There’s a simple recipe to turn frustration into new skills on and off the bike.
Contents:
- HRV: the most important daily metric
- What is HRV (really)
- HRV and the autonomic nervous system
- What’s limiting your HRV: 3 Things
- How to get accurate data: Device
- We’re doing it wrong: how you should take your HRV
- How I get my HRV now
- Introducing: The Recovery Score
- How to use HRV to train
- Mind blown: HRV and your zones
- Is Morpheus accurate: the Peter Attia test
- Do I still use Garmin for my rides?
- What’s more important: HRV or VO2max?
- Using HRV to identify health issues
- What to focus on
Introduction
There’s an amount and a type and an intensity of training that you are individually going to respond the best to. If you go above it, not so great things are going to happen. If you go below it, you’re you’re not going to get the output you want. And that amount is not easy to find and it changes on a weekly basis. It’s not the same week in week out. If you can get that right week in and week out, you will see continual improvements and that work will turn into result. If you don’t answer that correctly, bad things happen. And that’s why HRV may just be the most important metric you check every single day. I know, I know. I’ve also said this. Nothing nothing is more predictive of how long you will live than your VO2 max. So now you’re wondering, well, which is it, HRV or VO2 max? Don’t worry, it’s all going to make sense. But right now I think the burning question is what do we need to understand about HRV or heart rate variability to make this or this more useful? And if you don’t have either that’s okay as you’ll see all I know from Garmin is that being in the red is bad being in the orange is less bad and being in the green is good. But like what do we do with that? Because HRV is the metric of recovery, but most of us are getting our HRV wrong and relying on inaccurate data. But when you get it right, it will change the way you train and manage your life. Because it turns out HRV not only tells you how you’re handling the stress of your rides and your workouts, it reflects all the other stress in your life, too. done right, HRV can act like a traffic light, signalling when you’re ready to roll or maybe when you should dial it back. And even better, if you use heart rate zones to train, HRV is going to rock your world. And I’ll show you the device that I’m using now for HRV and how to get a reliable reading every morning and then translate your HRV into a recovery or readiness score. It is the coolest discovery I’ve made all year and it’s going to eliminate the guesswork of training this winter. But before we get there, it’s probably a good idea to understand what HRV really is because it’s
What is HRV (really)
pretty clear people find it confusing. So based on my research, I just tell them it’s just the RMSSD, the root mean square of successive differences in milliseconds of the R-R beats. You write all your time gaps. Then you calculate the differences between each time gap and the last. and then square these differences. So none are negative. Calculate the average of those differences and then take the square root of that. Simple, but really HRV is just measures the time between heartbeats in milliseconds. But your heart doesn’t beat to a metronome. The timing between the beats varies slightly, putting the variability in heart rate variability. And ultimately what that tells us is how much energy your body has been spending on recovery. Because of this, it gives us a window into the physiological cost of all the stress your body has been under recently. Over the long run, the baseline HRV number is a powerful gauge of your body’s resilience against stress, both physical and mental, according to Joel Jameson. Joel Jameson is a world-renowned coach to UFC champions and pro athletes. His success is due in large part to his introduction to HRV decades ago back when Russian coaches were slapping six leads on athletes chest and then hooking them up to a big machine to track their HRV. And by the way, he has a great backstory on his introduction to HRV testing that’s going to go out in my weekly email soon. So, if you’re not getting that, you can sign up here. Here’s how Joel explains HRV. Really, what I try to get people understand is we’re measuring how the body is reacting to the world around it. And that means everything you’re doing, how well you’re sleeping, how much mental stress you’re under, how well you’re recovering from your workouts, what your diet’s doing to you, just all it’s a summation of everything because it’s not selective. It’s not just responding to one thing. that you’re responding to. All of those things are going to influence your parasympathetic state. Both. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Your parasympathetic
HRV and the autonomic nervous system
state. So imagine if you had to tell yourself, take a breath, exhale, beat the heart, stomach, keep digesting, breathe. It’s absurd. Like we never do anything else in life. So say a giant thank you to your autonomic nervous system that’s running all those things behind the scenes that keep us alive and performing and that you know we just take for granted during your ride. It’s the sympathetic fight-or-flight branch of your nervous system that regulates your heart rate and gets oxygen to your muscles among other things. The same goes if you’re working and really using your brain or you’re in a stressful situation. But when you’re done your ride or your workout, you want the parasympathetic rest and recover system to put the brakes on and bring everything back to homeostasis so that you can begin to recover because that’s when you get stronger. But how does that happen? Well, the prime mechanism for that is your breathing. And if you look at your heart rate on your Garmin or your Apple Watch and you take a you take a deep breath and you look at your watch expecting your heart rate to go lower, you’ll find it actually goes up. That’s because every inhale suppresses the vagus nerve, the main highway of the parasympathetic nervous system that runs from your brain stem down to your heart, lungs, and gut. But when you exhale, what happens? Now your heart rate starts to fall. It’s this waxing and waning of veagal tone and its impact on heart rate that forms the foundation of a proper HRV test. And to put a bow on this, if you wake up in the morning and your HRV is low, it may mean we’re still kind of going through that process of coming down from a stressor or we’re under something right now acutely that’s stressful, right? Our sympathetic system turned on because our body is still in that heightened state. If we see a much higher parasympathetic tone, it says, “Oh, our body’s really shifted heavily towards the other direction, more towards rest and digest and recovery and regeneration, adaptation, it’s more anabolic, all that sort of stuff.” And then we see as you kind of come back, you’re going to go right back to where you started. And just before we get to the most accurate way to test your HRV and importantly, how you can actually use it, it’s really important to understand three key
What’s limiting your HRV: 3 Things
things. Starting with the fact that HRV is highly individual, meaning you should compare yourself to you, not someone else or some metric or standard out there. While it’s true that poor sleep and a bad diet can lower HRV, it’s also true that genetics play a big role in your HRV range. Check this out. You know, I’ve got patients who live at 100 and a good day for them, a good day for them, quote unquote, they’re at 120 and a bad day for them, they’re at, you know, 85. But, you know, if you follow them for 5 years, their average HRV is going to be 100 milliseconds. I’ve got other patients whose average HRV is 15 milliseconds, and a good day for them is 25 to 30, and a bad day for them is 10. Um, How could that be explained by something other than genes? That’s crazy, right? So, let’s continue. They say genetics is somewhere between like 15 and 70s something% of HRV. There’s just such a wide range in the research of what you see. You know, where that exact number falls, I’m not sure, but you definitely see a very strong genetic component to it. Why? I don’t think we truly understand that. But as you mentioned, I see people who don’t work out at all and they come into the gym or they, you know, whatever and you look at their numbers and you’re like, you have a very high HRV that you would not expect because you clearly don’t have very high level of cardiovascular fitness. But I’ll say kind of as a whole, if you start talking those people, they tend to have a healthier family history. They tend to have better health markers. I think there’s something to that and that that higher H probably still correlates to a health benefit even if it doesn’t necessarily come from exercise derived means. It’s just a genetic thing that they have that probably conversion benefit. And while lifestyle and training can still shift baseline HRV modestly within your genetic range, Dr. Marco Altini, one of the leading HRV researchers and coach to elite runners, puts it succinctly. I’d like to save you time and money. I most likely cannot increase your HRV, and that’s fine. Because it’s not just genetics, it’s also age. And here’s Dr. Attia again, a 50 year-old’s HRV is less than half of a 15year-old’s. Um, and it just keeps getting further and further crushed as we go down. I suppose that speaks to what you said earlier, right, which is one of the hallmarks of aging is this sort of lack of resilience. And we see it on every level. But this is just uh a very notable example which is even at the level of the autonomic nervous system, we lose the ability to recover from insult. And life is an insult. Everything in life is an insult. The world around us is just insulting us all the time. It’s just we can respond much better to it as we’re younger. And here’s why that is. Age reduces your margin of error is what it comes down to. I mean, I’m 44 and you know, like you can do a lot of things wrong in your 20s and maybe in 30s and you can still get a lot of benefit out of it because you just can you’re so resilient. Your your metabolism will adapt. But like you said, the older you get, the the less you can do that. And so you you have to be much more acutely aware of what your body can and can’t do. And that’s part of what HIV can help you understand. I mean, you’re just losing again this adaptability, this this ability to turn those two dials as necessary to meet whatever demand you’re placing in the body. We can’t turn that sympathetic dial up as much. We don’t have that spontaneous energy that you just described to get up and sprint because that that dial was way slower and it probably can’t go up as high. Yeah. So, it’s like we’re born with a 0 to 10 rheostat or dial on both of them. And as you age, that 10 goes to a 9, 8, 7, 6, 5. And yeah, you can still move them, but you just can’t move them as much. 100%. I would call like autonomic range. And and that really kind of represents what is our body capable of from an energetic standpoint. How quickly can we turn that dial up? And then conversely, how quickly can we turn that dial back down and crank up that parasympathetic side to restore homeostasis and get our bodies back to normal. And then there’s the impact of everything else. And and to your point, I think people vastly underestimate, in my experience, the impact of their life on their fitness. They really do. They just don’t realize how much a poor night of sleep or two nights of poor sleep or few nights few much too much drink one night or just a poor diet or they really underestimate mental stress. Mental stress is a much bigger deal I would say than people realize. So when you look at your HRV just remember that it’s impacted by way more than your workout. And then try to control the controllables, like try to get better sleep, to eat better, cut out alcohol, and take a freaking machete to stress, like I did that. And if you’re struggling with those things, at the end of the day, it’s also helpful to remember that resting heart rate is a better indicator of your fitness, whereas HRV is an of the- moment indicator of how well you’re handling your current training and the rest of your life. So, don’t fixate on one low HRV test. According to Dr. Altini, you should aim for stability as opposed to increasing its value. The goal, in my opinion, should not be to increase HRV, but to use HRV to improve outcomes that do matter, eg our health and performance, if that’s something that we care about, which is the perfect setup for how to use HRV for performance. Starting
How to get accurate data: Device
with accurate data. A metric is only useful if it’s accurate. And in this case, accuracy depends on two things. the right device and the proper method. And nothing beats this. According to studies, our wearables with their optical sensors, Garmin, Apple, Whoop, Aura, aren’t as accurate as this, for a couple of reasons. Here’s Joel Jameson to explain the difference. you know, 90 plus percent of the research has been done with either the EKG or with chest straps because that’s really been the gold standard of how it’s measured. The use of these PPG or optical sensors really has only been the last, you know, five, six years. They they’ve been around and traditionally their accuracy was just questionable when it came to it. And they don’t get the same electrical signal. They’re measuring changes in blood volume through the skin. Basically, the electrodes shine electric or shine the LED light down into the skin and it reflects differently based on the blood flow flowing through the the arteries below it. And so you’re getting the pulse and they actually call it pulse rate variable. It’s not really heart rate variability. If we want to get technical, it’s pulse rate variability. To get a good resolution, you need good blood flow below the surface and you need the lack of movement. The biggest problem with PPG sensors, optical sensors as a whole, is they get what are called motion artifacts and any kind of movement starts introducing noise into the signal because again we’re not getting electrical signal. We’re just getting this blood flow going beneath the surface that we’re using the LEDs to detect, right, for heart rate. When you start moving around, you get lots and lots of motion artifacts and it just becomes much more difficult for those sensors to detect it accurately. particularly in like a-cyclical movements, anything where your arm is moving around at random, higher heart rates, um darker skin colors, lots of things throw off PPG sensors. Tattoos also affect it. By the way, you guys know I love my Garmin data. I also want to trust it. And Dr. Marco Alini agrees, highlighting a study that concluded that wearables vary in accuracy in both your overnight heart rate and HRV compared to the gold standard, a single lead ECG chest strap. But then there are variations in the generations of the same device and then firmware and software updates, proprietary algorithms that change over times. Like should your HRV change when you move from Whoop to Garmin or Garmin to Aura? I don’t think so. Altini writes, “Not all HRV measurements are created equal.” And recent research highlights the pitfalls on relying on hardware or algorithms not specifically optimized for the job. The prime example of this issue is certainly the Apple Watch. Oh dear. But the situation seems rather similar for Fitbit, Garmin, Whoop, and others. HRV often ends up being an afterthought, not the core functionality of the device. He goes on to explain why, but really it’s moot when we understand that there’s a better way to measure HRV than the
We’re doing it wrong: how you should take your HRV
overnight method that our wearables use. Altini says you can avoid the issues from Apple, Garmin, Whoop, etc. And get accurate, actionable data by taking your HRV in a single morning measurement when you wake up. Joel Jameson agrees and explains why it’s so influenced by what you did in a few hours leading up to your sleep. So if you worked out at night, you had a glass of wine, the first few hours of your sleep are just reacting to that. It doesn’t mean at the end of the night that it’s where you’re going to be is not influenced by that versus everything else, right? Um the second thing is sleep quality is probably over reflected in your HRV compared to what your body actually ended up at. Think of it like this. And the analogy is if I was going to weigh myself, I’d want to weigh myself first time in the first thing in the morning in standard conditions. I wouldn’t want to have a meal and then go weigh myself. I’d want to have very standard ways of measuring so I can see the changes because ultimately it’s you changing against yourself that’s the most informative. So we wake up, we measure HIV, we see where you are and we see where you were, what your averages have been, what your variations have been, and that tells us where you are today. And that helps us make a decision about what are you ready to do right now or what’s the most appropriate for you to do right now. This is the impact of merely swallowing during your morning HRV test. It raises your heart rate. Drinking some water impacts HRV for up to an hour afterward. So now imagine what a plate of pasta and a couple of glasses of wine. Not to mention all the artifacts from moving around in bed with an optical sensor out here does to your HRV data over a course of a night. So taking two and a half minutes in the morning says, “Okay, you’ve rested. Now let’s see how you’ve recovered from your ride and that stressful moment yesterday and everything else.” Like it makes sense, right? So here’s how I get my HRV. Now, when I wake up, I put this heart rate
How I get my HRV now
chest strap on. But this isn’t my sweaty Garmin strap. It’s the Morpheus chest strap developed by Joel Jameson. I go to the bathroom, dampen the strap, and then get back into bed. Now, I open my Garmin app and refresh my sleep data because it’s going to flow into the Morpheus app. Then, in the Morpheus app, I answer a few subjective survey questions about the quality of my sleep and how I feel. And when I’ve settled again, I hit the start button and in two and a half minutes, I have my real HRV along with a recovery score. And here’s why that’s important. Let’s say you
Introducing: The Recovery Score
do a really hard ride. As you might expect, the next morning your HRV might drop. Here’s how Morpheus explains that in their app. Over the next two days, your body cranks up recovery by shifting more energy to rebuild and remodel all the stressed tissues, restock energy stores, etc. During this time, you’ll typically see a big rise in HRV, often well above where you started. Exactly how high it goes depends on a variety of factors like how stressful the workout really was, how fit you are, how much you help your body out by getting enough sleep, eating well, managing stress, etc. But you might interpret that spike in HRV for a green light, but then you’ll notice that your recovery score is down. You don’t want to mistake a high HRV rebound for readiness. It’s your parasympathetic nervous system saying, “I’m still repairing. Don’t add more stress yet.” It’s the recovery score in Morpheus that helps you go from a metric that’s often confusing to something actually useful. And and to be clear, I am not sponsored or affiliated with Morpheus in any way. I paid for this out of my own pocket because I think it’s so cool. And I’m just getting
How to use HRV to train
to the best bit. how to use HRV to improve your training. And this is the bit that kind of blew my mind. And I think maybe the perfect place to start is here. I I think what it comes down to is each person has a certain amount of training in a week they’re I like I think it’s a weekly basis, right? Because that’s kind of the cycle we live in. There’s an amount and a type and an intensity of training that you are individually going to respond the best to. And if you go above it, not so great things are going to happen. if you go below it, you’re you’re not going to get the output you want. And that amount is not easy to find and it changes on a weekly basis. It’s not the same week in week out. And so the more that you can hone in on that core, how much volume do I need and how much intensity do I need? If you can get that right week in and week out, you will see continual improvements and that work will turn into result. If you don’t answer that correctly, bad things happen. you either waste your time because you’re not getting as much out of it as you could or you do end up overtrained in which case we see injuries and we see burnout and lots of things that are going to have negative health consequences and that’s where I think data can play a really powerful role is it’s information that you can use to make much more granular decisions around rather than just guessing oh I should go do 40 minutes today should you or I should do 200 minutes this week is there anything to support that other than just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks and I think that’s what intrigued me so much about HRV is it felt like I could open the black box and get some real answers other than like test, train for eight weeks, re-measure, see what happened. I don’t want to wait 8 weeks. I don’t want to potentially lose the gains they could have made across that time period. So for someone like yourself that’s again wanting to get as much out of their time as they possibly can. Yeah, data can play a really strong role in that because it’s going to answer questions that can’t be answered otherwise. But how does accurate HRV data put you on the right course? Well, to answer that, let me ask you this.
Mind blown: HRV and your zones
Have you ever set out to do a zone two endurance ride and for whatever reason like you just can’t stay in zone two? You just keep popping into zone three. Conversely, you may hop on your trainer for a hit ride, maybe sprints or Norwegian 4x4s, but this week you can’t drag your heart rate into the VO2 max zone. For that matter, if you’re like me, you may even wonder, are my zones even right? Well, guess what? That’s because our zones are not static. They are dynamic. Because I think for many people, there’s still a little bit of ambiguity on not the concept of what zone 2 feels like, but the day-to-day variation, which again is really significant. And that speaks to the body’s dynamic. You know, I think we we can do a zone 2 test and look at lactate and all these things. If we just take one test, we don’t realize how much the body changes on a daily basis. And so, if you’re just, okay, I took my lactate test 6 months ago. I’m just using this static zone 2. You’re missing that dynamic change that the body is going through on a daily basis. The body is not static. I measure blood pressure. I measure testosterone. I measure like all these numbers change constantly. Like the body doesn’t sit still. Why am I just learning this now? Like am I the only one not to know this? Tell me in the comments. But back to those dynamic zones. The Morpheus algorithm then takes your HRV and recovery and sleep data from Garmin or Apple and then turns them into your daily training zones. Three of them. Recovery, conditioning, and overload. How you wish to train is up to you. But if you’re about to do a HIT ride, it tells you, okay, today overload, your red zone begins at a heart rate of 160. Yesterday it might have been 164. Conversely, if I want to do a zone two ride today, I know that I have to keep it under 143 beats per minute, the top end of the blue zone. So now you may be wondering, yeah, but like how do
Is Morpheus accurate: the Peter Attia test
you know the Morpheus algorithm is correct? This is what sealed the deal for me. And I have to tell you, Joel, I I cannot put in words how impressed I am with that system and how remarkably accurate it is at predicting something that is very difficult to predict. Um, so kudos to you for doing that. Um, what I find amazing are the days when, and I had one of these days a week ago. Morphia said I should have been at 140 or 139 for zone 2. I got on the bike and I did not feel great and I sort of said I think Morpheus got it wrong. I’m going to ride to this wattage and my heart rate was about 132. And I checked my lactate and it was 1.1 mill. It’s so damn accurate in what it predicts. It’s like a shaman. Um and he also has no financial interest in Morpheus. And he went deep on this. He’s kept a spreadsheet of heart rate, perceived exertion, and power along with what Morpheus set for his zones. But because he does a finger prick lactate test on the bike, he was able to confirm that the daily Morpheus zones check out. Like that is good enough for me. Now, recall that Joel said that there’s an optimal amount of training in a week for you, and it changes every week. And each week, the app tells you what that is, the number of minutes in each of the three zones for a given week, and where you’re at each day. So, your mind’s probably buzzing with questions like,
Do I still use Garmin for my rides?
“Do I still use Garmin for my workouts?” 100% I do. And as I sync them with Morpheus, it adjusts my recovery up or down depending on whether it aided in my recovery or depleted it more. You can even use the Morpheus app itself to train indoors, and I still capture it on my Garmin watch, but the Morpheus app has workouts targeting each of the three effort levels: recovery, conditioning, and overload. And you can configure the intervals and rest periods. And when it counts down to your interval, you’ll see if you’re in your daily target zone or not. It’s really cool. I should add that uh Dr. Marco Altini also has a dedicated HRV app and it’s called HRV for training. I haven’t used that one, but where it really shines is in the depth of the data it provides for your morning test. So, if you’re a data geek and you don’t really care about the daily training zones and the recovery score, this might be for you. It will estimate things like lactate threshold and VO2 max. And that brings us right back to where we started. What’s more important, VO2 max or HRV? As
What’s more important: HRV or VO2max?
Joel says, he’d rather have a person with a high VO2 max than someone with a high HRV that doesn’t even work out. Because, as Peter Attia often says, it’s not the high VO2 max number that’s correlated with health span. It’s all the work it took to get it. And you can’t have a high VO2 max without earning it. So in terms of longevity and health span, nothing is more important than that. But here’s why HRV is so important. One of the things I can tell you without question is VO2 max aerobic fitness correlates to HRV better than any other single marker. Oh, that’s interesting. Now, there’s a big genetic component to HRV just like there is in VO2 max. But if you some someone says, “How do I increase my HRV that that baseline number?” Without question, you improve your aerobic fitness. It’s somehow tied to mitochondrial function. It’s tied to centers in the brain that are colocated with different right regulation centers of of all this. People with higher VO2 maxes are going to have higher HRV 90 plus% of the time. That’s just the single biggest thing you can look at and predict what someone’s HRV is. Well, what’s their VO2? What’s their aerobic function? They’re going to have higher HRV if those are better. Interesting. And here’s the advantage of HRV because we can measure on a daily basis. I think that’s probably the advantage I would say it has is you’re not getting a VO2 max test every day obviously or every week or every month. You know, you’re not doing lactate testing. You’re not doing these markers that are more output based that are really important frequently enough to get feedback of whether or not you’re going the right direction. So, I think we can look at HRV in a more granular daily basis just kind of say, am I going the right direction? And that’s probably more of a utility than a great predictor of, you know, something. and we can look at those daily changes to help us make more informed decisions. We can’t do that with VO2 max or with you know more invasive tests. So it it’s a more uh you know narrow data point but it gives us something we can use more actionably than these longer term tests I think are better actual measures of outcome. And if we see our HIV trending down significantly that is a warning sign we’re doing something wrong. Our body is not adapting the way that it should be and we need to make adjustments whether it’s to training or or lifestyle. So I think it’s used differently. So in essence, while VO2 max is the most important outcome, HRV is the guide to get you there. And importantly, we can also use HRV
Using HRV to identify health issues
to shortcut problems in the extreme to identify real problems. Jules says if your RMSSD like the raw HRV number reported in Garmin is 10 or your Morpheus HRV which they normalize as a score out of 100 is in the 30s or 40s something may be wrong and he’s seen it firsthand. This is a you know one but I was at a guy there was name Meliff who you probably aren’t familiar with but he was a very well-known sports scientist. He wrote a book called Super Train. I was at his house with the original uh HIV system I was using and I had all the metrics and his HRV was like five and he just looked really bad, you know. I said then he had a heart attack and I said, “Mel, this looks really concerning.” He was, you know, he kind of brushed it off and he died of a heart attack uh you know, a few months later. And so, you know, if you’re really seeing these super low RMSSSD or Morpheus numbers, like it’s definitely an indication that that autonomic nervous system is not responding well to the world around it. And if it’s really really low, you know, there could be a legitimate medical concern that’s driving that. So, if you’re, you know, Morpheus 40s, 30s, and you’re just not getting up, it’s probably worth looking into, and it’s something to definitely be concerned about. The bottom line is that HRV is an everyday indicator
What to focus on
of how well your parasympathetic nervous system is responding to your workouts and everything else in your life. I said earlier we have to control the controllables. And to do that, we need to focus on recovery as much as our workouts. But recovery isn’t just about doing less or shuffling over to the couch. That can actually slow it down. And if you haven’t checked it out yet, I’ve got a whole recovery tool kit ready to go and you can find that right here. I’ll see you soon.