For HR, I’ll wait for HR to reach steady state during a step and then take an average over a minute or two from there. So if a six minute step, HR might be an average of minutes 4 and 5.
You can visually inspect the HR trace for each step and get a useful value easily.
But, particularly for home testers getting on and off the bike to sample, you’ll see HR drop very quickly when you hop off to take the sample. So have to let HR come back up to steady state for the next stage and not just take averages for the whole step.
On Edit: Here is an example. Can see how quickly HR drops when the effort is paused to hop off and take a sample.
