Transcription
Have you been recording your heart rate variability and now are looking to improve it? Or have you not heard of heart rate variability and just want to start to understand it better? In this video, I'm going to talk about what heart rate variability is, what affects it, how to monitor it, and 10 ways that we can improve our heart rate variability.
Welcome to the video. My name is Lee Eldridge, human performance coach from The Athlete Tribe. This channel is all about improving performance in all aspects of life, and today we're going to be talking about heart rate variability, or HRV.
Simply put, HRV is the variation between times of beats. For example, if you had a heart rate monitor on and it said 60 beats per minute, it's hugely unlikely that every beat is on the second. There's going to be slight variations in between each beat, and the research has pointed towards a greater variation in those beats meaning that we're in a better readiness state and a recovered state. This variation is controlled by our autonomic nervous systems, which basically has two branches: one that we call our parasympathetic nervous system, or more commonly known as rest and digest; the other branch is our sympathetic nervous system, or more commonly known as our fight or flight.
So the brain is continually processing information, both internally and externally, and both branches of this autonomic nervous system are always working. It doesn't mean that, for example, one branch is on and one branch is off; they're always kind of like a twin scenario whereby one might take a lead and the other one steps back. And this is important for all the functions that go on in our body.
So what affects HRV? One of the essential things to understand is that HRV is both affected from positive and negative situations. Later on in the video, I'm going to talk about the 10 things to help improve, positively, your HRV. For example, from a negative point of view, lack of sleep, arguments with your manager—all those types of things—increased stress is definitely going to negatively affect your HRV. Then, from a positive point of view, you know, great social experiences, promotion at work—all those things will cause changes in that heart rate variability.
A key point to understand is that both negatives and positive things are not necessarily an issue; they only become an issue if they persist over long term. For example, if you start to get two or three bad night's sleep in a row, then that is definitely going to affect your HRV. The key to understand is that one-off events, such as a poor night's sleep or one argument, are not necessarily going to have an overall poor effect. The problem is, is if this is over a long term, and what I mean by that is that if the problem persists, then there's going to be issues, especially because we're going to be using more of our fight or flight system, which has bigger problems down the line.
Now we've talked about what HRV is and what affects it; let's look at how to monitor it. Well, the gold standard is from an ECG machine, or electrocardiogram, whereby we'd place electrodes onto your chest and would get the HRV super accurate. Now the problem is that these machines are normally only in hospitals or doctor surgeries, so there's been a huge push in the tech to improve or help us monitor HRV outside of this. Now there are multiple discussions going on around the accuracy of these devices, but what I'm talking about here is the Oura Ring or the Whoop band. For me, one of the most accurate ways to go about getting your HRV is investing in a heart rate strap. So you attach the heart rate monitor to your chest, and you—there's multiple apps out there where you can record your HRV—and what you're trying to do is look at doing three or four measurements over the course of the week, first thing in the morning. And by doing that, then you can start to record and track changes or trends over the course of weeks and months. And that's a really important point to understand is that we need to collect quite a large amount of data, and what I mean by that is over a longer period of time, to track these trends and changes. Because if we think about it, heart rate variability, in its name, is variable, so it's going to be changing day to day, and we're not looking at these big changes per se, but we're looking at the trends over time.
Now we're going to move on to the 10 things you can do to improve or increase your heart rate variability.
Number one is understanding your training and how it affects you. And really, this is the main reason why heart rate variability became so popular in professional sports and training of professional athletes, because what we can do is we can see how the training plan or training load is affecting the athlete. And what I mean by that is that if we can see a depression in your heart rate variability, it means that there's a reduction in the readiness to train, so therefore we can adjust that training plan to that individual. Now this is critical when you're working in a team environment whereby you might have a squad of 30 players; it's very hard to understand the readiness of all those different individuals. By taking their heart rate variability or getting an understanding of what's going on, we can help to individualize those training loads. But what does that mean for you? Well, exactly the same; you're probably not going to be in a professional sporting team whereby somebody is monitoring for you, so therefore you can monitor it yourself and start to adjust the training. Obviously, when it comes to team training, that's a little bit tougher to do, but from a gym point of view, or if you're doing any work outside of team training or playing games, you're able now to have a lot of influence over what you do. Likewise, if you're training for an individual sport, again by monitoring that you can prescribe yourself a training plan and adjust it as you go. A key point here is that heart rate variability is not only affected by physical work but also by mental work and cognitive load. For example, if you're very stressed at work or you've been working hard from a cognitive point of view, your heart rate variability will become depressed. And for me, this is the biggest area in business and cognitive work where we need to be looking at, because it's impossible for us to be able to work 100 percent all the time. Likewise, in professional sports, we'd adapt the training program; we'd periodize it over a course of a month, six months, and a year. But unfortunately, life's not like that, and we just kind of allow things to happen to us. By monitoring your heart rate variability, you can track and you can make changes into your lifestyle and what you're doing to improve your HRV.
Number two, understanding your nutrition and the timings of when you eat. Nutrition has a huge role on our heart rate variability, and making sure that we have a healthy diet will improve your HRV because, obviously, unhealthy foods put stress onto the system. Prolonged stress causes depression in HRV. This is essential also to understand the timings of when you eat, because if you think about it, when we look back, we're a hunter-gatherer being, which would mean that we would have high sympathetic fight and flight kind of workings or responses to obviously go and kill an animal, but then we'd have massive parasympathetic rest and digest where we're looking for the blood to return back into the internal organs to help with digestion. So making sure that you're kind of in that parasympathetic state when you eat is hugely going to be important for digestion. So understanding basically when you should be eating, how food affects you, will be indicated through your HRV.
Number three, as we know, blood is a liquid; therefore, if we are dehydrated, that liquid is going to be thicker. If blood is thicker, it means that the heart has to work harder to push that blood around the body. Obviously, in the blood is nutrients, oxygen, and then, of course, the removal of byproducts such as carbon dioxide. We need to be in a hydrated state to be healthy; if we're in a healthy state, it means that there's less stress on the system, meaning that our sympathetic nervous system has to work less.
Number four, the effects of alcohol. Alcohol has a huge effect on our heart rate variability. Alcohol is a toxin; therefore, if we drink it or ingest it, our body wants to get rid of it, which means that it's going to be working harder to pump blood around the system so that the alcohol can get into the liver to be cleaned out. What is essential to understand is that the effects of alcohol can have a depression on our heart rate variability up to three or four days after. Therefore, if you have a heavy night of drinking, then your training is going to be affected over the next three or four days, which in turn means that if you're going to rock up to a session and your heart rate or your heart rate variability is depressed, it means that that session is going to be much harder than it would be normally.
Number five, sleep performance. Sleep is the foundation to performance and the bedrock to health, and I've spoken about this numerous times on different videos. If you're interested, I strongly suggest that you go and watch the video with myself and Nick Littlehales, a sleep expert, and we talk more in depth about the effects of sleep and how to improve your sleep. The biggest thing for sleep performance, both in terms of quality and quantity, is making sure that we go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time as consistently as possible. As we know, humans are a clock; we really like rhythms. So by doing this, it's going to ensure that we get enough REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, and enough slow wave or deep sleep to help with our HRV.
Number six, using light to our advantage. As I mentioned previously, we're a clock; therefore, if we can get sunlight in the morning, it helps to set this clock and keep it on its right schedule. Not only that, also getting sunlight in the morning helps with energy hormone production—all the good things that we're looking for—so in turn will affect our HRV.
Number seven, cold water therapy. I'm pretty sure we've all heard of cold water therapy, the Iceman Wim Hof, and now the ice baths have become a huge trend wherever you go. But there is some research on why it's good for us. So brief exposures to cold water causes our vagal nerve to be stimulated; this goes into our parasympathetic nerve branch and causes our relaxation nervous system to kick in. Now it's essential to understand that we don't need to have an ice bath at our house; obviously, you can use a bath and add ice into it, which is just as good. But even brief exposures to cold water helps with stimulating this nerve, so we could start with a cold shower, for example, and we could just build up from 20 seconds, 30, 40, etc., all the way up to two minutes or so, and these have a positive effect on our heart rate variability.
Number eight, adding breath work into your day or week. Again, I've spoken about breath work and CO2 tolerance being hugely important for performance, but also mental performance and setting our state. Even short amounts of breath work can really help with improving our HRV. For example, one cohort that I recently worked with of management consultants found that breath work was one of the only things that they did during the course of the day to help reduce stress and enable them to perform better.
Number nine, meditation. We can all understand that, for example, if we just take some time on our own in a quiet place and just relax and start to meditate, that's obviously going to help improve our HRV. And again, it comes back to all these points that we're just looking for small things to start the process. So even if you can just sit quietly for one or two minutes, that is going to start to affect your HRV. Obviously, the longer we can do it, the more benefits that we'll get, but again, just that consistency of doing it day to day is going to help.
Lastly, number 10, journaling. If you can write down your thoughts, your feelings, your plans, or keep a gratitude journal, that helps with HRV. By writing, it helps to reduce stress and in turn activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn increases our HRV. Like with everything I've said, consistency is king, so if you can do that on a day-to-day basis, you're going to have the effects on your HRV.
That's it for today's video. I hope you found it interesting and you've got some key takeaway points. Just some things I want to add to heart rate variability: firstly, don't get too carried away if you have a really high heart rate, and don't get down on yourself or beat yourself up if it's lower than normal. The important thing to understand is that we're all different, and therefore our heart rate variability will affect or be affected in different ways. The second point to understand is that variation is a good thing. For example, on, you know, days of recovery, you're expecting your heart rate variability to be slightly increased, where days where you're training hard or you're under stress at work, you're expecting that depression in heart rate variability. The important thing to understand is, coming all the way back to what affects it, is that changes in our HRV are not necessarily a bad thing; it's long changes over long periods of time are where things start to go wrong. For me, a great point to add is that the rule of two: for example, we can probably get away with two nights of bad sleep or two days of poor nutrition or two days of lack of physical activity, but anything over that then we'll start to see a significant depression in our HRV. Likewise, once that does happen, we need to make sure that we're doing things and putting maybe some of those 10 points in place to help improve our HRV. As I mentioned before, if you're interested in breath work or CO2 tolerance, I strongly suggest you go and check out the video where I talk about how to test your CO2 tolerance, how to improve it, how to add breath work into your training. If you haven't already, check out the link in the description for our peak performance test where you can go along, take the test, and see which areas that you might want to think about improving. Again, thanks for watching. Keep up with your training; remember it's all about progression and not perfection, and I hopefully see you soon.