Week 49: Heart Rate Variability: A Deep Dive
Hi there 👋
I hope you are doing well.
I recently joined Rick Prince on the All Things Endurance Podcast for a conversation about HRV, training, and how to make sense of physiological data as an endurance athlete. We dug into what HRV actually represents, where it’s useful, where it isn’t, and how I think about integrating it with training decisions.
During the episode, we touched on quite a few topics, including:
A bit of my background and how I ended up working on HRV and building HRV4Training
What HRV really is and why it can be meaningful when tracked correctly
Do wearables measure HRV accurately, and what should we consider the gold standard?
How HRV changes with age or gender, and what “normal” actually means
Whether and when athletes should adjust training based on HRV (and why a few low days in a row are not necessarily a crisis)
The most common factors that influence HRV day to day
Why HRV should never be looked at in isolation, and how I correlate it with subjective data and training load
The limitations of HRV, the areas where research is still evolving, and what we can actually trust
Some context on HRV4Training, how we built it, and how athletes use it in practice
If you’re curious about HRV, or simply want a clearer framework for interpreting your own data, this episode covers all the key ideas.
I’ve really enjoyed the chat and appreciate the work Rick has done, having taken a few UESCA courses myself. Thank you for your support.
Personal Coaching for Runners
If you’d like to work with me 1-on-1 for your running goals in the year ahead and beyond, please apply here.
You can also learn more about my coaching, here.
Thank you and happy training!
HRV4Training Pro
HRV4Training Pro is the ultimate platform to help you analyze and interpret your physiological data, for individuals and teams.
You can find a guide and overview here.
Try HRV4Training Pro for free at HRVTraining.web.app
When using Pro, the app will also automatically recognize your account and add the Normal Range to the Baseline view, together with detected trends and additional annotations, which can help contextualizing longer-term changes.
You will also be able to pick rMSSD as the parameter to see on the homepage of the app.
Thank you again for your support and for allowing us to remain independent.
See you next week!
Marco holds a PhD cum laude in applied machine learning, a M.Sc. cum laude in computer science engineering, and a M.Sc. cum laude in human movement sciences and high-performance coaching. He is a certified Ultrarunning Coach.
Marco has published more than 50 papers and patents at the intersection between physiology, health, technology, and human performance.
He is co-founder of HRV4Training, Endurance Coach at Destination Unknown, advisor at Oura, guest lecturer at VU Amsterdam, and editor for IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. He loves running.
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