training timed to perfectionQuestions or feedback?
info@ithlete.caHeart rate variability, or HRV for short, describes the way your heart beat varies - both at rest, and during exercise. Contrary to popular belief, the healthy heart does not beat like a metronome, but is constantly changing the time between beats in a rhythmic way. These changes are driven by the nervous system, constantly trying to find the most efficient way for the body to operate. The fact that the nervous system makes itself visible through HRV makes the heart a wonderful barometer of how hard your body is trying to preserve its equilibrium.
HRV has been used in hospitals for many years, mostly to help very sick patients whose beats are very regular, with little HRV, and has also been used in high end systems to help elite athletes. The widespread availability of heart rate monitor chest straps and the computing power packed into an iPhone mean that competitive and recreational athletes can now benefit from the big improvements in training effectiveness that HRV monitoring brings.
Intensive, or high volume, exercise will stress and tire your body, and this stress is reflected as reduced HRV. Recovery, which is vital both for improved athletic performance and general good health will cause your daily HRV to rise, letting you know that you are both getting fitter and avoiding staleness and sickness.
In two words: train smarter. By listening closely to your heart using HRV, ithlete tells you when to train, how hard to train and when to rest. Once you are giving your body a training load it can cope with, your training effectiveness will improve, and you will not lose nearly as much time to over reaching related illness (such as coughs and colds) or unproductive sessions.
It's hard for anyone (even experienced competitors sometimes) to judge whether they are under or over doing their training. Whilst the first leads to disappointing performance, the second can result in increased sick days through colds, persistent fatigue or worst case, substantial periods of layoff from exercise.
The simplest way to start using HRV to guide your training is to take a measurement using the ithlete app every morning, then train as normal, according to your plans. If your reading drops significantly, take this as an early warning that you are overloading the system. A small drop is OK as long as you recover. Training is all about stress and recovery and a hard session will lower your number. But if it stays low even with rest you could be on the edge of trouble. Using ithlete daily to monitor training stress is the best thing you can do to make your training safe and effective.
Top amateur and professional athletes from sports such as running, football, cycling and rowing use heart rate variability to help assess their training load and readiness for matches and competition. HRV analysis is used extensively in sports science research to assess the body's adaptation to training by becoming fitter.
HRV analysis is normally performed under coach supervision using specialised software that requires a sports science background and specific training. ithlete is the first easy to use product that allows the benefits of HRV training to be gained by anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch and a desire to use their limited training time effectively.
Taking your morning pulse is a classic check for signs that your body is under stress and needs recovery, and is probably performed by at least 50% of experienced runners and other athletes. A morning pulse rate a few beats per minute higher than normal is a sign to go easy. The trouble is that there are mutliple factors able to influence your heart rate and it is not that easy to perform the test accurately or to track when changes become significant enough to take action.
You can think of the ithlete app's heart rate variability measurement as a more sensitive, up to date morning pulse test where the readings and calculations are all done with high precision and stored to develop personalised decision making criteria on when it is right for you to train, how hard to train, and when to rest.
Just remember when comparing the two that a higher HRV number is a good thing, indicating better rest and recovery, whereas a higher resting heart rate is bad and may indicate accumulated fatigue.
The User's Guide provides a comprehensive overview of how to get the most out of ithlete, and includes articles by experienced coaches and users.
For an in depth review paper that explains concepts such as periodisation, training volume, thresholds, overload, overtraining and recovery that will help you reach peak performance, see the link below:
The file export allows you to email a copy of all your ithlete readings to any email address you like. That could be a friend, coach, or yourself in order to include in your training log or just to keep a safe copy.
The file is in .csv (comma separated variable) format and can be imported into many spreadsheet programs such as Excel, Numbers and OpenOffice. These programs will do some basic formatting for you when you open the file, and will put the Date, Time, HRV and resting HR into separate columns. The final column is made up of the Indicator letters that ithlete uses to make recommendations on your training for that day.
These are interpreted as follows:
What I like to do is create a chart, like a bigger version of the one in the app, with HRV on the Y (vertical) axis and Date on the X (horizontal) axis. I then compare notes from my training diary to see how my body reacted to the different types and levels of training. It's also helpful to look at patterns of HRV before a race or event when you did well, and one where you were disappointed in order to see if there were some patterns that you could find useful to identify in future.
Having trouble with some aspect of using ithlete? Perhaps one of the headings below describes the problem and possible solutions. The ithlete User's Guide is also a great resource.
The heart does not pulse after pressing Start and the two indicators at the top of the screen stay red. Things to check:
You get HRV readings that are much higher or lower than you were expecting, or inconsistent readings.