Since starting short power build, my HRV has absolutely bottomed on my Garmin. From around 58ms overnight average to around 40ms. It has warned me I may need more recovery.
However, I’m finding the workouts easy, and increasing intensity on most. I wake up feeling ok and I’m always ready for next workout, never physically fatigued or burnt out.
Any one have a similar experience?
Use the search function on the top of the forum, plenty of discussion of HRV. Or I can save you time and advise you to ignore HRV because it’s not a reliable metric. Using RPE and your best judgment is a far better measure.
Have you changed anything else? Like eating before bed, getting up earlier, temperature, etc? I find my HRV is mostly dictated by whether I sleep as late as I want. I’m an early riser so get up early on my own, but when I get up earlier than normal, my HRV doesn’t get a chance to really accumulate and drive the average up. I agree with MI-XC, it’s a very rough metric given all the variables.
Ive just been playing with HRV over the last few days but so far I cant see anything useful. FWIW it had me at circa 65 resting in the evening with peaks either side of that. 30 odd when doing a plank and 27 standing after the shower this morning. After listening to the podcast I don’t think I’ll bother monitoring it further.
HRV takes several weeks of data before it’s useful. One or two random readings are pretty much worthless.
After you have several weeks of good data, fluctuations in over night HRV (I believe the preferred method is an average of the entire nights sleep) have been shown to correlate pretty accurately with someone’s body struggling to recover. It could be from work stress, training stress or drinking too much alcohol. Either way over night HRV can be useful.
Yes, I’ve watched my data for months and it’s always been in the green. It dropped into the yellow around 8 weeks back when I got Covid and it’s never recovered. As I got back to training, it’s bottomed.
However, I feel fairly good. I’ll just push on and see what happens at the end of my first recovery week.
Cheers guys
I typically workout in the evening 7-8pm and in bed by 10pm. With higher intensity workouts my Garmin HRV gives low reading also. On days off my HRV is much higher. It’s also lower if I have even 1 or 2 alcoholic drinks on a weekend evening. I usually ignore HRV unless it’s lower for an unexplained reason which could indicate an illness.