I have a very average FTP (280-290, 78kg). My anaerobic isn’t bad, but nothing special. On the intervals.icu community power histograms I’m in the upper half of their population, but only just to the right of the peak on each one.
Yet I regularly get an HRRc of 60+. This morning 72, 181 down to 109, which the internet seems to tell me is pretty exceptional.
I will admit I have started to “game” it a bit… I figure if it’s a metric I’m going to bother to track, then I should try to be consistent with it, so I’ll often (like today), give it all the beans up a hill, and then come to a full stop for a minute before carrying on. So maybe I’m cheating, but I feel there’s no point tracking it on days where I’m still putting out 200W or 50W or whatever, too much variation.
Anyone pay any attention to it, or is it just a “fun” metric to keep an eye on, for curiosity more than anything else?
This is right after a 10 minutes ascent where I did high threshold-VO2 over/under’s
After the descent I had a second turn up and down, where my HRRc was 56, but not showed on the graphs.
Aye, it’ll only show your best HRRc from each activity. I’d argue it would be nice/interesting to see more than one, maybe let the user set a threshhold of “show any drop over XX% of the max drop of the activity”, or similar, with it defaulting to 50% or something.
Yes that would be nice and has come up a few times. It will probably get done eventually. If you are enthusiastic you could code that as a custom interval field using Javascript (HRRc after each interval as a field on the interval). I did a quick search and someone has done something similar already:
This sounds like an almost useless metric. You would need to do some standardized test to have nearly enough consistency to mean anything. But even then you would have non-fitness factors like temperature, humidity, allergies, mental stress, etc all affecting it as well.
Then you still have the question of how would it improve your training?
You can’t really train your max heart rate. Resting heart rate is not directly trainable, I don’t think. Even if you could train both, you don’t need HRRc as your way to check them. Of course HRRc is not just the difference between those numbers but includes how quickly your heart rate drops, but how would you even train that? And again, you can’t really judge your progress well with so many noise factors affecting the result.
I would say doing any of the things we know improve performance is much more valuable than HRRc. Same with metrics to track them. If you want to track heart rate metrics, try HR drift or LTHR. Those are more directly tied to fitness and don’t require testing specifically for the metric.
