Running and HRV: finally I found a balance

Finding the balance in anything is always difficult and especially hard in something like training and exercise. For many years I have been struggling to improve my performance and get injured and sick quite often.

About a year ago I started hearing about a thing called HRV, which in simple words is the variation in the time interval between two heartbeats. Apparently, when you are more stressed your heart beats in a more sync way compared to when you are less stressed (I know that might sound counter-intuitive ). Basically, HRV is how your nervous system responds to stress, it can not determine the cause of the stress but it's a great indicator of it.

Measuring HRV

The easiest way to measure HRV is via a smartphone app and its camera. There are plenty of apps that can do that, I’ve tried a few of them and in my view the best one for running is HRV4Training.

First things in the morning

The way it works is that you need to take a measure after you wake up or at least that’s the recommendation so I do that, and after it, the app is providing with feedback like: you are good to go or you need to take it easy, I found this really simple and in very useful.

In the past I’ve been sick regularly, like every few weeks, probably pushing too much too often, also combined with other life stress factors I had one of my worst training periods. However, since I start taking HRV measurements I feel much more confident and I bearly been sick since then.

I have to admit that I also started to train much smarter and follow training plans, not just random hard runs here and there but definitely, the feedback from HRV4Training has been crucial for keeping me healthy and improving my performance.

Ignoring the advice

Yes, sometimes I do have planned some hard sessions and HRV4Training recommends me take it easy, and depending on my schedule I might not take the advice and do the planned session. In some of the cases I’ve been fine, and in others, I’ve had to take a much longer recovery between runs. Even in that cases I still think such apps are helpful.

Take care of yourself that’s the only way we can enjoy our favourite activities.