What’s Your Heart-Rate Variability? It May Be Time to Find Out
wsj.com
wsj.com
Even in 'normal' parts of the gameplay when I wasn't under stress I'd see my heart rate shifting all over the place. One moment of calm I'd be at 65, then 80, then 70. I started playing with it, to see if I could swing the needle with breathing, and quickly found that gamifying it led to my heart rate increasing when I was successful at decreasing it. (I'd get excited that I had lowered the rate, which increased the rate.)
I was also surprised to learn that my heart rate spiked significantly after tense moments in the game. In game combat usually didn't cause the rate to rise until 30 seconds or so after the combat started. I felt the intensity and the rush immediately, but the HR increased later.
I also found that games slowly lose their HR impact over time. A game like Player Unknown's Battlegrounds could get my HR into the 120s pretty easily, and now it only raises my HR into the 90s when it's tense.
It's fun to have access to all this data about ourselves, and I'm glad to see so many different ways of using it -- from dialing in a few extra % on your athletic goals to showing goofy SVGs over a videogame.
I've been looking for a while and it seems straps are all over the place in terms of being easily accessed without proprietary adapters
This is something called cardiac lag. Your heart rate takes time to climb to the rate it needs to match the effort your body experiences. Also, some optical heart rate monitors are poor at dealing with sudden spikes in heart rate so that might impact readings.
Let's say I have a heart rate of 60 bpm. And my beats are
1 second -> .9 seconds -> 1.1 seconds
2 seconds -> .5 seconds -> 1.5 seconds
Meanwhile a person who is tired or sick or under stress will have more trouble adapting to the environment. Whatever happens, the heart beats at the same exact rhythm - but it shouldn't. It should go fast when required and go slow otherwise
About half of my class at university (me included) actually took a deep breath when they learned about HRV because we had all at some point worried about our heart rate seeming to erratically change from second to second. We all just never worried enough to ask anybody.
The primary source of variability under those conditions seems to be that HR increases when inhaling and decreases when exhaling. Seen in that light, it makes more sense.
Essentially, what HRV may measure is ability to actively and acutely lower HR (which is most naturally performed during exhalation). This is not so unlike how some exercise equipment will provide a fitness measure based on heart-rate recovery: how long does it take you to return to some percentage of your resting heart rate after having exercised?
At this point, I'll make an analogy, which is meant only to be that. If you have a high income, you can afford to spend a lot of money on a day-to-day-basis. Depending on how you set things up, you might see a wild flux in bank balance, and that's just fine -- because you can afford it.
Likewise, performance athletes experience highly-elevated heart rates regularly. Indeed, it's that stress which leads to fitness adaptations. Just as you need to spend money to make money, you need to stimulate the heart in order to strengthen it. High HRV (as far as I can tell), may largely correspond with the naturally-adapted ability to rapidly return to the calm, low-HR state characteristic of the well-trained athlete.
When you live check-to-check, you have to budget very carefully and avoid variability in spending. You can't afford to venture, and you don't gain. When you know huge cash infusions are around every corner, you don't worry about spending.
Likewise, the fit heart doesn't need to damp and suppress stimulus. Elevated heart rate is good (think about the positive moments in life which can cause this), as long as it doesn't lead to chronic stress but instead evaporates in the space of a breath or two.
Some docs says that breathing influences arteries constriction (or the opposite).
I wonder if it helps increasing oxygenation ..
[1] palms and feets get a tiny heat wave, also a sensation of relaxation in my veins
Polar uses R-R intervals to adjust heart rate high and low limits for for exercise period (unless you set them manually). I think they are called ownindex and ownzone.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4751190/
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100...
> Dr. Morgan also found that the metronomic [non variable] effect is often associated with early heart disease and even sudden death. Apparently, the body chemistry that allows young people to survive under high stress does not translate into optimal heart health past the age of fifty.
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/heart-rate-variability-th... has a bunch at the bottom. It's fairly easy to find tens of them with the right search terms.
I wouldn't know what the app is, whether anything that works with the Apple Watch exists, or even whether the Apple Watch has an API that would allow an app to measure it.
Does anybody here know about a good fitness tracker to measure HRV?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/heart-rate-varia...
“heart rate variability is essentially the gap between heartbeats when you are resting. A longer gap between heartbeats indicates you are well rested, whereas a shorter gap could mean you are stressed out and running the risk of overtraining”