Episode 186 - Heart Rate Variability (HRV) for Triathletes: What It Is, Why It Matters & How to Track It

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) for Triathletes: What It Is, Why It Matters & How to Track It

Do you ever wake up feeling shattered but you just make yourself train hard anyway?

I know it sounds like the thing you should do, but is that actually the best thing for your recovery, your performance and ultimately, your body?

As triathletes, we’re masters at tracking watts, pace, and heart rate but there's another metric that could revolutionise your training decisions. Enter Heart Rate Variability (HRV) – your body's daily report card on recovery and readiness. 

Today I'm getting nerdy with Daniel Roland from HRV4Training to learn how tracking your HRV can help you get the most out of your training sessions, understand your recovery and avoid burnout. And all it takes is one minute every morning.

Links:

HRV For Training https://www.hrv4training.com/

Check how well you’re doing when it comes to your nutrition with our 50 Step Checklist to Triathlon Nutrition Mastery

Start working on your nutrition now with my Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course 

It’s for you if you’re a triathlete and you feel like you’ve got your training under control and you’re ready to layer in your nutrition. It's your warmup on the path to becoming a SUPERCHARGED triathlete – woohoo!

Connect with me: 

To learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy, head HERE | dietitianapproved.com/academy

See behind-the-scenes action on Instagram: @dietitian.approved

Follow along on Facebook: @DietitianApproved

Join our FREE Dietitian Approved Crew Facebook group

Enjoying the podcast?

Let me know what you loved about it and what you learnt by tagging me @dietitian.approved on Instagram!

Episode Transcription

Episode 186: Heart Rate Variability (HRV) for Triathletes: What It Is, Why It Matters & How to Track It

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

[00:00:00] Taryn: Hey, team. Welcome back to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast, the show that helps you feel smarter, so you can train harder, recover faster, and perform to your best. I'm your host, Taryn Richardson. I'm an advanced sports dietician and retired triathlete These days. today we're diving into what I think is a fascinating topic that could be an absolute game changer for you as an endurance athlete, heart rate variability.

[00:00:24] If you've ever wondered how to truly understand your body's recovery, avoid over training and get the most out of your sessions, then this episode is going to be for you. I'm joined by Daniel Roland from HRV. Four. Training with the number four, an app designed to help athletes track their HRV and use that data to make smarter training decisions.

[00:00:46] Daniel is gonna break down what HRV actually is and why it matters for us as triathletes. How tracking HRV can help you train smarter and avoid burnout. And over training practical ways to interpret the data, which is the most important part, and potentially adjust your training accordingly. And the impact of sleep, nutrition, and stress management on HRV.

[00:01:12] I've personally been experimenting with HRV for training myself lately, and I love it how it just provides that real time insight into my recovery, my training readiness, and how shit my sleep was the night before. So I'm excited to bring this conversation to you to help you unlock another level of performance. 

[00:01:49] Alrighty, let's get into it. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel.

[00:01:52] Daniel: Thank you very much for having me. It's, uh, great to speak to you and speak to your audience.

[00:01:55] Taryn: I'm very excited to get all nerdy, so make sure you get real [00:02:00] nerdy about HRV, but to set the scene for people that haven't really heard about it before or don't really use it or have never thought about using before. What actually is heart rate variability and why should we be paying a particular attention to it?

[00:02:15] Daniel: so heart rate variability is a measure of the variability in the timing between each heartbeat, so our hearts don't. Beats at a constant frequency. So if you think about when you wake up in the morning and your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, that doesn't mean that your heart is beating every single second.

[00:02:32] There's a little bit of difference, and that difference is the heart rate variability. So one heartbeat might be 0.9 seconds to the next one, and then maybe 1.1 to the next one, one second, and it changes. And what we're trying to do with heart rate variability is measure that variation between the timing of each individual heart rate beat.

[00:02:52] Why this is important is that heart rate variability is a good proxy of the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system has two branches, the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems, and these sort of have colloquial terms that we associate with them. So fight or flight is when your sympathetic nervous system is activated, and when your sympathetic nervous system is activated, you ready to?

[00:03:19] Go into that state of fight or flight to escape or to, fight to combat, or you might just freeze, but your heart is in a very good state to, to react. And in this case, it's beating very regularly. So your heart rate variability when you're in a state of stress, in a state of sympathetic activation is very regular, and the heart rate variability is low.

[00:03:42] The alternative to that is the parasympathetic nervous system, and we call this sort of a rest and digest state. And when you're in that state, your body's much more relaxed. It's not under a state of stress, and your heart rate variability is much greater because you don't need to react to something so.

[00:03:59] The [00:04:00] measure itself is a proxy for your autonomic nervous system, and your autonomic nervous system is indicating the level of stress that you're under. So we have now an objective measure to try and assess your level of stress each day, and then you can start using that for different things.

[00:04:16] Taryn: There you go. So cool. Which is why like, I'm not doing triathlon training at the moment, but I've been using it in my life to get a, get a measure of my stress levels and like make some sense of maybe how I wake up or, or feel in the morning. So I've been using your app that HRV four, within number four training.

[00:04:36] What actually inspired the creation of that? And I guess what makes it different to other methods of HRV tools on the market? 'cause I know a lot of people will be using it, whether it's on like a ring or a band, or Garmin does one. I don't think it's particularly good, but there's lots of tools out there.

[00:04:53] Tell me about HRV for training.

[00:04:56] Daniel: so HRV for training is an app that you have on your smartphone, and it was designed by our founder and creator, mark Tini, um, who's a computer scientist. And he's always been interested in embedded systems and how the body reacts to different stimuli. And one of the things that he came up with, and this is something that does make HRV for training unique, is that.

[00:05:18] He found a way to take a camera based measurement of your heart rate variability.

[00:05:23] Taryn: It's 

[00:05:23] Daniel: just like you said, there are many different sensors that you can use. There's URA rings, whoop bands. You can also use your chest strap from, if you're a triathlete, you might have a polar H 10 or some sort of Garmin, Bluetooth enabled chest strap.

[00:05:36] And all of these things are different sensors that you can use to measure. Heart rate variability and it's great. Everyone has access to it now just about, but the convenience of being able to take that measurement every morning with just your phone, not having to wet a heart rate chest strap, and also, um, not having to wear a ring and those sort of things is one of the differentiates that we have as HRV for training.

[00:05:59] So [00:06:00] we see that a lot of our athletes. Are just a lot more compliance because the process is much easier in the morning. It's a one minute measurement. All you need is your phone. Probably have your phone next to your bed already. You don't need to search for your chest trap and those sorts of things. And then the other key difference I would say that we have at HRV for training is how we look at the data.

[00:06:19] So. We try to present the data in a almost raw form that the users can then interpret themselves. So the number that you see when you take a measurement in the morning from HRV for training, that is your HRV. We show it in the metric of rms SD, but um. Many different devices like Garmin and Whoop and those sorts of companies, they create a sort of algorithmic value.

[00:06:42] We don't know what's included in that value, and it tries to tell you whether you're ready or not to train, but that's making it more complex than necessary. It's including your previous training, trying to capture your sleep, but your HRV is dependent on all of those things, so. Algorithmic metrics like that are mixing independent, independent variables and perhaps are over counting certain things.

[00:07:06] Whereas in HRV for training, we just show the HRV and that is the actual states of the autonomic nervous system.

[00:07:13] Taryn: Yeah. And it's very easy to use. So as an example for anyone watching on YouTube, you just put your finger over the camera like this for a minute and sit there, try and sit there quite quietly and chill. but can you talk through some of the practicalities of taking that measure? 'cause there was, there's a few things that I've learned over the last little bit, testing it out myself, like being sitted instead of lying down half asleep.

[00:07:37] Daniel: Yep. So the context that you take, the measurement is really important. So what we try to do with HRV for training is that each morning you take a measurement and then over time you create a baseline of your own individual scores. And then I. Each morning measurement is compared against that same baseline.

[00:07:56] So what we want you to do is to try and take the measurement in the [00:08:00] same context every day. So it's quite simple. We recommend that you wake up. If you need to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom, and then go back and sit on the bed. Or if you have kids in the house and you can't do that, sit on the edge of the bath, but.

[00:08:13] The idea is to take the same routine, wake up, go to the bathroom, sit down in a seated position, use your phone, take the measurement. The measurement itself takes one minute. You just need to cover the, camera and the flash on the back of your phone. And then there's a subjective questionnaire after that.

[00:08:30] The camera needs to be covered fully, the flash partially, just so that there's a source of light. 

[00:08:35] Taryn: if you've got, you know, two or three camera holes? I've just been putting my finger on one and that seems to work.

[00:08:41] Daniel: one of the cameras will be used. So we have in the app there's a practice mode, so you can find that in the app. And when you go into the practice mode, when you cover the correct camera, it'll show, show you that you're covering the correct one, and then you use that for your measurement. So you only need to cover one.

[00:08:55] You might have to hold your phone in a slightly unusual position because with each new generation, the phone, they changed their arrays. There used to be just one camera. Now there's two and now three, and all sorts of different ways that the cameras are set up. Only one camera will be used and you can test which one that is in the app itself. 

[00:09:11] Taryn: Okay. Awesome. So what are, what are some of the key benefits of monitoring heart rate variability for triathletes specifically, you know, think endurance athletes do a lot of training. Triathletes in particular do a lot of training. What are some of the key benefits that they'll get from monitoring this?

[00:09:28] Daniel: so at the highest level we say that it's telling you how stressed your body is and the level of stress that you have at each day will dictate how much additional stimulus you can adapt to in your training. So that's the way we try to explain it as a, as a metric, is to say. When you are in a very stressed state, if you add more load, you might not adapt to that load.

[00:09:50] So having a very hard day when your body is already under a state of stress might not be that beneficial. And there's research and studies that have been done that have [00:10:00] tested different ways of organizing your training. So might be using a fixed schedule where you have. Just your normal track Tuesday, hard swim on Thursday, long ride on the weekend, or a schedule where you vary by using HRV to assess am I in a good state to adapt to the training load today?

[00:10:19] And when they compare these two different schedules, the athletes. Who followed an HRV guided training actually did less hard and less, uh, long sessions than the athletes who followed a fixed training plan. But the athletes following the HRV guided training were faster at the end. So it was loading at the right time and loading in a way that they could adapt to the we know this intuitively anyway, right? if you're really tired and you wake up and you're not feeling good, you are not gonna have a great training day 

[00:10:48] Taryn: Yep. 

[00:10:49] Daniel: it's a useful time to measure HRV, but for me and the athletes that I coach, I find that it's sort of the edge cases where you wake up and you think, well.

[00:10:57] Am I really tired or am I just being a bit lazy today? should I go out and train hard or am I a little bit, cooked? At the moment, I need to take a slightly easier day. And those edge cases where you're not sure whether you should just push or not, or you need to rest, it can help you make a decision in that state because you have an objective measure to assist you.

[00:11:17] So we like to say, add it to the arsenal of tools you have. Your body will tell you when you wake up how you're feeling. But sometimes you just need something extra, a little bit objective to help you make a good decision.

[00:11:28] Taryn: Yeah, I think that's really valuable for triathletes who do a lot of training, and I was really guilty of this when I trained. I just trained hard all the time

[00:11:36] Daniel: Yeah.

[00:11:37] Taryn: and you know, you build that fatigue as a week goes on and you wake up for a Thursday run and you're like, I'm shattered. But me being who I am, high achieving.

[00:11:46] Daniel: Yeah.

[00:11:47] Taryn: type A type person. You just get up and go and do it anyway. So I think much more listening to your body and being intuitive around training is so much more valuable and I think an important message for people to hear. There's no point, this is probably a very [00:12:00] Australian term, but flogging a dead horse.

[00:12:02] You know, going out and smashing yourself, even though your body is telling you that you just need to maybe go and do an easy jog, go and do a coffee ride instead.

[00:12:10] Daniel: Exactly. So in the app, it provides guidance each day. So we compare your score against your normal range, and we like to say normal is good. So if your score is within the normal range, then you should proceed as planned and you can follow your training plan for that day. If it's a hard day, you could go hard.

[00:12:27] If you had an easy day planned, you can just go easy. When your score four is outside of the normal range, either too low, which is a sign of, um, high stress because your sympathetic nervous system is activated or it's too high, which can be a sort of overcompensation by the parasympathetic nervous system, then that will recommend that you limit intensity on that day.

[00:12:49] So the amount of advice in the app is not trying to complicate things we are just saying. You should probably have a plan. And then behind that, you need to adapt a little bit each day, depending on how your body is stressed and how it will adapt to the training, cope with it that day. So we're just trying to provide a little bit of extra guidance to say, yeah, if everything's fine, follow your plan.

[00:13:10] Do the hard training, but. You get a little bit of a warning system, like, oh, maybe you might be getting a bit sick, or maybe you're just pushing a little bit too much and the accumulated fatigue from a block of training is too much, and now's the time to, to limit intensity on that day. So it can help you in that way.

[00:13:26] It's just a little extra guide to, to adjust your training and, and adapt to when you're ready to train best.

[00:13:31] Taryn: So after you've done the measure on your finger, it does ask a whole bunch of subjective questions too around like how sore you are, what your like RP for training was yesterday. What your sleep was like and a few other things that it, does take into consideration when it gives you some guidance. Can you talk through some of those things and I guess the decisions around putting them in, because I know that you are quite careful with the language used in answering those [00:14:00] questions or getting some subjective measures as well.

[00:14:02] Daniel: Yeah. So, we need to be quite clear on that, on how it's working exactly. So as I said at the beginning, we try not to make a sort of algorithmic accumulated metric. So we show HRV and the guidance is based purely on your HRV and whether it falls into the normal range or not. There are two exceptions to that.

[00:14:21] If you report being injured or you report being sick, then we'll tell you to limit intensity. The other questions that appear in the subjective questionnaire, and there's a range and you can choose to turn some on and turn some off and use whichever ones you want, but you're able to track your sleep, as you said, your uh, previous days training intensity.

[00:14:40] You can also link to Strava, for example, and bring your training sessions so that you have a record of your training in the previous days. You can add things like whether you alcohol, lifestyle, stress, all these. Those don't adjust your score on the day. The score is your HRV score for the day. But in the app, we have a whole range of analysis and different correlations.

[00:15:02] And what we can use that for is to say, how does your HRV change over time and how does it change in relation to these factors? And in that way, you might find. That you're particularly sensitive to something. So sometimes we see, for example, some athletes are very sensitive to travel and when they travel across time zones, their HRV is much lower for a couple of days.

[00:15:25] So if you're going to a big race overseas and you've detected this trend in your HRV data, then you know, okay, I need to leave two easy days before the race. Or if I'm going on a training camp, the first couple of days might need to be easy. Other athletes. See sometimes that they're particularly impacted by alcohol and you might say, okay, then you don't need to drink, during a big training block when you want to be.

[00:15:49] The state where your IV is higher and you're ready to adapt to more stress. So the idea of the subjective questionnaire is to collect all of the context and the data behind [00:16:00] what's going on so that you can learn like, how is my body responding to all these different stimuli that I have in my life? For athletes, it's usually pretty easy.

[00:16:08] The biggest stress you have in your life is the physical stress of training, but most people are not professional athletes and. All other lifestyle factors, work stresses, relationship stresses, all of those sorts of things that come in and affect their life as well. And learning how those affect you can help you incorporate your training better into your life as a whole.

[00:16:28] Taryn: It's very cool. I might turn some of those off though. Like I don't, I never travel.

[00:16:32] Daniel: Yeah, that's a, there's an option, so there's a whole lot of tags. You can turn some on, turn, some off, whichever you like. And then we also have a few custom tags at the bottom, so you can add your own metric that you want in there. Some people capture, uh, medication that they're taking or they might capture.

[00:16:48] If they're doing meditation or yoga as a separate session and, and the things that they have to try and sort of calm themselves and reduce stress and see, oh, over time, is this helping or not?

[00:16:58] Taryn: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really cool 'cause I know a lot of my athletes do travel for work across time zones and in beating, jet lag is something I've helped them with from a nutritional perspective. But adding some HRV tracking through periods of stress and and time zone shifting like that could be really useful for them too.

[00:17:15] Daniel: Yep. It's, uh, it's just to learn more about yourself. So definitely some athletes will find some things and some are just really robust and resilient and nothing affects them. Um, we see some athletes that just have the same score all the time, no problem at all. They can cope with any level of stress and others who are much more, much more sensitive and need to account for better.

[00:17:34] But. Everyone who has more information and more understanding of their own physiology is in a better place to train.

[00:17:40] Taryn: Amen.

[00:17:41] Daniel: Yeah,

[00:17:42] Taryn: So what are some of the common mistakes you see triathletes or athletes making then when it comes to using their HRV data? 

[00:17:50] Daniel: the biggest mistake is thinking of it as a readiness to train. So we try to be really precise on the language there, and. Some athletes think I, if I [00:18:00] wake up on race day and my HRV is really low, that means I'm stressed. I have a bad race. And we say, no. That's not necessarily the case. It's not indicates in your readiness or your ability to do the work, but it's indicates in your body, state and ability to adapt to the training.

[00:18:18] So changing your mindset and rather than thinking of it as a limiter, telling you what you must do each day, think of it as a. That can help you understand when best to train. So this is the idea is when are you best adapted to training and do the hard training on those days? The app is not trying to guide you completely, it's just trying to give you an indication, and that's, I think, as you said, one of the biggest mistakes is just being purely guided by your HRV.

[00:18:44] Sometimes you might be on a training camp and you need to do multiple hard days in a row and accept that you're gonna take a small decline in your HRV over that period. But when you get home, you're

[00:18:59] a, a dictate your training completely. Into a whole system that, uh, measures your body and, and helps, adapt to your perceptions as well.

[00:19:10] Taryn: So that's a good point. So you're not taking the data and going, okay, my, my readiness to train or my HRV score is terrible for multiple days in a row, so I'm just gonna do nothing.

[00:19:20] Daniel: Yeah.

[00:19:20] Taryn: So it's, it's using it as a tool in your tool belt to see that, see some trends and maybe make some changes to your lifestyle to help it.

[00:19:28] any other tips for adjusting training based on what your HRV measurement might be for the day?

[00:19:34] Daniel: Yeah. So, We have the, the primary level, which is just that guide every day, whether it says proceed as normal or to limit intensity. So that's your first level. Then we can start looking at trends over the season. So we see that there's also some seasonality to HRV and some athletes, train much better in the summer and struggle in the winter.

[00:19:54] And that can be related just to the seasons. That can be, um. A relationship to your work [00:20:00] week and those sorts of things. So some athletes are able to train better particularly on Sundays. I'd say the first level is use just the simple guide that says whether to proceed as planned or not, or to limit intensity. And then dive into the analysis that we have in the app and try and find out your own rhythms and your own, cycles of training with when things work best for you. So start at the highest level.

[00:20:25] And then start digging deeper into the data to see if you can find certain little things that work best for you. Like those examples that I gave around travel, some people might find things like that. You might find that you go out for a, a big party every Friday night and then you're training on Saturday's terrible.

[00:20:42] Taryn: Triathletes. Don't do that. What are you talking about?

[00:20:44] Daniel: Yeah, after races, I think that might not be the case, but it's, it is finding those patterns that suit you rather than just trying to use a metric. So that's what we're preaching and a sort of holistic system of over the season, over the year and finding out when the best time for you to train us.

[00:21:01] Taryn: I haven't seen this 'cause I haven't gone looking, but is there any way to track menstrual cycle through the app as

[00:21:07] Daniel: Yes. So one of the tags that you're saying you wanted to turn some of them on and off. One of them we have is the mint cycle that's available in the, in the app. So that's something that you can track as well?

[00:21:17] Taryn: That's really exciting. 'cause I know that there's a lot of females listening that are probably like, I feel terrible at this particular phase of my cycle. And there's lots of tools to track and measure that now. but it'd be nice to align that with HRV as well.

[00:21:28] Daniel: Yeah, so if you turn that tag on, you can report on that in the subjective questionnaire. You'll have your HRV data as well, and also your training data. So you can look at all those three different components and see, and again, it's really personal. So we see some female athletes who just. Have consistent HRVs are able to train consistently throughout the month and some that really need to try and adapt their training and then have certain periods of the month where they don't want to, to train as hard or need to adjust their training to to suit them.

[00:21:58] So that would be something as [00:22:00] an example that you can learn more about. It can be. your period, or you can learn about strength training. That can have a different impact on you. That's why the muscle soreness question is included in there. travel, alcohol, sleep, all of those things, and learning those things about yourself.

[00:22:14] You might find I'm very sensitive to sleep and if I go on a training camp, I need to make a plan to get to bed an extra 30 minutes earlier.

[00:22:22] Taryn: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. I'll go and find that, 'cause that's really exciting area, I think, and I encourage all of the female athletes that I work with to just start tracking, like get an idea of what is your story and what is going on for you. Because there might be, you know, recommendations that this happens at this phase of the cycle, but personally, I don't follow those.

[00:22:43] I have my own little rhythm. And the only way to figure that out is to start using yourself as your own experiment and tracking that information over time.

[00:22:51] Daniel: Exactly, that's what we try to provide. And I said there's, there are three sort of custom metrics, so if you add, have other things, other impacts on your life, you can also track those as well. Uh, medication can be big things, but. You can also do things on the parasympathetic side where you're promoting recovery and see is that helping if you do a, a yoga session or meditation or a biofeedback breathing session, does that have an impact and benefit me so we can look at both positive and negative stresses and capture those influences on us.

[00:23:20] Taryn: Yeah, so cool. So can we talk about those factors then that may affect HRV? So, you know, sleep, nutrition, and stress management? I guess first step is tracking that stuff and then I guess optimizing that for HRV. Do you have any data or have some, stories around how that works?

[00:23:38] Daniel: So this is where HRV is really interesting. So we say that HRV is a, um, very, very sensitive measure, but it's not specific. So it's not specific to any type of stress. It's not only your training stress that will impact your HRV. Your body doesn't know the difference of. What the stress stimulus was. So if you're in a [00:24:00] stressed state, the autonomic nervous system will react in the same way regardless of what that stress is.

[00:24:06] And, the size and magnitude of that stress will impact your HRV. So we're trying to capture all of those different things, and as you said, It can be travel, sleep, it can be your diet as well. That can have a big impact. And if you change and you go through a phase of eating lower carbs while you're trying to lose weight, for example, or maybe you in a big block of training and you're eating a lot of refined carbs to try and help you get through those big training days, those can also have an impact on your HRV.

[00:24:33] So. It's very useful in the sense that it can pick up on all sorts of different little things and it's really sensitive and that's what makes it a really, uh, useful metric. Of course, it's challenging then to interpret what is the source of that stress, and that's why we are really precise on saying follow the same context every morning so that you're always getting a base reading that is the same each day of your HI.

[00:24:58] And then be thorough in capturing the data in your, uh, subjective questionnaire so that you can learn which stresses are impacting you. Then in the app we have a series of correlations, so you can go in the app and there's, um, an option to change through all those different subjective questionnaires and see.

[00:25:14] Is there a big relationship for me on this factor? And I see that with, the athletes I work with. Some are much more, um, impacted by altitude, for example. And we need to design their altitude training camp in a different way to other athletes who are less sensitive to altitude. Some are very sensitive to heat training, so if we go to environment.

[00:25:36] Or if they're preparing for the first race of the season after the winter in Europe and we know that it's, something that impacts them a lot. Training and heat. We try to introduce heat training sessions indoors on the trainer or on the treadmill, but prior to that, for those athletes who are more sensitive.

[00:25:54] So it's always about capturing that data. Remembering that it is very sensitive and that [00:26:00] you need to be really careful about interpreting and trying to find what reason that the HRV changed for you.

[00:26:06] Taryn: Very cool and quick question, we go back to the beginning. does it give you different data or is it still as valuable if you are testing your HRV at a different time of day? You know, you meant to do it when you first get up in the morning, but could you do it say at night before you go to bed or sometime when you're maybe more relaxed?

[00:26:25] Daniel: we recommend doing it always in the morning because that's the same context. So you have, you've had a period of recovery overnight. You wake up in the morning and it should be the same, context every day. during the day, lots of things can change. So your HRV will be sensitive to caffeine that you've drank your coffee, your work stress, your life stress, and you don't have a full period of recovery.

[00:26:47] So it's never gonna be exactly the same as measuring as you would've done in the morning. people do experiment and try and take different measures, but for us, all you need is that One minute measurements in the morning, in the same context every day, and make adjustments from day to day.

[00:27:03] Don't try and adjust during the day. It just becomes too complex and there's too many factors to try and.

[00:27:09] Taryn: Yeah. Thank you. I just had that thought while you were talking and I'm like, hang on, I'm gonna ask this one just in case somebody else was thinking the same thing.

[00:27:15] Daniel: Yeah, we've tried different things measuring before sessions and after sessions and trying to assess how they impact HRV and is that a way to measure the adaptability of the body and the session itself? there's too many variables, too much complex. It's either comes into that that you can't account for.

[00:27:31] So we tried to limit it in. Questions that we ask and the context of the measurements so that it can be meaningful and interpretable, and it's not trying to grab something out of this hazy adjusting variables all the time.

[00:27:44] Taryn: So if you could give one piece of advice to the triathletes listening about using HHRV to leverage better performance, what 

[00:27:52] Daniel: Yeah. continuing from where we were right there is that the body's really complex. It's a really complex and adaptable system, [00:28:00] and that's can never be simplified into just one little metric like HRV, but HRV can be a very useful objective metric that can help you to understand where you are at different points in time.

[00:28:13] So The goal is to learn more about yourself and adding HRV as a tool in your toolbox to learn more about yourself and to have a little bit of objective data can make you a better athlete because you're better informed and you know more on how you personally adapt to training.

[00:28:30] Taryn: Perfect. So if somebody wants to go and do it, I downloaded the app from the app store on Apple. It was 15 Australian dollars. It was 14.99 I think. I paid for this. Like these guys aren't paying me to talk about this on the podcast. Just fy I'm not gonna

[00:28:46] get kickbacks for that. This is like, I paid for this thing tax deduction, surely.

[00:28:50] But. It came outta my own pocket. my athletes in the US that are using it, it was 9 99 I think in US Dollars it's in like Google Play. It's on the app store. You guys also have a website anywhere else that they can go to learn a bit more about HRV.

[00:29:07] Daniel: Yeah, exactly. It's uh, we have an iOS, app on the Apple App Store and a, Google app on the Chrome or Google Play Store. the price depends a little bit by region and there's certain individual regional taxes that have to be taken into account, but the app is just a one-time fee.

[00:29:23] So you pay for the app and then you always have it, and you can use your IV and take a measurement every day. So.

[00:29:31] Taryn: Yep. 

[00:29:31] Daniel: Because the most important thing is learning about yourself and learning about HRV. We have a great website, so we have, HRV for training.com is our website. We have a lot of articles. I write some of them. Marco writes most of them explaining how to take the measurements, how to make different interpretations.

[00:29:48] We have ambassadors on our website to also give some case studies so you can learn how they're using the data. We also provide case studies. We have information there about the research and [00:30:00] scientific method that we use to validate the measurements. So it's a great resource just to learn more about HRV and to learn, uh, more about how to use it in your training.

[00:30:08] Taryn: Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing all of that knowledge with us and talking nerdy.

[00:30:13] Daniel: It's a pleasure. I hope it's useful. We also have, maybe the last thing to say is we have a helpline, so if, uh, any of our users or any of the people who listen to this wanna start using it, if you have questions, you can send us emails and we'll try to help and support you guide you on how to use HRV for training better.

[00:30:28] Taryn: I love that it's a one-time fee.

[00:30:31] Daniel: Yeah,

[00:30:31] Taryn: There are so 

[00:30:32] many subscriptions that triathletes have for everything, and so it's nice to just have to pay once and be like, okay, I'm done. This is not coming out every month. Now

[00:30:40] Daniel: we like that as well. We do have, another online platform where you can do further analysis, uh, when you wanna look at the bigger picture and maybe look at some of the trends over time. And that's a subscription. But the majority of our users just have the app itself and use that for measurements and to pull in their data.

[00:30:56] So. You don't need the subscription. If you want to, there's an option there, but, we recommend just getting started with the app and learning something about yourself.

[00:31:04] Taryn: Thank you so much, Daniel. Thanks for 

[00:31:06] Daniel: it's been a pleasure. Yeah, thank you very much. Have a great day. 

 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smashed in the fourth leg - nutrition!