How to Track Recovery with Heart Rate Variability
There is often a lot of focus on running performance, but unfortunately an often forgotten aspect of running is RECOVERY!
One of the best ways to track your recovery is with heart rate variability (HRV). You can effectively use this to help you determine your recovery, and this helps mitigate risk for injuries, improve performance and train smarter – not necessary harder.
If you read last month’s blog on meditation, you learned about the parasympathetic nervous system. Heart Rate Variability is a way for runners to objectively measure the effects of recovery, including how much more time you need before another hard work out based on your resting heart rate and it’s ability to rise and come back down. In essence, the greater the heart rate variability, the more fit and recovered someone is.
The Problem with Poor Recovery
If we are not recovered, we are at a higher risk for muscle strains, bone stress injuries, and tendon Injuries due to fatigue. Many orthopedic musculoskeletal injuries in runners are due to being over trained and underfed which can lead to REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency). But food intake alone isn’t the only answer. Quality and timing of sleep, rest and recovery and stress management is also key.
Getting to bed late or eating late spikes cortisol, a stress hormone which should not be elevated at night while we try to recover, since recovery and tissue healing all happens while we are asleep. So if you don’t have enough sleep, if your sleep schedule is inconsistent, or you have a late sleep schedule, this will affect recovery and lower heart rate variability.
Cortisol, if left high and unchecked, will eventually crash. Low cortisol levels can leave you feeling tired or burnt out. It can cause deficiencies in key micro-nutrients and vitamins D, B, and iron, as they are used up more by the body when it’s in a state of stress and not recovering fully after hard workouts.
How to Track your HRV
Incorporating meditation and breathing is a good step, as is measuring and tracking your Heart Rate Variability for runners. When you track HRV, you can keep track of your stress levels and other metrics. It especially becomes important with masters level runners since recovery is even more imperative in order to continue to sustain the demands and loads of running and hard training.
There are many wearable technology devices (some better than others) that can measure HRV and other metrics, even quality of sleep. One option is Whoop, which is based on neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman’s lab at Stanford.
As runners begin to track their HRV, it’s important to understand what average levels are for your age.
New Technology: Fire Fly
Speaking of recovery. I want to introduce runners to the Firefly, a new innovative advanced technology being used by many professional and elite athletes (over 350 Combined pro and NCAA div 2 sports teams) to assist with recovery and performance. It is a small, inconspicuous self-Neuromuscular electrical stimulation electrode strip that helps athletes with recovery and performance by increasing blood flow up to 400% in the lower extremity after hard work outs or long runs. This helps to move out metabolic waste such as inflammatory mediators, lactate and other post exercise byproducts.
I have been using this with some patients which in their case, a lot of their “injuries” are actually due to fatigued and inadequate recovery and have been having phenomenal results! The Firefly has been shown to be superior to Normatec compression boots.
Use the link below to save 10% on the Firefly. Please contact me if you have any questions. This product is really a game changer! https://www.recoveryfirefly.com/discount/ORC10
If you have more questions about recovery and how to improve your running performance, contact Oregon Running Clinic for a consultation.