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Oleg Gavryliuk's avatar

Thank you for the great explanation about applying HRV for strength training.

How is it possible to distinguish a drop in HRV from training stress or "non-training-related stressors"?

For example in the morning after training, I see a drop in HRV and a rise in HR, plus yesterday was a quite busy day at work.

How is possible to distinguish what factors affected HRV?

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Gabriel's avatar

I have been using HRV4training for more than a year now and I am still undecided on whether it is more useful to use it proactively (for example, your HRV is outside normal range, and you adapt your lifestyle or training program) or reactively (you take a day off, or reduce volume or intensity).

I personally believe that the first is the most useful. But I am not sure about the second. There is so much going on that affects your HRV, maybe you slept poorly or had a big party yesterday, but it doesn’t mean you are going to underperform if you train like normal the next day. I must say that I have regretted some days of training like normal when the app told me to take it easier, but I subjectively cannot feel the difference between low, in range and high HRV.

Another thing I noticed, is that if I do strength training alone, without changing training programs, my HRV is mostly flat and 90% of the time it changes due to lifestyle. I am unsure if this is always good. It is important to apply progressive overload in the form of volume or intensity to make progress, and constant HRV means I am just used to it. That does not mean that crushing your HRV is the way to go. So there is a lot of nuance. I do believe that HRV monitoring is probably more important to the endurance athlete, with strength training you can increase stress by adding more sets or going closer to failure, but we are probably not training more than 6 hours a week, and there are no hard and easy days or long days, it is all the same in duration and intensity, only changing the exercises, day after day.

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