vagas nerve right but you know nobody wants us to stick a needle into their neck and so we measure how that activity manifests in your heart rate and the understanding is that like in that pathway different people will like dampen the signal different amounts and that that dampening is not necessarily related to anything good or bad it's just an anatomical differences um which is why we super strongly stress that you know you should be comparing your HRV to yourself there's loads of metrics we can compare and compete with our friends against uh you know heart rate or heart resting heart rate is a way better example of this the important thing is that HRV within an individual it like the differences matter a ton so like I don't want people to take away from this like oh it's the super noisy useless metric um you it's not a great way to say who's the most fit person on the team it's a really great way to know if your training is working and and what on that note is a notable change in your HRV when do you sort of sit up and go oh okay my HRV is doing something today so that's depends a lot on what your typical variation is so it varies from person to person there are people who are healthy with hrvs that average around 20 milliseconds than people who are averaging around 120 right so like a 10 millisecond increase you know in in the first case is a 50% increase that's massive um and you know in the latter case uh is you know so much smaller so typically what we look for is what the like standard deviation is Al like some like a half of a standard deviation or a third of a standard deviation is like a good measure of there's probably something real and interesting going on here but what that standard deviation is in terms of like how many milliseconds going to vary a lot from person to person and what is the best way to go about improving rhv it's all the same things that are going to be associated with improving Health the some of the most dramatic things that we've seen are things like you know like eliminating alcohol that really crushes your HRV of course you know cleaning up your diet um you know improving Your Sleep Quality and getting more fit uh all of those things are very related to each other but have we've definitely seen can increase your HRV by f a lot there are a lot of things that people that aren't necessarily like massive efforts you know you don't have to get loads more fit um for example we've seen things like not eating close to bedtime and improves your HRV by a lot because it allows your body to kind of finish digesting get into a state of sleep it's not just like you have to go and you know find two hours a day to work out or something crazy like that to get meaningful improvements to HRV the biggest lever for any one individual in terms of what's going improve their HRV has a lot to do with what their weak spot is right so if you're already getting 8 hours of sleep a night getting more sleep's not really going to improve your HRV so then I would say like focus on your diet you um dehydration is a huge one for most people who are listening it's like start with a really really simple things yeah really fascinating I find it all really interesting and I'm sure I've you as well too so thanks for your time today oh thanks for having me if you are new to this metric well you will soon discover that it's a fascinating topic and there is so much literature out there now for you to troll through but I wouldn't get too bogged down it I would more just concentrate on your own HIV and start to learn what stresses both physical and mental are affecting yours and then you can develop it from there now I'm just personally hoping that once I'm no longer pregnant that I will start to see those improvements and I'd love to hear from you guys if you've got a really high HRV well well done you but it isn't a competition still leave your comments in the section below

Channel: Global Triathlon Network

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Keywords: hrv, smart watch, hr, chronic stress, run, running, endurance running, heart rate, heart rate monitor, train using heart rate, max hr, max heart rate, resting heart rate, watch, running watch, pregnancy, GTN, Global Triathlon Network, triathlon, Triathlon (Sport), tri, ironman, Sports, swimbikerun, triathlon training, triathlon skills, iron man, tri bike, triathlete, swimming, cycling, training, skills, coaching, ቿ, Ꮽ, Ᏹ, Ᏼ, ꖧ, ೊ, ཙ, 𑃔, की, ፕ15, ᡝ, ዩ, whoop band, whoop data

Id: LH8oK8FazUc

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024