Creakyknees

Wow I only recall first reading about this a couple years ago, and already there are several consumer-grade training solutions on the market. Anybody tried any of this stuff?

https://www.omegawave.com/personal
https://myithlete.com/
https://www.bioforcehrv.com/
https://www.firstbeat.com/

I like the idea of HRV, was not aware that consumer-grade self-coaching tools were on the market.

If I understand correctly, HRV offers the potential to real-time measure fatigue status, as different from TSS for example that indirectly tracks (some) training efforts.

Enthalpic

I tried to get people interested in this in 2007. It didn't work.
https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...questionnaires

I haven't played around with it much since then - mostly because the chest strap I had only sent out 2s averages and I wasn't motivated enough to buy a new strap purely out of curiosity.

I have played around with the little StressCheck App by Azumio on my phone and it does seem to detect both physical and mental stress. If I'm rested and not stressed I get 2% if I'm stressed at work or training a lot I get 30 - 60%

Thanks for the links

Racer Ex 

Had a discussion with my big brain coach about this. His take, which I mulled and agreed with was that it was a meh. As with HR while training, there are variables that make it unreliable. The degree of unreliability will most likely come down to the individual, and like any training load metric is going to need interpretation by someone with knowledge of the persons current physical state and of their training load (be it the individual or their coach).

There's some predictive software we've been playing with (think WKO meets HAL) that might have great potential. Unfortunately the test dummy (me) has been on hiatus for the last month and change and the historical files I have aren't able to reversed engineered from WKO format to one that the software will accept at the moment.

Should have kept those duplicates in native format.

Do'h.

globecanvas

I've been tracking HRV for a couple of weeks now. It's interesting. It's clear that it's not just a random data set, it trends up or down for days at a time. My 2 weeks of data show a multi-day trend downward (indicating more fatigue) to a low of 40 (rmssd), then a longer trend upward to a current high of 130.

I don't have enough data yet to conclude anything about correlation with responsiveness to training. HRV does seem uncorrelated with TSB. I happened to do the hardest workout of the last 2 weeks on the day when HRV was at the bottom of the range (most fatigue), though TSB was +6. The workout went well, certainly better than any previous time I've done this particular workout. HRV started going up the next morning and has continued to increase, while TSB has been going the other direction.

HRV does seem correlated with general life stress and rest. The trough part of the trend was during a very stressful time at my wife's work. Household stress has been much lower the last few days and I've been sleeping better. Again, there's not enough data to conclude anything, but it's interesting that the correlation with life stress seems high and the correlation with training stress seems low.

jsk

This is what I've found as well. My HRV seems to have little to do with training volume/intensity or TSB. In fact it's pretty common for my highest HRV of the week to coincide with my lowest TSB of the week on Sunday. Saturday is usually my biggest training day volume/TSS-wise, so I would expect to HRV to be down on Sunday morning. But for me, HRV seems to be primarily an indication of how well I slept the previous night, and I guess big cheat meal on Saturday evening followed by sleeping in Sunday morning (along with lower stress on the weekend) results in HRV going up.

tetonrider

a few weeks isn't much data--may be too early to conclude that correlation with training stress is "low". training stress is a component of total stress on the body. i think if you continue to track this you will see that

the rides we tend to do -- even the hard ones -- are usually not hard enough to require much longer than a day or 2 to fully recover. observe HRV during a stage race or a huge training block.

recovery from hard efforts is better when overall stress is low; i think you may find that the "high" correlation with life stress that you observe is due to the presence or absence of life stress as THE major stress factor in most (amateur, esp masters-age) riders' lives.

when you have a year or more of data it starts to get interesting. you can look at seasonal effects.

Doge

Junior lost his Garmin again. However, doesn't really matter (well it does cause he will want me to buy another) as I think he can guess within 5 BPM. More like 1 BPM. So he is manual entering into Strava for USAC coaches to see. I'm sure it is driving someone crazy - besides me.

globecanvas

Maybe I just haven't been training that hard... up through yesterday it's been nothing but Z4 and strength training this winter. Yesterday I did the first Z5 session of the year, which went well but at the beginning of the 2nd and 3rd set I could practically hear my heart saying "really? again?" This morning HRV plummeted from 167 to 57, abruptly ending a multi-day slow upward trend.

Hermes

You may find these two articles interesting one is by a cyclist, cardiologist, electrophysiologist and the other referenced by him in the journal "Circulation".

The Mysterious Athletic Heart

From Circulation

Athlete's Heart and Cardiovascular Care of the Athlete

The heart remodels based upon stimulus. Strength training causes a different response from aerobic exercise and or course a heart attack causes the heart to remodel due to lost heart muscle.

I do not monitor heart rate and feel there are too many variables to make meaningful assessments of my training. I like power, breathing and how I feel. I do not monitor HR in the gym when jumping or doing leg presses. All I care about is the weight lifted and reps and the height of the jumps, reps and rest periods for ATP PC recharge.

IMO, I think you will have a great season this year due to your strength work.

tetonrider

i'm not sure about absolute #s for HRV (i don't know if they are directly comparable from one person to the next), but i look at the peak values and that is my "100% recovered" baseline. if you follow this approach, the trouble you might notice is that you are building your data set as you go along. when i started i was in a training period, so what i believed to be 100% recovery at the time was not. in fact, it really mashed all my numbers together, so for months i had trouble differentiating overloading vs full recovery.

it wasn't until i had many months of data that i started to see more defined peaks and valleys--more differentiation in the data.

after lots of data collection, i still occasionally get new info -- a new all-time best recovery (today, coincidentally), which affects all prior numbers.

not saying this is happening or will happen to you, but it might help to be aware of it.

tetonrider

i've got a Suunto watch that i use for recording efforts off the bike... like nordic skiing. with certain HR straps, it measures respiration rate.

it's kind of interesting (to me, at least) to overlay that with HR, power, and RPE. it can be a good indicator of easy threshold vs into the red. power on the bike is good for that--and with running you can do that by pace. with some activities, like skiing, there is no direct measure of power, speed varies tremendously by terrain, wind, snow conditions, waxing, and human efficiency on skis varies widely (whereas it doesn't on the bike), so respiration turns out to be interesting.

Creakyknees

funy timing that this thread has popped up again, I was just about to dredge it because of this statement on another board (which, I think is wrong but who knows, i'm not an elite physiologist):

"It's well-established fact that lactate threshold begins to occur at 2.2mmol/L of blood and 4.0mmol/L of blood is when lactate accumulates to the point that it exceeds full body clearance, also known as anaerobic threshold. For nearly everyone this occurs around 92% of HRmax, or 85% of VO2max."

^^^ can anyone verify / debunk that?

wens

The 85% of Vo2max part is complete bunk. Percentage of vo2 at threshold is one of the limiters of endurance performance that most responds to training.

Edit to add that's so widely studied and reported that I'm too lazy to find a link.

tetonrider

4.0mmol/L is generally regarded as one's LT (/people sometimes use FTP interchangeably) if you're being tested in the typical stepped test (with a finger prick at every level)....BUT...it is by no means universal.

LT is really where one is clearing lactate accumulation hits a steady state (usually a 2nd peak--there's often a point/power (sometimes called LT1) at around endurance where the rate at which trained cyclists clear lactate increases before it gradually decreases until hitting LT2.

85% of vo2max power, 92% of HR...that is someone attempting to apply a rule of thumb to everyone, when the reality is that it varies based on the individual and where they are in the training cycle.

chasm54

I used HRV for a season or so three years back. It was the iThlete system. I wasn't entirely persuaded of its correlation with training stress in normal circumstances, but it did seem to have one unanticipated benefit. One of our young riders suddenly saw his HRV measurement crash for no apparent reason, decided to take notice of it and have an easy day, and by the end of the day had all the symptoms of a cold. So it may have given early warning that his immune system was engaged/compromised. That's what we told ourselves, anyway.

tetonrider

with enough data (eg 6+ months) it can serve as an early warning of an oncoming illness.

globecanvas

This morning HRV was at an all-time low, and has been below baseline for 3 days, and this is after a day off. My HRV app advised me to skip training and rest. But I felt OK so I trained anyway and it went fine. At the moment I don't feel like I'm getting a lot of value from tracking HRV.

Ygduf

you don't say.

globecanvas

Of course, if I have a coronary and die this afternoon, I will reassess.

Ygduf

leave instructions for your family to have TKP post an update.

tetonrider

I personally wouldn't make decisions based on 3 weeks of data. That's not much to seed any real analysis of HRV. But......ymmv.

I also don't know what you use to assess "readiness" to train...what's the algorithm the program you use uses?