Does anyone have any practical experience monitoring heart rate variability as a metric for tracking training fatigue? How useful have you found it to be? A quick search brought up app available from omegawave, bioforce, ithlete.
Are there better ways to monitor HRV than these apps?
There have been a few studies out there that kind of reach into two areas.
First is the idea of adjusting training day by day according to morning hrv readings. There have been three published studies on it that I have seen, not all in endurance athletes. The setup was two groups, one group did a normal training schedule and the other group did a schedule that was adjusted using hrv. If the rmssd (one of the several heart rate variability numbers) was high they were good, if hrv was kinda low they dialed it back and if rmssd was very low they stopped training.
In these studies the two groups improved the same amount oven though the control group put in more hours. Though the sample sizes were small and it isn’t clear that the experiment’s design was likely to have detected a difference in the first place.
The other thread is predicting performance, several researchers have shown moderate but significant correlations between change in performance and change in a few different hrv measures. This could be useful for finding out how training changes your performance and then adjust your taper leading into a race, this is quite interesting to me actually.
Now, as for how to get the measurements you need an ant+ dongle $50 if you don’t already have one and two free software programs hrv tracker and kubios to get you numbers. HRV tracker allows you to grab the ant+ signal and record the time between heart beats and kubios is the mathematical engine getting the heart rate variability numbers and helping you filter data.
Having done a lot of these things and looked into the recordings, I haven’t found an automatic data filter that does the judge in a away I trust, I always grab the sections of data without artifacts in it manually in kubios. So I personally I would need more convincing from one of the companies you showed that their filtering or sample detection methods are up to it.
First, I would like to say that HRV alone won’t give you a full picture of what’s going on in your body. There are other systems that work at different “wavelengths” than your cardiac system. Yes, one affects the other, but it’s not totally accurate.
Having said that, HRV does help in identifying certain aspects of your body’s ability to adapt to training, and more importantly, how it’s recovering from your workouts. The studies that Kevin mentioned are valid; you can achieve the same potential by simply training, and not using any device to measure your body. We all know that peaking at the right time, and knowing when to push and when to back off is more of an art than a science. Or at least it used to be!
With Omegawave you can track your HRV values, while also tracking your aerobic readiness, which in essence gives you your cardiac super compensation curve. This is only available through our system.
I would like to challenge Kevin in the use of normal HR belts. They do R-to-R measurement only, which is ok, but not great. A full ECG sensor belt is available from us. Sure, it’s a bit more expensive, but you get more out of the measurement than with normal HR belts.
Anyway, I’m not here to sell our system, I’m here to say that HRV technology works to track how your body is adjusting to training. It can also tell you that you are not pushing yourself hard enough. Overall, it can help you optimize your training. Whether you use Omegawave, or the other brands, it’s up to you.
Could you explain how you interpret the results in Kubious and what figures you pay attention to and the significance of the trends in them please?
Could you explain how you interpret the results in Kubious and what figures you pay attention to and the significance of the trends in them please?
I’ll start by telling you what to do when taking the measurements, assuming you are using the ant strap, because these things weren’t obvious before I got started.
There is more background here, https://show.zoho.com/embed?id=483356000000019003 it’s a presentation I gave at MIT so the audience was engineers but you should find it helpful on some of the background. Also it came after a presentation on Banister modeling so it assumes you know what that is.
First things though,
when measuring you want to do it same time every day after peeing but before coffee.
You need three minutes without swallowing, swallowing changes the measurements to a ridiculous degree.
From experience you need to have a clock and make sure you breathe at 10 to 12 times per minute, since you need the computer handy you can just watch the clock on the computer, if you just totally zone out and relax and breathe 5 or 6 times a minute, it will screw up the numbers. We used a three minute test.
In some individuals, the lf power / hf power was the best indicator of stress, if that number is high then your short term stress is piling up and you should back off for a bit. Most authors have defined “high” as more than 1 standard deviation over the mean of the past ten days. However lf power / hf power needs a clean data input, there are filters out there, but they all skew the data one way or another. Also if your breathing rate goes below 10 for part of the test, it is totally void.
The long term positive adaptations were best fit by normalized HF, HFn in Kubios. But it has the same issues and so in two athletes this worked well, but for others it was useless.
What ended up working the best for all athletes was sd2/sd1 for short term stress and sd1 for long term adaptations. On an individual basis, it wasn’t the best for everyone, but across my group that worked on the pilot study it was the best. Those measures are more robust to breathing rate than the Hf and Lf power are.
And result, if I were trying it for the first time, I’d recommend using sd2/sd1 as the indicator I would track to see if my short term stress is high and I need to back off today.
There have been a few studies out there that kind of reach into two areas.
First is the idea of adjusting training day by day according to morning hrv readings. There have been three published studies on it that I have seen, not all in endurance athletes. The setup was two groups, one group did a normal training schedule and the other group did a schedule that was adjusted using hrv. If the rmssd (one of the several heart rate variability numbers) was high they were good, if hrv was kinda low they dialed it back and if rmssd was very low they stopped training.
In these studies the two groups improved the same amount oven though the control group put in more hours. Though the sample sizes were small and it isn’t clear that the experiment’s design was likely to have detected a difference in the first place.
The other thread is predicting performance, several researchers have shown moderate but significant correlations between change in performance and change in a few different hrv measures. This could be useful for finding out how training changes your performance and then adjust your taper leading into a race, this is quite interesting to me actually.
Now, as for how to get the measurements you need an ant+ dongle $50 if you don’t already have one and two free software programs hrv tracker and kubios to get you numbers. HRV tracker allows you to grab the ant+ signal and record the time between heart beats and kubios is the mathematical engine getting the heart rate variability numbers and helping you filter data.
Having done a lot of these things and looked into the recordings, I haven’t found an automatic data filter that does the judge in a away I trust, I always grab the sections of data without artifacts in it manually in kubios. So I personally I would need more convincing from one of the companies you showed that their filtering or sample detection methods are up to it.
I have read the research recently and I don’t think we know enough for HRV to be useful for guiding training. It is useful for showing effectiveness of psychological counseling, depression, psychological stress, but not overtraining, yet. We don’t really even know enough about sympathetic and parasympathetic responsed to overreaching and overtraining to be able to draw any solid conclusions from HRV data. There are trends in some studies as you point out, but I don’t think this is nearly ready for prime time.
I have read the research recently and I don’t think we know enough for HRV to be useful for guiding training. It is useful for showing effectiveness of psychological counseling, depression, psychological stress, but not overtraining, yet. We don’t really even know enough about sympathetic and parasympathetic responsed to overreaching and overtraining to be able to draw any solid conclusions from HRV data. There are trends in some studies as you point out, but I don’t think this is nearly ready for prime time.
I look at it pragmatically, what is out there now that does the same job? Or who can benefit from its use right now?
If you are presented with an athlete who continually has issues with non functional over-reaching that exists even after using normal best practices, then you need to look into something else. And HRV may be the next thing to investigate, particularly given its low cost of implementation.
So in the sense that for many athletes I don’t think it really adds anything as far as non functional overreaching, I agree with you, it’s not ready for prime time. But for those still struggling with overtraining type issues, it IS something to look into.
By the same token I look into it more for the use of performance modeling, I absolutely agree that actual relevant performances are better predictors and better inputs for models. However, my own experience and that of a handful of other coaches I have talked to on the matter is that performance modeling is a pain to implement for many different reasons, so using some hrv measurements as a proxy can offer an alternative input, that may not be exactly what we want but can still offer an insight into the person’s response to training.
I think it’s my background in engineering that leads me to look at the situation that way.
I have read the research recently and I don’t think we know enough for HRV to be useful for guiding training. It is useful for showing effectiveness of psychological counseling, depression, psychological stress, but not overtraining, yet. We don’t really even know enough about sympathetic and parasympathetic responsed to overreaching and overtraining to be able to draw any solid conclusions from HRV data. There are trends in some studies as you point out, but I don’t think this is nearly ready for prime time.
I look at it pragmatically, what is out there now that does the same job? Or who can benefit from its use right now?
If you are presented with an athlete who continually has issues with non functional over-reaching that exists even after using normal best practices, then you need to look into something else. And HRV may be the next thing to investigate, particularly given its low cost of implementation.
So in the sense that for many athletes I don’t think it really adds anything as far as non functional overreaching, I agree with you, it’s not ready for prime time. But for those still struggling with overtraining type issues, it IS something to look into.
By the same token I look into it more for the use of performance modeling, I absolutely agree that actual relevant performances are better predictors and better inputs for models. However, my own experience and that of a handful of other coaches I have talked to on the matter is that performance modeling is a pain to implement for many different reasons, so using some hrv measurements as a proxy can offer an alternative input, that may not be exactly what we want but can still offer an insight into the person’s response to training.
I think it’s my background in engineering that leads me to look at the situation that way.
Kevin
There is no doubt that your analytical skills far surpass most triathletes and coaches (and mine too!), so if anybody is going to be able to get some useful data out of HRV analysis, it is probably you. Personally, I don’t have the talent or temperment for that level of analysis (and I think most people don’t), so I prefer to sit on the sidelines until the smart people figure it all out and put it in a more usable package. If some funding goes through this summer, I will be getting an Omega Wave system in my lab this summer though (not for monitoring overtraining though). I had an opportunity to try out the competing Zephyr system this summer, which displayed a real time HRV metric. It was interesting to play with respiratory rate and other factors to see the immediate, and sometimes large, impact on HRV.
Isn’t Zephyr based in Annapolis?
kevin have you any experience how the old omega system that had 12 contact (meassure) points compares to the newer 2 contact point system?
I have read the research recently and I don’t think we know enough for HRV to be useful for guiding training. It is useful for showing effectiveness of psychological counseling, depression, psychological stress, but not overtraining, yet. We don’t really even know enough about sympathetic and parasympathetic responsed to overreaching and overtraining to be able to draw any solid conclusions from HRV data. There are trends in some studies as you point out, but I don’t think this is nearly ready for prime time.
I look at it pragmatically, what is out there now that does the same job? Or who can benefit from its use right now?
If you are presented with an athlete who continually has issues with non functional over-reaching that exists even after using normal best practices, then you need to look into something else. And HRV may be the next thing to investigate, particularly given its low cost of implementation.
So in the sense that for many athletes I don’t think it really adds anything as far as non functional overreaching, I agree with you, it’s not ready for prime time. But for those still struggling with overtraining type issues, it IS something to look into.
By the same token I look into it more for the use of performance modeling, I absolutely agree that actual relevant performances are better predictors and better inputs for models. However, my own experience and that of a handful of other coaches I have talked to on the matter is that performance modeling is a pain to implement for many different reasons, so using some hrv measurements as a proxy can offer an alternative input, that may not be exactly what we want but can still offer an insight into the person’s response to training.
I think it’s my background in engineering that leads me to look at the situation that way.
Kevin
There is no doubt that your analytical skills far surpass most triathletes and coaches (and mine too!), so if anybody is going to be able to get some useful data out of HRV analysis, it is probably you. Personally, I don’t have the talent or temperment for that level of analysis (and I think most people don’t), so I prefer to sit on the sidelines until the smart people figure it all out and put it in a more usable package. If some funding goes through this summer, I will be getting an Omega Wave system in my lab this summer though (not for monitoring overtraining though). I had an opportunity to try out the competing Zephyr system this summer, which displayed a real time HRV metric. It was interesting to play with respiratory rate and other factors to see the immediate, and sometimes large, impact on HRV.
Hi.
There are other options rather than measuring RR data and crunching them until one finds a pattern.
That will work now and then.
And for someone, at sometimes.
That has been the way to HRV for decades (it was first investigated in the 50s,).
It just doesn’t work. We are too many. We change. In fact, the all thing of training is about changing our physiology (enough to get more efficient in our sport of choice).
There are humans living everywhere from North pole to Patagonia. We are the best at adapting. Our body is meant at that.
There’s only - as far as I know - one different approach to this way of working, that still let the body float at will (no forced breathing-pace to “lock” the sympathetic system): Hosand Recovery Valuation system.
And, independent (and unsolicited) published paper at hand (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23715248) shows that the device used is far better than ordinary belts at measuring RR intervals. Even not at rest.
I’m here just to inform. So, if you wish, here is where : HRV - an online presentation.
For those of you with iPhone 4S and 5’s, Bluetooth Smart transmitters do exist. Androids do not have the hr profile to hear BT heart rate even though they are BT Smart.
Disclaimer… I WORK FOR POLAR USA