Anyone had any luck with one of the heartrate-variability systems in being able to accurately estimate “readiness,” training stress, etc?
I found the FirstBeat article confusing. And boy is it expensive if you go all-in for the type of system that’s seemingly described in the article series - around $1000 as far as I can tell.
I tried Omegawave - reasonably priced. Bought an ECG-capable HRM strap and got a subscription. And it just doesn’t seem to work at all. Case in point, this weekend I had 4 tough criterium races. Before the first crit when I was feeling tapered and ready it told me my “Readiness” was “Good.” Fine. I thought it’d be a little better than that, but I can live with “Good.” Then after 4 really tough races I’m totally ruined. I feel exhausted, cranky. And it tells me my readiness is “Excellent.” Pegged at the far end. That’s B.S.
Anyone found any of the various systems that works for them? Definitely not shelling out $1000 for the all-in FirstBeat system if there’s not proven success for some people. There’s also lower-end FirstBeat things, like the EPOC metrics available in some Garmin products, etc. Those work for anyone?
I have used the Omegawave system a while ago but eventually gave up on it. I started using it after a long winter break with less fitness and when ramping up training and was expecting to at least see some changes or trends or fatigue etc. But that wasn’t the case, I got the same results every day. According to the app, every day I was well rested and ready to go at it whereas I knew sometimes I was just too tired (or even just knowing that not everyday should read the same).
I am skeptical about FirstBeat as well, partly because Omegawave at least had the whole ECG waveform whereas Firstbeat only has time intervals between two beats. That’s essentially a lot less information and I think that’s why they process the result down into something that’s a single number. They might say that it’s better or easier to understand but I think it is also driven by limitations in terms of what you can actually do with only time interval data.
I too, have had similar and unsatisfactory experiences with HRV. Several years ago, I bought a system and had feedback that I was not recovered when I felt good to go . Conversely, it gave me a green light the day after a hard work out and poor sleep.
Good idea in theory, but I will not buy another system until somebody else raves about their results.
HRV4 Training is boss. It is super accessible, uses your phone, and accurate.Can you elaborate on this? What is ‘boss’, what makes it accurate, and what do you do with the information? And if you say it’s accurate, how do you know it is accurate (i.e. what do you compare it to or calibrate it against)?
Got the Firstbeat system. It works and helps you to better understand your body. Used it about 50-60 times to calibrate to my heart over a period of 2 years.
Practically, HRV is highly correlated to resting heart rate.
This is why I switched to FitBit’s charge HR. less complicated to wear, log, etc. If that goes up I pull out the pro stuff from Fitbit to have a closer look (or just take a day off training…).
To me Firstbeat will only really work day to day once the Suuntoo Spartan with 24x7 hr monitoring comes out with RR intervals (provided they are as accurate as their bodyguard device. it doesnt work as well with Garmin’s straps etc - there is substantial data loss).
No. At night you wear a thing called bodyguard attached to the chest with medical stickers.
You can also upload workout measurements but only if data are stores with RR data (raw so the variability can be calculated). Not all Garmins have that feature neither has the TickrX. Works best with Suunto.
Anyone had any luck with one of the heartrate-variability systems in being able to accurately estimate “readiness,” training stress, etc?
I did a study with some of my athletes on morning hrv measurements in the off-season. I can relate my experiences.
We did morning, 3-minute resting measurements, I analyzed the readings for multiple parameters in Kubios - which was a huge pain in the ass BTW. Also did weekly time trials, I think running in this case. The athletes ranged from ladies who came to the sport late in like with little natural gifts and little training time to a couple guys who regularly place top three in age group in age group races and could qualify for usat nats if they desired to. So slower than your typical slowtwitchers
Here’s what we found.
About a third of the folks just flat out didn’t comply. They thought it was a good idea but would forget to get the measurement, forget to upload it, not do it for the full three minutes, take the measurement after they had their coffee etc etc.
One athletes’ resting breathing rate was below 6 breaths per minute. So when looking at her data with frequency based measures - it threw all of her “good” values into the “bad” pile. We got her straightened out by having her do paced breathing - this is something that is overlooked often in my opinion. If you take a gaggle of endurance athletes - several will have natural breathing rates below 6 breaths per minutes. And even if it is above, the changes in frequency can change the nature of the measurements and skew the results if you don’t do paced breathing.
I think that left us with 5 athletes who got something close to analyzable data.
One athlete’s results were shockingly accurate, his change in “good” hrv values tracked with performance surprisingly well. The rest not so much. I think the mean r value when I checked for correlation between performance and any of the hrv measures was 0.65. So it was significant and could explain some of the variation in performance, but only 40 to 50% for most people.
SO in the end here’s where I think we are with HRV.
You need data that is done at the same time in the same position every day with breathing preferably near ten times per minute.
You need some sort of analysis program, and as stated above, HRV4training is indeed the bomb for that purpose. Those of us on android don’t have such a clear-cut easy program to use. Though elitehrv and selfloops are OK.
At the very least I recommend looking at your data and training schedule laid together in trainingpeaks. Look to see if the responses make sense. The day after a hard day, does one of the hrv measures reliably jump or drop? If so, then looking at how quickly it returns to normal gives some indication of how much time you should spend tapering as you get close to race day. Though this application as yet has little science behind it.
But if this relationship holds, then the application of scaling back training on days when your hrv numbers are out of whack might be a promising avenue to pursue particularly if you have been plagued n the past by overtraining or overreaching.
It’s best to run a self-pilot to see if any if the various hrv measures tracks with your own performance. This would involve at least 6 but probably 8 or more weekly time trials in the sport of your choice and then going back and running a correlation analysis in excel to see if any of the hrv values tracked with performance for you. If you get some that correspond well, then this is an application that can work for you. You can use hrv measurements as a surrogate for performance testing to perform a Banister type analysis on your response.
So in the end, there are some people for whom this flat our will not work. Also, even if it works there isn’t yet a sort of end to end or even partial solution to show how hrv measurements might change how you train. And very little of the research that has been performed was on triathletes, so contrary to the article listed I don’t really see an elegant solution yet on how to integrate for multisport athletes.
This might get somewhere soon, but right now it’s still a tough nut to crack.
To me Firstbeat will only really work day to day once the Suuntoo Spartan with 24x7 hr monitoring comes out with RR intervals (provided they are as accurate as their bodyguard device. it doesnt work as well with Garmin’s straps etc - there is substantial data loss)
This is the killer app for the firstbeat nighttime hrv measuring system.
Agree! One caveat - its for people that sleep at home a lot. For me the frequent business travel across time zones is exactly the stressful element I am missing when I log training volume and intensity. Often times a rest day really wasn’t one if packed with flights.
Or I carry that thing around with me. Can it be linked to automatically feed into Firstbeat? This is crucial for a day to day log item.
Similarly to respiration rate I wonder if my resting HR can screw things up. When I’m very rested (low acute training stress) and very relaxed my HR drops to around 30-35 and my heart skips a beat a every 3rd or 4th beat. (Hopefully benign) PVC or something. It goes away as soon as I start doing anything, like stand up.
Do you see the issues you were having more from inaccurate/bad data interpretation from the software or that it is too hard to have repeatable conditions i.e. breathing rate, sitting up before taking a reading, waking up at different times (6am reading, 8 am reading, etc)? Do you think taking a longer sample (firstbeat system tracks over night) would help with these inconsistencies? I would think 3 minutes when you wake up could give you all sorts of inconsistent data unless you are a perfect sleeper and wake up in the same state and at the same time each morning.
In terms of accuracy they put it better than I (http://www.hrv4training.com/...ng-the-phones-camera). I wanted to test this for myself when I first swapped to an optical sensor so used both HRV4 Training and Elite HRV (with a Polar strap) for three weeks. These were returning consistent results. Therefore I personally trust it.
It seems the important thing with HRV is the long term picture. As such compliance with measurements under similar conditions is important. That is where the optical sensor comes in to its own. Personally, I have found I am much more likely to actually take it if I don’t have to mess around with a chest strap.
I’ve been using Elite HRV, an app for Android phones in the Google Play store. It was free but I think they are trying to sell packages for whole teams and trainers to interact with and see the data.
It syncs with my Wahoo Tickr HRM. You’re supposed to do a “morning readiness reading” when you wake up before getting out of bed, but I never bring my HRM to the nightstand, so usually I just do post-workout readings when I’m already wearing my HRM.
I haven’t been training hard enough to expect significant changes in my HRV to tell me when to recover, but they did have some interesting white papers to read, and I figure it can’t hurt to collect the data periodically even if I’m not trying to analyze it on a daily or weekly basis…
Similarly to respiration rate I wonder if my resting HR can screw things up. When I’m very rested (low acute training stress) and very relaxed my HR drops to around 30-35 and my heart skips a beat a every 3rd or 4th beat. (Hopefully benign) PVC or something. It goes away as soon as I start doing anything, like stand up.
All of the proposed uses of HRV I have seen to date use a personal baseline, so the fact that you have a high or low resting heart rate shouldn’t matter as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the information!!
Do you see the issues you were having more from inaccurate/bad data interpretation from the software or that it is too hard to have repeatable conditions.
I think the issues I see are mostly a function of the fact that performance changes week to week depend on a lot of things that hrv doesn’t reflect. I think the overnight readings might make it a bit better but I think the hrv readings need to be combined with something else.
I am familiar with the firstbeat system as far as EPOC but not that familiar with the recovery aspects of it.
This is a blanket and hopefully all-encompassing reply to all of the very interesting comments on this thread. Firstly, I specifically and intentionally interviewed several athletes and coaches who have no financial ties whatsoever to Firstbeat in order to provide as unbiased and open-minded assessment as possible about the system. I’ve known one of the coaches interviewed, Zach Caldwell, for many years: he is a stodgy, Vermont curmudgeon and I can promise you that he would never endorse any product for which he did not truly believe in its merits.
Next, I also tested the OmegaWave system a few years ago and like many others, I was also disappointed with it. It has been a few years since I used OW, but I can assure you that Firstbeat is head and shoulders above it in recording accuracy and overall functionality. So for those of you who were underwhelmed w/ OW, I’m right there with ya.
Finally, as I wrote in the article, this system is not a panacea, but rather another tool in your arsenal. If it is used properly, patiently and with sufficient understanding of the software, it can provide valuable insight into what’s happening “under the hood.” Is it perfect and 100% comprehensive? Absolutely not. But I do believe it is the best thing out there and used in combination with RPE, HR, power, a good coach and common sense, it will provide a competitive advantage and perhaps most importantly, allow athletes to use their training time more effectively. It is not cheap, but if you are busy, training at a high level and willing to invest the time, money and energy into understanding how to use it effectively, it will be an enormous asset. I have worn it almost every day for going on a year and while it hasn’t revolutionized my training, it has provided useful guidance on many occasions.
I applaud everyone for the skepticism and critical thinking on this issue and hopefully these clarifications and additional information are also helpful.
I’m so glad that someone started a thread on this topic and thanks Fast BigDog for the great article to kick it off. As I mentioned in comments, I tried OW and ithlete but had very limited success. For me, the problem was that a morning HRV had too many variables. A cat might walk across my chest. I might be thinking about an annoying email. Any little bit of stress could throw off my HRV dramatically. A nighttime sleeping HRV test makes so much more sense to me. Suunto recently added it to their Ambit 3 device, but I’d rather have it on the PC and also Ambit 3 doesn’t support ANT+. Hence, the reason why Firstbeat seems like a very interesting idea.
The problem I’m having is nailing down exactly which product to get. I think the cheapest option is to get the $299 one-year license (http://shop.firstbeat.com/us/all-products/sports-individual-1yr.html) and test it out with my 920xt (which apparently can record R-R and is listed as being compatible). I noticed on Firstbeat’s Facebook page that they had a 50% sale for Black Friday-- maybe they’ll do that again for Black Friday and maybe for Rio? If so, then I could grab the unlimited lifetime license (normally $799). Glad to hear the less-than-stellar feedback on the Bodyguard 2-- a normal belt looks just as comfortable and I could use the extra $350 that a BG2 would have taken from my wallet.
That’s the plan at least-- maybe a FB owner could confirm that that’s the way to go? Firstbeat hasn’t replied to my email to them but I’ve heard that they’re not known for exceptional customer service.
