Oh, good. Was making my chest itch just thinking about it. 
Now I’m going to have to buy an Apple Watch…
I got my first shot (Pfizer) on Feb. 9 and had no real symptoms. I did a challenging 34 miles of threshold intervals (Avalanche Spire +3) the next day. My HRV was slightly depressed to 7 from 10 day of my shot.
Expecting more side effects after 2nd shot on March 2. Good news today is that new data shows Pfizer first shot alone provides good protection even before your get the 2nd!
I had my Astra/Xenica jab yesterday morning. Resting HR 14 beats higher at 68 but HRV was lower but still in the green this morning. Feeling pretty achey today with headaches coming and going.
i must say that over the past 2 weeks i’ve gone all in on hrv, trying to understand it, best practices, tracking measurements etc. this thread has helped me a great deal.
first, i’m on android platform with a garmin watch. i have serious issues with how garmin handles hrv (they use the onboard optical sensor themselves for hrv tracking, but for the end user you’re required to wear a chest strap and they provide you with no data whatsoever) so i’ve been looking outside of that ecosystem. i have a polar h10 chest strap that i use for normal training, so i’ve been pairing that with various android hrv apps to see what works best. so far i’ve been using elite hrv, hrv4training and kubios hrv. i like all 3 actually. kubios is entirely free from what i can tell, but i had to pay $10 for hrv4training and $5 for elite hrv (to pair with strava). i also bought a corsense hrv finger sensor to test out. early days, but here are my findings so far:
- as is typically the case, android is a rather limiting platform in this space. the apps that are available are more limited and seems to lag their apple counterparts from what i can tell. still, of the 3 that i’m trying, i’m pretty happy. all 3 do a good job of providing all the raw data you could possibly want and putting some context around it. not sure which one i’ll end up settling on, but all 3 seem more than capable of doing the job at this point. elite adds serenity crap and breathing stuff to the mix, which i have zero interest in, so there’s more fluff than the other 2. hrv4training adds a lot of detail around your fitness tracking, such as how your tss and vo2max are impacting/impacted by the hrv score. it’s pretty cool, but most of the data requires a critical mass of measurements, which i don’t have yet. kubios is more basic than these and just provides all of the hrv metrics and how your score compares to the population. refreshingly simple.
for all 3 i just wish there was a way to view the data on a pc outside of the mobile apps without paying even more than i already paid for the app. elite wants something like $80/yr to view your data, while hrv4training wants $50 or so. i even see such an option with kubios. kind of annoying to have to pay more just to see your data on a screen larger than 6.9" when you’ve already paid for the apps… - the corsense finger monitor is kind of terrible. elite billed it as a direct replacement to strap based measurements but it’s anything but. it is EXTREMELY sensitive to any sort of movement and turns on randomly from the vibration of you walking by it when it’s sitting on a table. there’s no battery indicator in the elite app (or any other app) to see what the life is like, you just have to guess. when taking a measurement, i have to typically try 3 or 4 different fingers before i can start to get an accurate reading. otherwise i’ll see either no data or a resting hr of 170, which is nonsense. i have no confidence at all that it’s feeding the apps accurate data and this will likely be going back under their return policy. h10 chest strap is less convenient, but at least i know it’s accurate
- have i mentioned how disappointed i am with garmin and how they’re handling hrv? they know it’s important data and admit to using it in a great many things:
https://support.garmin.com/en-GB/?faq=04pnPSBTYSAYL9FylZoUl5
Heart Rate Variability or HRV is used for the calculation of Physiological Measurements such as the VO2 Max Estimator, Stress Score, Performance Condition, Lactate Threshold and Body Battery. HRV is also used to determine sleep levels on newer Garmin devices that feature an Optical Heart Rate sensor.
…but they refuse to give the actual data to the end user or let you use it on other platforms, which is why i have to chase these other solutions in the first place
anyway, this is really exciting stuff! thanks for the info here guys. looking forward to seeing what we can do with this data to help improve our fitness!
FWIW on my Edge 530 bike computer its possible to save HRV in the .fit file. It is possible to use other tools with the HRV data collected. For example I’ve been told this project:
will use the HRV data collected by my 530.
yeah i see it shows up in runalyze as well. i guess i’m more disappointed that i can’t see it directly from garmin on the connect platform, where all of my other data is stored. also i’d love to try that hrv logger app they mentioned but alas it’s not available for android. apple only
I’ve been using Training Today for quite a while but Athlytic looks very cool. Giving it a try for sure.
Initial reaction is that I would pay $20/year for this data.
yes, and HRV is used to create Performance Condition which you can see. But not HRV directly, unless you record it and have an app to read/display it.
Look into Garmins body battery. Gets good reviews and is better than a whoop??
I decided to give HRV4training a try this past week and am now past the baseline phase. I’m not sure how much if any I’ll use this to guide training, but just curious to follow mine. Past few days my score has been 7.6, 7.8,7.2,7.1 and this morning 8.1, which is interesting because I did my longest endurance ride yesterday (the RPE was pretty low on the ride too), but I guess I had pretty decent sleep after a night of bad sleep Sat due to a sick kid.
I am seeing quite clear pattern. If daily hrv stays around 100 (85-165) = I feel good and can exercise without worries. When it stays low (70 or less) many days in a row. I need to rest.
Last four days my hrv has been very low 55-65. And last couple days i have been eating little more junk food and now i know how much that actually affects my sleep! Heart rate is up and i feel swollen and feel the “inflammation”. One good reason to stay away from the junk. I do have three weeks of good training behind me so the low hrv is also kinda obvious at this point.
Just my 2 cents as I have used elite and other and now have had whoop for close to a year. I believe Whoop states measuring HRV in the morning is not nearly as accurate as their measurment taken in the deepest part of sleep as opposed to measuring when you are already awake and many factors can influence the HRV measurement. My own experience was elite and whoop would disagree some mornings. I used both for a month. I sided with whoop. Whoop also takes into account the quality and quanity of sleep and your breathing patterns in your readiness to take on stress and calculates how much strain is optimium for that day.
@marco.alt any plans to release the HRV Logger app for Android or integrate the functionality into the HRV4Training app? Would love to try the LT1 estimation but I’m an Android guy.
Hey all, I’ve been tracking my HRV for quite some time but haven’t been too serious about adjusting my training accordingly. I track via an Apple Watch and the Training Today application. Also recently stumbled on Triathlon Talon’s Excel sheet. Have been resisting the urge to grab a Whoop.
I’m a 38 year-old health care administrator with a 1.5 year old boy. Needless to say, the last year has been pretty difficult and I am starting to realize that my recovery might be suffering.
I’m on a low volume training plan and this recent build has been pretty rough. I probably brought this on to some degree with outdoor rides while trying to maintain the plan and adding some group workouts with friends.
My plan moving forward is to adjust my schedule according the the Training Today result from my morning reading. Green, go for the high intensity workout; Yellow, it depends on how high in the yellow range and how I’m feeling, will work somewhere between tempo and sweet spot; Red, rest or lower on the endurance range. Example, I’m 7.7/10 in Training Today right now so doing Mt Hale outside with maybe some extra endurance mileage.
Finally, the question, what exactly do these studies mean by high intensity? Threshold, VO2? I’ll be able to fairly easily find the endurance and sweet spot (few) rides but could use some advice on the higher intensity stuff.
All these “daily optimizations with HRV” seem so surreal to me. Just a simple example, If I get heavily drunk, next morning I’ll be destroyed, my heart rate can be 10-15 beats higher than usual, I’ll be in no shape to look straight, let alone train hard, and yet… each HRV app completely misses that and tells me “8/10 go get 'em tiger!”.
If it can miss something as big as that, how am I supposed to rely on it to detect that my sleep/nutrition wasn’t really perfect and that 6/10/yellow means I should do medium intensity or whatever?
On the other hand, when I take a look at long term graph I can see some trends, recognize some of these things etc but still I ask myself how useful is that for anyone who isn’t professional endurance athlete? Because in my case (and probably most other people are in the same spot) I’m limited more by time available and less whether all other things in my life are ideal for training session etc.
I’m collecting HRV each day for last 2-3 years and I still can’t say it has any use for someone in my position. 
I’m coming to the same conclusion. I’ve only been collecting data for 6 months, but it’s tough to see how it’s telling me anything I can’t figure out for myself.
So far I notice that a ‘low’ reading is highly correlated with
a) a VO2 max workout the previous day
b) drinking too much the night before
c) a bad night’s sleep
(obviously these things are not always mutually exclusive…)
Of more concern, though, is on more than a few occasions I’ve taken a reading as instructed, a couple of minutes after waking up - then taken another one a couple of minutes later, still lying in bed, and the reading has gone from ‘you’re trending downwards, take it easy today’ to ‘proceed as planned’. That doesn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence.
Oh yea, this is my favorite thing, always love hearing from these app representatives how you should just take 1st reading, “it’s all scientifically validated”, bla bla stuff when it’s so obvious that you can take 2 readings back to back and get highly different results.
Sure, those things don’t matter as much for real endurance athletes because they can use it for detecting different trends, but for recreational athletes? For us training generally isn’t most impactful stress in our lives and HRV really loses its usefulness. I have yet to see any concrete proof that any of these HRV apps can be used for guiding short term training, it’s really still marketing fluff at this point.
They are but the raw RR interval data which is what eliteHRV exports would be the same for HRV4T if it can import the format presented to it.
I’ve been using both Elite HRV and KubiosHRV. The data and recs are often at odds. After a moderately challenging ride (TR Hunter) yesterday, Elite gave me a 6 (out of 10) and suggested recovery. RMSSD and SDNN were 28 and 40, respectively. KubiosHRV rated me at 94% (an all time high) with the same two readings 91 and 51. Readings were taken back-to-back.
Not surprised. I see this between EliteHRV and HRV4Training at my wake-up HRV measurement. I see them align more often than not. At this point I tend to align with HRV4Training but will admit it only influences my training decisions with the help of how I feel, how I think I slept and how my Garmin tells me I rested.