Using HRV, Heart Rate, and Blood Pressure

Yeah we mainly use heart rate and blood pressure just because they a bit more they a bit more accurate than HRV HRV can be all over the place depending on the technology you using how they calculating that what the scoring system is So every device is going to have a slightly different scoring system. We've gotten, gotten away from teaching HRV the way we used to, because we used to use elite HRV and we do do a five minute reading in the morning or whatever, and then do use that as a proxy. But the problem was that people would see one bad score on their HRV and go, oh, I can't train. So no, that's one bad score, one good score. That's not what counts. We need to see a trend one direction or the other and then pull out of it at that point. So we had to dial back and I've got to figure a better way of teaching it so that trainers and also people that are training don't look at that and make hyper reactive responses based on that number. And everybody's HRV is going to be different. So we have a broad range of where you should be. But if you're sitting at a number and that's supposedly a bad number, but you feel good, you're recovering, you're sleeping, your appetite's good, you don't have any symptoms of being overly stressed, then maybe that's just your number, right? So what we've done lately is teaching people, if you're going to monitor your HRV, monitor it and then write down, keep a diary of how you feel that day. and then when you don't feel right, make a note of that and see if the numbers change. And when you feel really good, make a note of that and see how the numbers change. And over time, you'll find what number is best for you and you'll find what range is best for you and that's your range, right? Now with the heart rate and the blood pressure, there's a lot of literature on this that shows standard ranges for lowering all-cause mortality. So we know pretty much for blood pressure, staying under 120 over 80 is the right way of being, right? So anything above that is prehypertension. Then you get to stage one, stage two, and even stage three hypertension. And blood pressure is a nice proxy for having a cardiovascular event. So if you have stage one, stage two blood pressure, to me, that's like a check engine light on your car. You better think about taking that in and let the mechanic look at that. And the same thing with resting heart rate. And I think when I tell people what the literature says about the optimal resting heart rate, especially when you're trained, it boggles the mind because there's a few papers I've looked at where 45 beats per minute, if you're well-trained, seems to be the optimal of staying under that. And then anything above that slowly starts to, in a linear manner, starts to increase your risk for some type of cardiovascular event. The only problem is getting that low isn't practical because most people don't have the time to do the amount of work that's going to take. They're not willing to do the work with stress management or they're stressed to the hill. like my friend I'm staying with, he's got two little boys and trying to get them up for school is a, it's a, it's a mission trying to get them to go to bed. It's a mission. So it's not practical to think that everybody's going to be able to hit that magic number. So we think I like somewhere below 62, optimally somewhere in the fifties is probably pretty good. And that's not that difficult to get. As long as you clean up your diet, as long as you do some cardio, as long as you don't take too much with the weights don't get too crazy with the weights especially high neural stuff like always lifting super heavy and going to like trying to go past failure it's not that difficult to get to those levels if you just make the effort but that stuff is super important and that's the the side of what we teach which is we prioritize health and fitness over performance and you can't perform if you're not healthy or rather genetic freaks can perform whether they're healthy or not but that's those are outliers for the rest of us mere mortals it's really important to understand that the better your metrics are the better you're going to perform and the faster you're going to make progress