Asyou have read in previous articles, cardiac variability is a very useful tool for analyzing both general well-being and how your body responds to the training load. By constantly monitoring your Heart Rate Variability (HRV) you can realize when you’re overtraining, when you’re about to get sick, or when on the contrary you’re at peak efficiency. You may be wondering at this point if you can also use HRV to manage your training and especially to figure out if and how prepared you come to races.
How to take advantage of HRV
To study the relationship between performance and HRV, many analyses were done on individual athletes in order to evaluate possible relationships. A very thorough study was performed on a professional triathlete who was monitored throughout the competitive season for a total of 32 weeks.
The athlete measured and recorded both resting heart rate (HR) and HRV indices of cardiac variability each morning. Instead, the training load was monitored using the tools you also use in your daily training:
The daily analysis of the athlete in this study showed some constants: the first is that after a period of training load, resting heart rate tends to decrease and cardiac variability to increase. In recovery periods the opposite phenomenon occurred. In practical terms, if after a block of training you experience an increase in HRV and a decrease in RHR, it means that you have trained properly and your body has responded well to the stimuli produced. The basis of training theory is that there must be adequate stimuli provided by each session that must be followed by recovery phases during which your body reacts by improving its ability to respond to physical and psychological stresses. In other words, stimulus after stimulus, if the workouts are well administered your performance improves. The goal for everyone is to reach peak form close to the competition. Many athletes, favoring high volumes and intensities, often reach a good level of fitness quickly but then come to a standstill or even worse run into injuries. Analyzing not only your training loads and their results but also your physiological responses will help you understand whether you are going in the right direction.
Make it grow (little by little)
The study performed showed that to have a good race performance in the pre-competitive phase your HRV should increase by at least 5% along with a lowered resting heart rate. The subsequent tapering phase (pre-competition unloading) then concludes the work done in training by bringing the athlete back to both physical and mental freshness. In this last short phase you may experience a slight decrease in HRV related to reduced training volumes and sometimes also to a state of anxiety that accompanies the days leading up to a race. But this is normal and does not represent a red flag.
When, on the contrary, approaching a competition you realize that HRV values do not go up and remain constant or even decrease, it means that the training program has not produced a proper adaptation or that the load has been too much for your abilities. Always remember that training effectiveness is not always directly proportional to volume. As the miles or hours of training increase, you get positive results only up to a certain point beyond which you instead run the risk of injury or overtraining. Always keep your HRV monitored and reduce the load when you see the value continue to drop. You will give your body a chance to recover and fully acquire the work done up to that point.
Analysis is important
The measurements taken daily must then be analyzed at the end of each week. In fact, each daily measurement can be affected by individual negative events such as a sleepless night, a digestive problem, or even related to a single particularly hard and challenging workout. After an initial response of the organism, however, which must respond to a stress, it quickly returns to an equilibrium situation. For this reason, a weekly average figure is certainly more reliable than individual daily readings compared with each other.
Training endurance sports such as running, cycling and triathlon requires a significant minimum training load for an amateur athlete. For this reason, you need to constantly monitor how your body responds to this sports stress.
Analyzing the behavior of different aspects of your heart rate serves you to improve your performance on the one hand and to avoid situations of overtraining or injury on the other. Cardiac variability is perfect for this purpose over a period of a few weeks. As I explained, the daily point value can be disturbed by many effects and is therefore less reliable for medium- to long-term planning. Conversely, however, abnormal daily values are useful because they may represent warning messages sent by your body.
My advice is to do a trial period, preferably a full season, in which you record heart variability and resting heart rate. Thus you will be able to evaluate at different stages of preparation your physical and mental adaptations to the training program. With reliable data you can modify your training plan to make sure it produces the stimulus you need to succeed.
(Main image credit: liurii.86 on DepositPhotos.com)