Heart rate variability (HRV) can give us key insight into our heart’s health and can be a unique tool to help guide fitness routines. But how does this work?
In this article, I detail why measuring your HRV matters for your health, how it can inform your fitness routines, and how consulting a cardiologist can help provide insight into your readings.
What is heart rate variability, and why does it matter?
Heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute. Heart rate variability is the measure of variation in time between each heartbeat. These variations are slight, adding or subtracting a fraction of a second between beats.
HRV can be present in healthy individuals. A variation in heart rate is normal, as the heart constantly regulates blood flow to keep pace with the body’s needs. These heart variations are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. This built-in system automatically manages things like heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion. It works without you having to think about it.
The system has two main parts:
- Sympathetic nervous system – your body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ response. It kicks in when you’re stressed or taking part in exercise. It can drive an increase in heart rate and blood pressure.
- Parasympathetic nervous system – your body’s ‘relaxation response.’ It helps you calm down and recover. It can drive a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure.
These two parts of the nervous system work together to keep your body balanced. Your heart’s variability reflects how adaptable your body can be to outside factors and activities.
Why is tracking HRV essential for your exercise routine?
Physical activity is a stressor that can cause your sympathetic nervous system to take over. However, your HRV can determine whether your body is ready for your exercise routine before you’ve even started.
HRV reflects how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are balanced, indicating whether the body is ready for exercise. This is shaped by whether you are experiencing high or low HRV.
If your HRV is high, this shows that your body can adapt to many kinds of changes and handle high levels of physical stress. HRV may trend upward as physical fitness improves and can also increase with stress-reduction strategies such as mindful breathing or meditation.
If your HRV is low, this shows that your body is less resilient and struggles to handle changing situations. This can be an early warning sign that high-intensity exercise programs are best avoided on that particular day. Training hard when HRV is low may reduce the effectiveness of your workouts and increase the risk of overtraining.
HRV is a valuable tool for your fitness routine because it can provide insight into how well the body can recover and adapt to training. Monitoring HRV consistently can help prevent injury and illness by identifying signs of overtraining early, allowing for timely adjustments to your workload or recovery strategies. Over time, improvements in fitness and recovery capacity may also be indicated by an upward increase in your baseline HRV, making it a valuable marker of long-term progress.
Beyond just training, HRV also highlights the impact that mental stress, sleep quality, and overall lifestyle can have on physical performance. This can influence improvements in these areas of your life that you may need to change.
To measure HRV meaningfully, you should compare your daily HRV to your average HRV over the last 6 months. This measurement can help to judge if your HRV is high or low.
Getting a cardiologist’s insight
Measuring your HRV can be easily done by yourself using smart devices such as an Apple watch or an Oura ring. However, what do you do if you notice something unusual with your HRV rate? Seeing an expert cardiologist can help you understand your HRV readings and perform further diagnostic tests to investigate the cause.
In particular, if you’ve noticed your HRV is exceptionally high or has dropped suddenly and hasn’t risen for more than 2 weeks, this could be a sign of a heart concern. For example, a very high HRV could suggest an underlying arrhythmia such as atrial fibrillation or frequent ectopic beats. Low HRV is also more common in people with higher resting heart rates. This can occur as a result of conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, asthma, or anxiety. Further tests, such as an electrocardiogram (ECG) or an ambulatory ECG, can monitor your heart’s electrical activity and highlight any abnormal heart arrhythmias.
As an expert cardiologist leading in cardiovascular risk prevention, I can provide cutting-edge tests and management strategies to help identify what might be wrong and where you can improve your lifestyle to reach prime heart health.
If you are concerned about your HRV readings or are generally worried about your heart health, contact the clinic today to discuss how best to tackle your heart health and become your best self.
