canklecat

According to a fairly recent trend, heart rate variability can help identify training and recovery problems that may not manifest obviously enough just going by how we feel.

I was skeptical about HRV when I first heard about it, but in retrospect that was because the videos and articles were trying to sell products and programs rather than just inform consumers. Too many of the proponents made the mistake of chattering enthusiastically about meditation, mindfulness, biofeedback and pop psychology buzzwords that trigger my skepticism. So I ignored the whole HRV thing for a year or so.

However -- possibly because I mentioned it to a friend on Facebook or clicked on an article -- Google news and other news aggregators I use recently began suggesting stories on HRV. (That's one of the benefits of enabling tracking for some purposes.) An article mentioned Wattson Blue and Elite HRV apps, so I've been using both for a couple of weeks. Wattson Blue uses the phone camera and steady light for fingertip readings -- seems crude but it works reasonably well.

Elite HRV does sell products but also works with other brands of heart monitors, including my Wahoo Tickr, so that's what I use. However pairing the Tickr to Elite HRV is a chore. Some days it takes up to 10 minutes of repeated fiddling, phone reboots, etc, to get the damned thing to work with the Tickr. This is the most common complaint about Elite HRV from people who've tried the app. So I tend to use it only once a day to minimize the frustrations. When it works the information is useful.

Generally speaking results from these HRV apps tend to correspond with how I perform that day in bike rides and workouts -- good and bad. Due to injuries (hit by cars twice in less than 20 years, busted up neck, back and shoulder), illness (Hashimoto's, a pesky but non-fatal autoimmune disorder that killed my thyroid after years of gradual deterioration), surgery for thyroid cancer, and just being older (62 now), I rarely feel well in the morning. I can remember exactly one day in all of 2019 when I woke early and ready to join a group bike ride. Most days it's a chore just to drag my carcass out of bed, pee and get some coffee. If anyone asked me on a typical morning if I planned to ride my bike later that day, I'd say not only no, but hell no.

Pain is no longer a useful indicator of my fitness or capacity for exercise on any given day. (This gets into a whole nuther realm of pain management and science, which is being investigated by a UT Dallas team of researchers, who are studying why pain persists long after an injury has healed, and how to safely relieve useless pain, while not masking valid pain signals that indicate a current, possibly serious injury that shouldn't be ignored.) But I'm not gonna take fistfuls of opiates (even though I can get 'em from my doc). And I'm not gonna sit around moping on the sofa, tempting though it may be. But it would help to have a tool to give me some hints about when I should rest and when I should get busy. Because my body isn't handling those guidelines anymore.

So on days when the HRV apps indicated my body appeared to have had adequate rest, nutrition, etc., and I went ahead and rode and/or worked out, I usually felt pretty good. Even made some progress after having plateaued for months. And there have been a couple of days when I felt the same as usual in the morning -- miserable, achy and exhausted -- and the HRV apps warned that either the results were skewed by glitches, or my body was out of whack and I should rest. On both days, I had indeed been extremely stressed out by life stuff and hadn't eaten properly or slept well for a day or two. And the post-workout HRV checks also seem to reflect the intensity of my rides and workouts.

Now, there may be some placebo effect, wish fulfillment,etc. --- basically, the HRV data showing me what I wanted or expected. But for many things in life, that's just as valid as purely physical issues, in terms of how it affects our perceptions of well being.

So, HRV may be useful for some folks who are serious about training, or pursuing fitness, and either usually wake feeling great or, in my case, usually feel like cold poo every morning, regardless of what our bodies are actually capable of.