Hi everyone,
I’ve been tracking my HRV for nearly a year now and see the usual trend of HRV declining when i do back to back training days/overreaching/stressed.
However, the last week my HRV has been steadily climbing outside of garmin’s baseline and garmin classes it as “unbalanced”. Interestingly my RHR is lower than usual and the lowest ever (45bmp) after a rest day yesterday.
What does this mean? I couldn’t find much when I tried to Google it, apart from the body trying to go into “deep recovery” after a stressful period.
I have a normal level of stress at work and I’m enjoying training!
Does anyone have experience with this or know what it could mean?
Thanks I’m advance for time!
What I found from The Cleveland Clinic:
Why is heart rate variability a good thing?
Your body has many systems and features that let it adapt to where you are and what you’re doing. Your heart’s variability reflects how adaptable your body can be. If your heart rate is highly variable, this is usually evidence that your body can adapt to many kinds of changes. People with high heart rate variability are usually less stressed and happier.
In general, low heart rate variability is considered a sign of current or future health problems because it shows your body is less resilient and struggles to handle changing situations. It’s also more common in people who have higher resting heart rates. That’s because when your heart is beating faster, there’s less time between beats, reducing the opportunity for variability. This is often the case with conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, asthma, anxiety and depression.
So getting medical opinion(s) would be a great idea, especially if it’s been years (or never) since you’ve seen a specialist. (My insurance requires a yearly physical, and they go through a rather long list of things to look at. It included my issues exercising, and that led to a series of tests that found a surprise undersized artery limiting the effort I can put out. I was having chest pains during HIIT workouts 
)
If you haven’t been fit before, this could be a good thing, but if you have been fit, having this much of a pronounced change could be a marker for upcoming badness. I’d still, depending on age, get an expert opinion. You only have one heart, and one life. Make sense?
1 Like
Maybe I’m misreading this, but she’s saying his HRV is HIGHER than normal. Not lower.
I’m curious what a higher than normal HRV could mean as well. My understanding is that a lower HRV can mean your body is experiencing a lot of stress (illness, training load, life, etc.).
1 Like
I’ve had this happen a few times over the past couple of years. The timing is about 4-6 weeks after resuming full training after an extended break (say 6-8 weeks of only riding 1-2x a week). I seem to generally maintain a higher average HRV for 4-8 weeks before it normalizes.
1 Like
I had this recently, HRV way higher, along with a significant drop in RHR (~10%)
This also included lower average and max heart rates on the bike.
It started in a small break after a long period of heavy training load and a significant volume.
The HRV normalised after a week or two but RHR only went back up 1-2bpm.
Getting sick seems to have reset everything now. I wondered if it was a weird kind of soup of increased fitness and a level of fatigue that was suppressing my hr
1 Like
It said:
People with high heart rate variability are usually less stressed and happier.
So I’d interpret that as ‘healthier’ too. Sure, when I was really fit, my resting heart rate was in the 40’s, low enough it freaked me out one night when I heard it beating so slow. BUT if it just all of the sudden just drops (meaning a higher range of heart rate from a low to the high) that could mean something that a physician might be able to help with. That was all I was saying.
The heart reacts to a lot of stuff going on in the body. Stress, emotions, food, allergies, drugs, music, all kinds of things. Sudden changes from ‘normal’ could mean something. Like in my case: I was having chest pain, it felt like it was in the area of the heart. I mentioned it to my GP, and she scheduled a workup (stress test) and I failed it (couldn’t get my heart rate up high enough for the test). They scheduled another diagnostic test, and they found my genetic governor. That one vessel was essentially starving my heart of blood and I was really having a very mild heart attack-like episode. Weird…
1 Like
Had this as well a couple of times as a low HRV person (30…40). It went away as it came after a week or so each time without me noticing any other difference.
1 Like
Thanks for your message. That’s quite scary that you were having a mild heart attack and I think you are right, I’m due a check up anyway and good to get things checked out. RHR is steadily declining (last few weeks) I started increasing my running over the past few weeks and cleaned up diet for a few days, but I don’t think that can’t have such a change straight away. I’ve never seen such a change with years of cycling training. Like you say prob best to get it checked out
That’s interesting. I guess with more data being available from wearables, maybe we will start seeing more research on what this means
That’s interesting. I didn’t think to check HR on my recent TR workouts vs before. Good to know though, thank you
Yeah my HRV is higher than normal, not lower than normal. I’m a she :-))
1 Like
I sure hope it’s nothing…
2 Likes
Edited, and my apologies for messing that up!
1 Like
Just a reminder that all depends on the accuracy of the data in the first place.
Here is an n=1 article with some interesting results:
1 Like
I’d point out that a HRV value (consistently) in the teens is very unusual. Obviously, not unheard of, but that’s exceptionally low by almost every definition of it. Most people that see those types of very low numbers only see it when super sick (e.g. rough bout of COVID, etc…).
Obviously, as always, HRV numbers vary in terms of what’s normal, but that’s definitely pushing that boundary as a norm.
Setting that link aside, when I see my HRV values go up, and my RHR values got down, that almost always means I’m on vacation and/or otherwise getting strong sleep with relatively minimal workouts (mostly in terms of intensity or duration). The ‘problem’ with assigning high HRV above the baseline to ‘Unbalanced’, is that it can either be good or bad. But Garmin (and other platforms), don’t relly know which. In the majority of cases, it’s good. But for some people, it’s bad. This is where it all gets kinda weird, because Garmin (and others) are trying to appease both camps, while concurrently not upsetting both camps.
This is all even moreso true if your average baseline is hyper-consistent in a very small window (for any number of reasons), then it doesn’t take much to jump beyond it.
2 Likes