Ironman Lake Placid Training Week 25 Update-Still Tapering – Blog by Bri Tri

To see Bri Tri’s full blog post with his training description and pictures, please click here.

Below is an example of how SweetBeat can be used to monitor training for the Ironman at Lake Placid.

Time to Geek out!

“The Training Totals(since January 1 2013)..

Activity Distance Duration
Swimming 169,586 yds(96.4 mi) 66:37 hrs
Cycling 2,274.4 miles 140:59 hrs
Running 561.1 miles 88:39 hrs

Heart Rate Variability

My Heart Rate Variability (HRV)rebounded back into the high 60’s and 70’s this week with the reduction in training. I can’s say I really felt that spectacular yet, so hopefully that will come up even more this upcoming week.

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Looking at HRV for the entire training season, you can see the up-and-downs that go with the changes in volume and intensity of training. Overall, it appears to trend upward as the 2nd half of the season progresses. The very high value during the first week or two was from an old algorithm that was used in the Sweetbeat iOS app.

image

Training Load Analysis(TRIMP/CTL/ATL)

The graph below shows that my fatigue(ATL) has dropped significantly below my fitness level(CTL) giving me a positive Training Stress Balance(TSB) of 24(132 CTL-108 ATL = 24 TSB).

Training Load 2013-07-21

 

Finally the breakdown of weekly training volumes broken up by activity…

Weekly Training Volume 2013

To download SweetBeat on iTunes, click here.

Try our free app with Bulletproof Executive, Food Sense.

Ep 24 – SweetBeat and Soap Boxes By Jon & Debbie from FitFatFast.com

CEO Ronda Collier is constantly participating in podcasts to enlighten our users and listeners on how the autonomic nervous system works. She was recently interviewed by Jon and Debbie from FitFatFast.com. This is an excerpt from the article. To listen to the podcast, click here.

 

“Ronda Collier from Sweetwater Health, come on down, you’re the next guest on The Fit Fat Fast Podcast! In today’s show Jon and Debbie (but really Debbie’s “friend”) talk with Ronda about Heart Rate Variability and why it is an invaluable biomarker to track.  Indeed, if finding health and balance in your life is your ultimate goal you need to know about HRV!  We side-step all the uber-geek talk and get down to the nitty-gritty of what this stuff means to the regular person.  It’s a great conversation and it really is a topic very important to metabolic health.  We also talk about the functionality of the SweetBeat App which is the key that unlocks all of this information.

Jon also goes off on a tangent and climbs on his soap box while discussing an article written by a world renown Heart Surgeon on what really causes heart disease.  The Fit, Fat, Fast podcast is never short of opinions and Jon certainly makes this one known!

We also take on a listener question about why you still need supplemental calories from carbs during exercise even if you’re fat adapted.”

To download SweetBeat click here.

Download the free Bulletproof app – Food Sense.

Please send all support questions to support@sweetwaterhrv.com

Find Your Kryptonite With the Free Bulletproof Food Sense iPhone App! – by Dave Asprey

Find Your Kryptonite With the Free Bulletproof Food Sense iPhone App!Check out the brand new free iPhone app that helps you identify the hidden food sensitivities that make you weak. Hidden food sensitivities are like kryptonite – they cause chronic inflammation, make you tired and moody, and sabotage your fat loss. The free Bulletproof® Food Sense™ app uses your phone’s onboard sensor to get data about what your body does after you eat, so you can identify and eliminate problem foods in order to perform to your maximum potential.

This app is a brazen attempt to use biohacking technologies in an iphone app meant for everyone’s benefit.

After years of knowing that heart rate data is useful for detecting food sensitivity data, but not having a convenient way to use it in the real world, it’s exciting to work with SweetWater Health™ to make this type of technology convenient and accurate enough to use. The alternative is a lab test, which costs a lot of money and involves needles.

You can use this app to decide if it’s worth your time to get a full blood allergy test, or you can use it to help you know what foods to avoid without any lab test at all. I recommend you get a blood test for food allergies unless you feel awesome all the time without fail.

This is an example of how powerful it can be to gather and analyze data from your own body and use it to upgrade yourself. The Food Sense app isn’t meant to be used all the time. Just use it when you’re testing new foods to see how it helps you zoom in on your unrealized food sensitivities.

This app is free because everyone performs better when they are more aware of what is going on in their bodies. You don’t have to eat  the Bulletproof® Diet or drink Bulletproof® Coffee in order to use this app to feel better. Whether you are a biohacker or just concerned about your health, Food Sense™ helps you in your quest for optimal performance and a healthier life. Try it outUS iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store, see if it works for you, and let me know what you think!

The Quest to Bring You This Technology

When I first started down the path of biohacking and upgrading myself, I was fascinated to learn of Dr. Arthur F. Coca’s research that shows how the heart rate raises, by at least sixteen beats per minute, after you eat foods you are sensitive to.1 As profound as this research is, I found it wildly inconvenient to continuously measure my heart rate, gather the data, and analyze it to help me discover which foods were inflammatory vs. which ones just weren’t for ME. Of course this specific quest was before I fully developed an understanding for the larger relationship between common inflammatory foods and biochemistry in the majority of all people. It is one thing to know your sensitivities and another to know about inflammatory foods in general. More often than not they go hand in hand.

Then, in 2009, I was CTO of a company that makes heart rate monitor wristbands. I became interested in using wristband technology to gather data on food sensitivities, but soon realized that there was no real mechanism for doing that in a watch.

When I started working as an advisor to SweetWater Health™, a heart rate variability monitoring software company, I jumped on the opportunity to partner with them to create the Food Sense app. I was amazed to see how accessible and user-friendly they made the technology I have been dreaming about for years.

How the Food Sense Test Works & Why Eliminating Hidden Food Sensitivities Can Make You Think, Feel, and Look Better

food-sense-screenshot
My experience as a biohacker who used to weigh 300 pounds and really struggled with food cravings, is that every single person has a set of things in their environment or their food that makes them weak, and most people don’t know what most of them are. The Bulletproof® Food Sense app offers a food sensitivity test, using methodology developed by Dr. Coca, to help you identify what is causing the weakness. If you are sensitive to certain foods, you may not experience symptoms right away, though your body reacts by elevating your heart rate for up to 1 ½ hours after eating an offending food.

Food sensitivities are a reaction from the immune system or a result of the body’s lack of proper enzymes to digest foods. When the body reacts to a food, it sends out inflammatory proteins and cortisol, which create low-level chronic inflammation. This type of chronic inflammation may impair digestion, cause sore joints, headaches, and brain fog. Inflammation also triggers weight gain because it affects a specific part of the brain (the hypothalamus), causing it to become insulin and leptin resistant. Decreasing inflammation is critical to any effective fat loss protocol, including the Bulletproof Diet.
Unfortunately, a person with low-level inflammation often does not connect the symptoms with the foods, or may not even be aware of them.

This is where easy-to-use self-tracking tools like the Food Sense app come in handy. The Food Sense app uses the iPhone camera sensor to take quick and easy heart rate measurements at specific times of the day. You use the app to measure your pulse first thing in the morning to get a resting heart rate as a base to compare to. Then, before eating a meal, you record what is on your plate and perform a quick pulse test again. After the meal, the app will prompt you to measure your heart rate three times, every 30 minutes after the meal. Once testing is complete, the app determines if the meal triggered a food sensitivity, indicated by a red “X” or if not you will see a green checkmark.

While people can also use one of the affordable heart rate monitors compatible with the app, the camera sensor is a convenient way for people to adopt the food sensitivity test into their everyday life. Using the camera sensor merely requires holding the tip of your index over the iPhone camera lens and flash. No needles. No blood.

I used technology similar to this years ago, but it was too much work to take my own pulse using a little finger attachment, writing it all down, and analyzing the information. This app makes this process really simple and recordable.

Stress and HRV Training Features for High Performers Are in Full-Featured Version of the App

If you want to get a bit nerdy and serious about your performance, you can also get an amazingly full-featured version of the app that works with a compatible chest strap to measure and track your heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in the time between heartbeats, all day long. HRV is a great way measure of a person’s stress level and this app is able to tell you when you are “unconsciously” getting stressed or moving into a fight or flight response throughout the day. In fact, users can see their HRV in real time, giving them the ability to take action to manage stress during a 5-minute breathing and relaxing session. Doing these sessions can help you return to a more relaxed, higher performing state, even in demanding business environments.

This application does not compete with my friends at Heart Math who make the Inner Balance sensor, which you use to train your HRV for short periods, not track it all day. The two HRV apps actually work well together to train your nervous system for optimal performance.

In competitive sports, studies show HRV to be an effective metric to detect overtraining. The full-featured app measures HRV for training, recovery, and provides an objective measure of your body’s response to each workout. The athlete simply does a 3-minute HRV session each morning to determine a result that recommends, “train as usual”, “low exertion day” or “rest day” based on the athlete’s baseline trend.

The app even allows users to upload their data to a secure database in the cloud so they can access their data on a compatible Bulletproof website. Users sign in securely to see a calendar of their sessions, color-coded by average stress level, session tags, and session summaries.

Bulletproof Recommendation

For overall food allergy testing, the Bulletproof recommendation, if you can afford it, is still to get a blood test that looks at your antigens (IGE and IGG). These two tests will help you map out which foods on the test you’re sensitive or allergic to. However, if you eat out at a restaurant or eat mystery processed foods on occasion, that weren’t on the blood test, the Bulletproof Food Sense app will let you know if you have sensitivities to them.

So again, you don’t have to use this app all the time. Use it for a few days in a row to help you zoom in on your kryptonite.

Food Sense is available for free so you can try it out, see if it works for you, and let me know what you think!

Click here to download your free Bulletproof Food Sense app from the Apple iTunes store

50th episode of Bulletproof Executive Radio – New Free iPhone App “Food Sense”

Below is the original podcast article. To listen to the podcast and get a play by play itinerary click here.

“It’s the 50th episode of Bulletproof Executive Radio, which has now been downloaded more#50 New Bulletproof iPhone App, Food Sensitivities & HRV with Ronda Collier from SweetWater Health™ – Podcast than 1.3 million times, and has reached #1 status on iTunes. It’s time to celebrate and say thanks, so in true biohacker style, here’s a brand new free iPhone app to help you upgrade yourself, along with an interview with the scientist who made it all happen.

The new iPhone app is called Bulletproof® Food Sense
and you’ll hear a lot more about it in today’s show, and you can read more about it in the full blog post to come. Thank you for your support for the show and the blog – I am humbled.

Today’s interview is with long time biohacker and founder of Sweetwater Health™, Ronda Collier. Ronda is putting her Rhonda-Colliermore than 25 years of experience in high tech to work at SweetWater Health™, where they are looking at the signal coming from the human heart, and instead of seeing beats per minute or simple heart rate variability, seeing a huge pool of big data just waiting to be analyzed using Ronda’s crazy advanced math skills. There is a lot more information in your heartbeat than you’d think – stress levels are just the beginning. By applying mobile health monitoring and stress management with medical research techniques, SweetWater Health is creating some very advanced, very easy to use biohacking technologies.

My experience as a bio hacker who used to weigh 300 pounds and really struggled with food cravings, is that every single person has a set of things in their environment or their food that makes them weak. SweetWater Health and Bulletproof Executive just partnered to create the free Bulletproof® Food Sense iPhone app to help you find your personal kryptonite by using the phone’s onboard sensors to detect your hidden food sensitivities.

You can also get an amazingly full-featured version of the app that works with a chest strap to measure and track your heart rate variability all day long and use complex algorithms to quantify your food, stress, and overall health.

Click here to download your free Bulletproof Food Sense app from the Apple iTunes store

This application does not compete with my friends at Heart Math who make the Inner Balance sensor, which you use to train your HRV for short periods, not track it all day. In fact, I’m on the advisory boards of both Heart Math and SweetWater Health. Both companies totally rock!”

Ironman Lake Placid Week 20 Mini Camp Day 3 – Guest Blog by Bri Tri

This is an excerpt from Bri Tri’s Ironman Lake Placid Journey. At the bottom of the post you can find a link to the rest of his blog. We like to share our users’ journeys as often as possible.

“Sunday morning I woke up a bit groggy. I reached over to my nightstand, fumbling around until I felt the elastic band of my heart rate monitor strap. I squirmed around wrapping the HRM around me without  actually sitting up in bed, a task I have become quite proficient at over the last several months. I check my Heart Rate Variability(HRV) every morning. I was curious what HRV reading would be this morning after the 100+ mile bike ride and brick run yesterday. I hit the start button on the Sweetbeat HRV iPhone app and tried to relax as best I could for the next 3 minutes. After the buzzer went off, indicating the test had completed, I was more than shocked to see a reading of 36. Half of the previous days’ reading of 69. Obviously Saturday’s training had taken its toll on me and my body was a bit of stressed. Despite the app telling me to take it easy today, I had a 2:45 long run to do today, so the easy day will have to wait until tomorrow.

 

Daily AM HRV readings

As you can see from the graph, my HRV rebounded quite well on Monday after my long run with a value of 76. So I was able to recover from the bike pretty quickly.

I slowly maneuvered out of bed and starting making some instant oatmeal. My thought was to have my smoothie after my run, but then realized that I would not have time when I got back since we had to pack up and head home. So I mixed up the smoothie too, and had a much larger than normal breakfast. I am sure my body appreciated the extra nutrition. While eating breakfast, I noticed the constant flow of runners going back and forth past the end of the driveway on River Road, about 25 yards from our window. It was going to be a busy day on the run course I guess. Next I got my running gear together and set off for my long run. I had no idea how my legs would respond after the full bike.

I set off north (towards Whiteface) on River Rd for the 1.5-2 miles towards the course turnaround point. I started off without my 4-bottle fuel belt. No reason to lug that extra weight if I don’t have to, since I can pick it up on the way back. My legs were a little stiff at first, but by the time I got back to the house they were feeling better. It was very cloudy this morning and a little muggy. Not horrible though and I didn’t have to put sunscreen on which is great. There were a constant flow of runners out and most were all pretty friendly saying hello and good morning. Mostly everyone out was going at a pretty slow, Ironman age-grouper pace, but every so often a younger dude would fly by at a pretty fast clip. There were even some people out walking and a couple ladies doing the run/walk. I knew that cause I heard their little timer go off when I went by and they immediately started running.

When I got back to the house I stopped in for a bathroom stop and grabbed my Fuel Belt. Ughhh…it felt like I strapped a divers weight belt on. The slight grade of the road, heading south, amplified this weight even more. Eventually I settled into a steady rhythm again. I passed a couple people running towards me on my side of the road. I don’t know how people can run with their back to traffic? I felt really good the entire way out to Route 73 by the ski jumps. I was not looking forward to the either of the two hills on the course and the first one started here as I made the right across the steel bridge. It really wasn’t too bad and I continued to run fairly steady up it. Once I crested the hill, the course flattened out again back into town. At Lisa G’s began the big climb up to Main St.

The slog up up to Main St. is a tough one. I took it easy and slowed my pace a bit. A couple younger couples blew by my on the hill at a pretty fast pace. The one couple that was leading decided to just stop running and the other couple behind them almost ran them over. It was pretty funny. The couple that stopped continued running fast and walking the entire rest of my run. I kept leap-frogging them the whole way. It was quite annoying after a while. Why don’t they just run a little slower and keep running?

I made the turnaround at the back side of Mirror Lake and started making my way back to River Road again. Now the sky had really clouded up and was getting dark. It was only a matter of time before the rain started. I was ready for a little refreshing rain now. I continued leap-frogging the stop-and-start couple and took in the beautiful scenery of the mountains surrounding Lake Placid. It is such a beautiful place, which is why I wanted this to be my first Ironman. I think the mountainous scenery is one of those things that will help to really enjoy doing this event and get me through those times that are going to be painful.

My Garmin was reading 15 miles when I approached the house on River Road and I was somewhere around 2:15 at that point. I needed to do 2:45 so the out and back to the course turnaround should fill that in promptly. It is funny how so many times workouts just seem to automagically fit perfectly into the time I need to complete for a workout. Most times I do try to plan them that way either. The rain finally started to fall just as I passed the house. Denise was not back from her outing yet, so I pushed on. I figured she had gone to Henry’s Woods for a trail run. The rain increased more as I continued and by the time I got back to the house it was a steady downpour. 17.3 miles in 2:50. Not bad for a slow, steady run. I think that is a better pace than what I ran my first marathon. Of course I was nursing some IT Band issues during that, but it would be pretty funny if I end up PR-ing my marathon during Ironman. We’ll see.”

To read more about Bri Tri’s Ironman journey at Lake Placid, go to his blog.

To download SweetBeat click here.

24 Ways To Know With Laser-Like Accuracy If Your Body Is Truly Recovered And Ready To Train by Ben Greenfield

This is an excerpt taken from the article mentioned above by Ben Greenfield, in which he has used SweetBeat to monitor his training and recovery. He goes over a little bit of background information about heart rate and heart rate variability. Followed up by some very interesting graphs from his personal sessions.

“Even though an entire book could be devoted to the topic of Heart Rate Variability (HRV), I’m going to give you the basics of how heart rate variability tracking works and how you can use it to track your training status. If you need more resources on HRV testing, check out my podcast episode “What Is Best Way To Track Your Heart Rate Variability” and my article “Everything You Need To Know About Heart Rate Variability Testing”.

First, I’m going to explain HRV to you, and then I’ll tell you the best way to track your HRV.

The origin of your heartbeat is located in what is called a “node” of your heart, in this case, something called the sino-atrial (SA) node. In your SA node, cells in your heart continuously generate an electrical impulse that spreads throughout your entire heart muscle and causes a contraction (Levy).

Generally, your SA node will generate a certain number of these electrical impulses per minute, which is how many times your heart will beat per minute. Below is a graphic of how your SA node initiates the electrical impulse that causes a contraction to propagate from through the Right Atrium (RA) and Right Ventricle (RV) to the Left Atrium (LA) and Left Ventricle (LV) of your heart.

heart-rate-variability

So where does HRV fit into this equation?

Here’s how: Your SA node activity, heart rate and rhythm are largely under the control of your autonomic nervous system, which is split into two branches, your “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system and your “fight and flight” sympathetic nervous system.

Your parasympathetic nervous system (“rest-and-digest”) influences heart rate via the release of a compound called acetylcholine by your vagus nerve, which can inhibit activation of SA node activity and decrease heart rate variability.

In contrast, your sympathetic nervous system (“fight-and-flight”) influences heart rate by release of epinephrine and norepinephrine, and generally increases activation of the SA node and increases heart rate variability.

If you’re well rested, haven’t been training excessively  and aren’t in a state of over-reaching, your parasympathetic nervous system interacts cooperatively with your sympathetic nervous system to produce responses in your heart rate variability to respiration, temperature, blood pressure, stress, etc (Perini). And as a result, you tend to have really nice, consistent and high HRV values, which are typically measured on a 0-100 scale. The higher the HRV, the better your score.

But if you’re not well rested (over-reached or under-recovered), the normally healthy beat-to-beat variation in your heart rhythm begins to diminish. While normal variability would indicate sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system balance, and a proper regulation of your heartbeat by your nervous system, it can certainly be a serious issue if you see abnormal variability – such as consistently low HRV values (e.g. below 60) or HRV values that tend to jump around a lot from day-to-day (70 one day, 90 another day, 60 the next day, etc.).

In other words, these issues would indicate that the delicate see-saw balance of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system no longer works.

In a strength or speed athlete, or someone who is overdoing things from an intensity standpoint, you typically see more sympathetic nervous system overtraining, and a highly variable HRV (a heart rate variability number that bounces around from day to day).

In contrast, in endurance athletes or people who are overdoing things with too much long, slow, chronic cardio, you typically see more parasympathetic nervous system overtraining, and a consistently low HRV value (Mourot). 

In my own case, as I’ve neared the finish of my build to any big triathlon, I’ve noticed consistently low HRV scores – indicating I am nearing an overreached status and my parasympathetic, aerobically trained nervous system is getting “overcooked”. And in the off-season, when I do more weight training and high intensity cardio or sprint sports, I’ve noticed more of the highly variable HRV issues. In either case case, recovery of a taxed nervous system can be fixed by training less, decreasing volume, or decreasing intensity – supercompensation, right?

But wait – we’re not done yet! HRV can get even more complex than simply a 0-100 number.

For example, when using an HRV tracking tool, you can also track your nervous system’s LF (low frequency) and HF (high frequency) power levels. This is important to track for a couple of reasons:

-Higher power in LF and HF represents greater flexibility and a very robust nervous system.

-Sedentary people have numbers in the low 100’s (100-300) or even lower, fit and active people are around 900 – 1800 and so on as fitness and health improve. 

Tracking LF and HF together can really illustrate the balance in your nervous system. In general, you want the two to be relatively close. When they are not, it may indicate that the body is in deeply rested state with too much parasympathetic nervous system activation (HF is high) or in a stressed state with too much sympathetic nervous system activation (LF is high). Confused as I was when I first learned about this stuff? Then listen to this podcast interview I did with a heart rate variability testing company called Sweetbeat. It will really elucidate this whole frequency thing for you.

So how the heck do you test HRV?

When it comes to self quantification, there are a ton of devices out there for tracking HRV (and hours of sleep, heart rate, pulse oximetry, perspiration, respiration, calories burnt, steps taken, distance traveled and more).

For example, there is one popular device called the “emWave2″, which seems like it is the ost popular heart rate variability tracking device among biohackers. The emWave2 is a biofeedback device that trains you to change your heart rhythm pattern to facilitate a state of coherence and enter “the zone.”

Basically, when you use the emWave2  a few minutes a day, it can teach you how to transform feelings of anger, anxiety or frustration into peace and clarity. It actually comes with software that you run on your computer which teaches you how to do this. But the emWave2 is kinda big, and you certainly can’t place it discreetly in your pocket or take it with you on a run – although they have just developed a phone app called “Inner Balance” that can allow for a bit more portability and ease-of-use, albeit with less biofeedback potential.

Zensorium Tinke

Then there are devices such as the Tinke. A small, colored square with two round sensors, the Tinke, made by a company called Zensorium, is designed to measure heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen level, and heart rate variability over time. Every time you measure, it gives you your “Zen” score and your “Vita” score, and you can simply use a measurement like this every morning to see how ready your body is for the rigors of training.

All you need to do is attach the Tinke to your iPhone, and then place your thumb over the sensors so the Tinke can measure cardiorespiratory levels. Tinke captures blood volume changes from the fingertip using optical sensing and signal processing. It takes about sixty seconds to measure all the parameters you need, from you stress level to your breathing and more.

You can use the Tinke anytime, anywhere, and it’s designed primarily to encourage deep breathing exercises in order to promote relaxation and alleviate stress levels. While it’s not a medical device, it can assist in stress relief and recovery when you combine it with regular deep breathing exercises, and I’ll admit that as a self-proclaimed biohacker I am addicted to playing with my Tinke every morning (which almost sounds a bit perverted to say).

Then there are simple apps that simply use the lens of your phone camera to check your heart rate or heart rate variability, or even teach you how to breathe properly. The Azumio Stress Check App is a perfect example of that. It’s not incredibly accurate, but it’s inexpensive and a good way to start.

Of course, there are also wearable body monitoring units you can clip to your body throughout the day, such as the Jawbone UP and FitBit, which measure sleep, movement and calories, but won’t measure heart rate, pulse oximetry, or heart rate variability – so I don’t consider these to be ideal recovery monitoring devices per se. Finally, there are wristwatch-like units that are getting fancier, such as the new MyBasis watch, which is a multi-sensor device that continuously measures motion, perspiration, and skin temperature, as well as heart rate patterns throughout the day and night – but once again, this device doesn’t measure things like heart rate variability and pulse oximetry (although there is a similar device under development called a MyBoBo which may offer these measurements).

And while I’ve experimented with a variety of heart rate chest strap style measurement tools, include the Bioforce and Omegawave, my top recommendation for measuring your heart rate variability is the SweetBeat system, and this is what I personally use every day to track HRV. I like the SweetBeat because it’s easy-to-use, intuitive, allows you to track your heart rate variability in real time (such as when you’re out on a run or working at your office) and is also something you can use with meals to test food sensitivities by tracking heart rate response to foods.

For SweetBeat HRV monitoring, you need:

-The SweetBeat phone app + a wireless Polar H7 chest strap

or

The SweetBeat phone app + a regular chest strap  + a ”Wahoo” wireless adapter dongle for your phone.

Here are some sample charts of what kind of measurements and fluctuations you might see when measuring HRV, HF and LF, taken during the time that both my lifestyle and exercise stress significantly increased as I approached a big race (for a more detailed explanation of the charts below, read this blog post):

hrvchart1

 

hrvchart2

 

hrvchart3

hrvchart4

 

To read the entire blog post on “24 Ways To Know With Laser-Like Accuracy If Your Body Is Truly Recovered And Ready To Train

To download SweetBeat click here.

Using HRV for Improved Sports Performance

Most athletes know that getting enough rest after exercise is essential to high-level performance, but many still over train and feel guilty when they take a day off. The body repairs and strengthens itself in the time between workouts, and continuous training can actually weaken the strongest athletes. In competitive sports, improved performance is achieved by alternating periods of intensive training with periods of relative rest. Rest is physically necessary so that the muscles can repair, rebuild and strengthen. For recreational athletes, building in rest days can help maintain a better balance between home, work and fitness goals.

While standardized training programs produce well documented results, they do not take individual responses into account. Age, gender, race, baseline fitness level, and genetic factors are known determinants of individual differences in responses to endurance training. In addition the status of the nervous system plays an important role in training response.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a view into the nervous system and can be used to guide an optimal training program. Never heard of the term? You are not alone. Measuring HRV, though long used in hospitals for treating heart patients, is a relatively new biofeedback concept for endurance athletes. Soviet Union sports scientists started keeping track of their elite athletes’ HRV in the ‘70s. In the past decade, college sports teams and world-class athletes have been increasingly using HRV to monitor fatigue and recovery from workouts. There are numerous clinical studies on HRV and training.

The introduction of athletic heart rate monitors that communicate with smart phones has enabled HRV monitoring capability to anyone who has a smart phone and wants to use it to guide training.

SweetBeat is an iPhone app by SweetWater Health that has custom capability for athletes to track their HRV. The athlete simply does a 3 minute HRV session each morning and is presented with a result that recommends “train as usual”, “low exertion day” or “rest day” based on the individual’s baseline trend. New SweetBeat updates include power frequency graphs and audio alerts.

The new SweetBeat power frequency graphs display the LF (low frequency) and HF (high frequency) components of HRV. LF and HF are bands of the HRV power spectrum.  The LF power level represents both branches of the nervous system, the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and recovery).  The HF power level is a reflection of the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, and responds quickly to rest and recovery.  Both LF and HF are expressions of overall fitness and resilience.  These power levels are relatively high when the nervous system is active and flexible.  Typically, these power levels range from 800 to 1000 for fitness enthusiasts and 6000-8000 for elite athletes as measured in the SweetBeat application. This feature provides important additional information about the nervous system and fitness levels. Tri-athletes and more advanced users have requested this feature. Along with a graph representing the power frequencies over time, a real time graph will show your power for each session.

Good luck with your training! If you have any questions you can email us at support@sweetwaterhrv.com and we will reply within 24 hours. Don’t have SweetBeat, yet? Download SweetBeat on iTunes now!