I picked up a Forerunner 955 a few weeks back hoping the HRV tracking and training readiness metrics would be helpful for training. I came from a Venu 2, so I was used to Garmin’s stress/sleep tracking and Body Battery.
I have overnight HRV data now for 19 nights. It’s never been lower than 35 or higher than 42. My average per the chart is practically flat. Maybe it’s still too early to draw any conclusions, but it seems (for me anyway) that HRV adds no value to my training. Doesn’t seem to matter…3 hr hard ride, or rest day…HRV average that night doesn’t budge.
I like the idea of the training readiness metric too, but I don’t think it’s telling me anything different than the Body Battery would. That’s always aligned pretty well with how I felt.
Has anyone else experienced this? I’m going to give it some more time to see if anything changes I guess.
Thanks!
I would give yourself longer than 19 days to start to review trends. I would as a minimum look to have at least a 4-6wk block of training to see yourself go through a period of work then a recovery week. In fact I would do this a few times to see the trends. I think 60days is best practice to set a baseline. A stable HRV is not a bad thing…
I have been tracking HRV for over 18 months and it is only now that I can really see/ use it to inform where I am at. I don’t use to to alter my training on a daily basis but rather to see if my training is sustainable long term and if I need to push a little harder and/ or back off.
Example of my data from the last 12 months (in intervals.icu)…you can see where I caught COVID and how long it has taken to return to baseline/ normal…
Lots of the stuff I have been understanding on this subject has come from the excellent Marco Altini blog (HRV4Training) here: Marco Altini – Medium and also lots of stuff posted on twitter by Alan Couzens here: https://twitter.com/Alan_Couzens
I put the below table together from the Marco Altini blog to help decipher the trends etc…
It isn’t always perfect but does provide another data point (which is just part of my routine and no hassle to capture) to review against my subjective feelings and other data points.
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This really helps…thank you!
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