Every strength has its weakness. My best talent, if you could call it that, is that I follow-through. When I decide to do something—earn a certification, wake daily to a morning flow, take a cold shower every morning, etc. I do it. I’ve now done five-minutes of non-stop 1 arm kettlebell swings every week for nearly two years. Every time I dread it, but I’m always glad I did it.

My approach is simple. I plan my weeks every Sunday. If I plan to do something, I do it. I can reflect and adapt, but changes don’t go into effect until the next week (I write about it in my free ebook, The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery). My hard-charging approach has a downside, however. I do not always listen to my body.

Like any household with two toddlers, I now live in an oasis of germs. After two weeks of watching my household battle a chest cold, I woke last Monday feeling very off, yet I changed nothing. By Wednesday, I was bad—way worse than the rest of the family had been. I woke and did my five-minutes swing test anyway.

The next morning was the worst. I woke early to write and was freezing despite the room’s balmy temperature. I shivered as I did my morning writing. I’ve committed to 365 straight days of cold showers, so at 6 am, I still jumped into the freezing water.

My teeth now chattered. I put on a few layers and biked to work because I had committed to no longer commuting by car, if at all possible. As you can see, in extremely stubborn people, such as myself, discipline can slip into stupidity.

Life is Adaptation

Enter resistance, rest, and see an adaptation. This general adaptation syndrome is the foundation of all training and life. In this scenario, I was not listening to my body telling me that I need more rest, so the body started talking louder.

I shivered through working out my first team of the day and made it back to my office where I curled up into a ball and waited for the fever to break. After it did, I biked home and slept for a few hours.

After that, I laid in bed and read all day. I did nothing and got better fast. By the next morning, I felt better than I had all week. The take-home message is simple: sometimes you have to be willing to listen to your body and back off.

Athletes often struggle to understand this concept. More is often not better when it comes to training. As I tell my athletes at the end of each session, “You are weaker now than you were before this session. You’ll be stronger because of it, if and only if, you take care of hydration, nutrition, and sleep.”

If you want to get stronger and more powerful, you are likely far better off doing three or four workouts per week than six. If you begin breaking muscles down again before they’ve appreciated the last training, then you’re interfering with that adaptation.

Your negating earlier efforts. These principles are outlined within the first three pages of nearly every training book. Even the exceptions, daily “Grease the Groove” training programs, are predicated on very low volume, intensity, and density. These are the variables we always play with.

What is HRV?

Many top tier athletes have begun tracking their Heart Rate Variability (HRV) in order to direct their daily training. When HRV is low, the body is fatigued. It is overdrawn and needs recovery.

Any training put on the body at that time would not be well-received and would, likely, bring you further from your goals. When HRV is high, you are fresh and ready for more intense training. With the rise of Apple watches and wearables, now everyone can track their HRV, but why would you want to?

Tracking HRV basically allows you to categorize your training into three-groups that you can use to guide training selection.

• Low HRV: Do low-intensity work. Aerobic mobility circuits, slow jogs, biking, yoga flows, or just a walk.
• Medium HRV: Can err towards lower intensity work if you have a higher-intensity day planned for tomorrow that you want to be fresh for. If not, hit some medium intensity work at medium volume and intensity. In short, don’t go too heavy and give the appropriate rest. This might mean tempo training, calisthenics, skill practice, or just a crisp, solid, punch the clock workout where nothing gets too heavy or intense. Think push-ups, pull-ups, carry’s, goblet lunges, single leg RDL’s, and skills practice.
• High HRV: Go heavy. Push the volume. Whatever you’re into. This is your day to go hard. But only if you are okay with being in the low HRV range the next day. The wisdom of “Grease the Groove” training programs is that you can train more often by never taking too much out of the tank. You have to have a strategy and stick to it.

Let Me Check My Apple Watch to See if I’m Hungry

So, again, why would you want to track HRV? It isn’t like you are training for the Olympics. You are exercising to build health, willpower, and to, generally, enhance your life. For most people, the last thing they need is another excuse to miss a workout. They’ll take off if they are overdrawn anyway.

Conditions shouldn’t have to be perfect. What about being a human? We should be a little less reliant on devices to tell us, “you are tired,” or “you feel great.” The body is extremely advanced technology and, if we learn to listen, it is already telling us what we need to know. Training is about strengthening your connection to your body. You want to hone an ability to listen to the body and tap into your own intuitive sense of HRV and recovery.

All that auto-regulation can still take place without tracking HRV. Here is what I recommend.

• Create one or two high-intensity training days. Ex. Sled pushes, heavy presses, heavy double bell swings, heavy farmer’s walks, muscle-ups, and finish with a bear crawl Tabata
• Create one or two medium-intensity training days. Ex. Medium 1-arm swings w/ push-ups, Turkish get-ups w/ rows, and x-band walks w/ Pallof Presses
• Create two or three low-intensity training days. Ex. Bike and do an aerobic recovery circuit and stretch like this one.

I find autoregulation is easier if I have a set time when I know I’m going to do something for my body. For me, it is a 40-minute movement block that I hit at least six days per week. Once that time is set you just have to show up and adapt accordingly.

Autoregulation is simple, but it doesn’t require more tech dependency. That is what created an environment that required us to follow regimented workouts in the first place. Learn to listen to your body. Make a week plan for your training, but shift the pieces to fit your need on any given day.

The post Auto-Regulation, HRV, and the Unplugged Approach appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

No pain, no gain. Right? I’d like to think most Breaking Muscle readers are already aware of the dangers of overtraining. There’s no better way to be completely counterproductive to one’s fitness goals, and knowing when to have a rest day is just as important as tracking your progress. Hell, progress and rest days are technically one in the same since rest is when your muscles rebuild. Yet despite the number of tools we have to scientifically track and measure how to workout, we still decide when to workout primarily with a calendar, completely unrelated to what our body is saying.

Your body, and more specifically, your heart, has a lot to say about your workout schedule. The ithlete ECG Receiver claims to accurately monitor and track you HRV (heart rate variability), in turn telling you exactly when it’s time to take a break or get back to the gym.

Drum Machines Have No Soul

(How Heart Rate Variability Tells Us if We’re Ready to Rock)

Drummers detest drum machines for various, often amusing reasons, but primarily because it’s steady beat is too “perfect.” Well it turns out, our hearts have a little soul. A healthy athlete with a resting pulse of 40 beats per minute is actually drumming at a variation of that oversimplified number, a variation that is now becoming easier to measure thanks to advances in technology. This perfect little imperfection gives us insight into critical information about the function of our autonomic nervous system. Information such as our current physical, chemical, and psychological condition.

Normal HRV values range from 50-100 – the higher the number, or the more variability, the better. When your variability drops, it means you could be overtrained. It should be noted this number is highly dependent on the individual, so you won’t find much value out of comparing numbers with others. Your baseline is your personal point of reference.

How Does the ithlete ECG Receiver Work?

In order to record your HRV, you’ll need to purchase and download the ithlete software onto your iOS or Android device. Plug the ithlete ECG Receiver into your device’s headphone port. Strap on a compatible 5.4 KHz analog standard pulse reading chest strap. Hit start while in the “Measure” tab and begin to breath deeply, keeping pace with the lung animation on screen. Do this every morning as you wake up, before you have coffee. After a few days, you’ll have yourself a baseline sample. (Note: there are no directions in the software or hardware in regards to exercise during these first days, so my advice is take it easy activity-wise so your baseline is actually a proper baseline.)

Once you have a baseline, the app begins to give you advice. A common HRV for a fit 40-50 year old male, for example, could land in the 82 range. If that range begins to drop significantly after a few days of working out, the ithlete software will indicate it’s time to take a break by a falling red line. If the falling line is amber, you might want to do a lighter workout that day. Once your HRV recovers to a variation closer to your baseline with a climbing blue or green line, it’s time to get back to work. You’ll also have a trending blue line that averages the day-to-day changes.

Pros

The overall accuracy of the chart is stunning. I’m not talking about the individual HRV values, since I don’t have any other device to confirm reading. I’m talking about the feeling of an overstressed body on days when my baseline value had dropped. I have, unfortunately, been victim to overtraining in the past and have a good sense of when it’s time to take time off. I attempted to overdo it for a week in order to see if I could move the needle down. FOR SCIENCE!!!

I typically left the receiver and chest strap on my nightstand so I would get in the habit of recording a daily reading. By far, the best part about the ECG is its price point relative to what it would cost to measure these values in a clinic. A complete kit will run you $100. And yet…

Cons

The price point is indeed relative. Relative to metrics I personally wouldn’t pay for in the first place. So to most athletes, this is an expensive software/hardware purchase that does one thing. Morning ECG measurements. The software and receiver do not (currently) act as a more common heart rate monitor.

The software interface doesn’t fall into the intuitive pool of iOS and Android apps. For example the first few days of recording your HRV don’t track any information. The software is actually in the process of collecting your baseline, but it doesn’t let you know. It took quite a bit of research to understand how to go about collecting HRV data. While learning how it feels to be overtrained could be a useful exercise for novice athletes, this device is just not user friendly enough for me to recommend it for that purpose.

By far, the biggest con to using HRV data to dictate workouts is the fact the HRV, as mentioned earlier, measures more than physical stress. It’s also capable of measuring physiological stress, among many other things, which could lower your HRV. Thus, in theory, your stress level can tell ECG you shouldn’t workout, when a good workout might just do you some good.

Final Thoughts

The ithlete ECG Receiver is a powerful little tool for advanced athletes. This niche information however feels a bit overpriced. The hardware price point is quite fair, but at $9.99 the software needs some help from an experienced user interface designer. My personal reservations about using HRV as a physical health indicator are pretty much nullified by the thousands of peer reviewed articles on the subject. I recommend the device to top tier athletes who have money to spare, otherwise I recommend holding off until we see future iterations of the software.

Reviewed Software Version

Android 2.0 on Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Product Info

ithlete Heart Rate Variability App – $9.99

ithlete ECG Receiver – $59.99

Chest Strap Monitor and ECG Receiver Combo – $94.99

The post Product Review: ithlete HRV Monitor appeared first on Breaking Muscle.