One question I’ve had as I use HRV over the years: how is it that some days my subjective feeling can be so bleh (as after a not great night of sleep) yet HRV remains in the upper end of my normal range? What accounts for this sort of dissonance between the objective and subjective?
great question. I do not have an answer on the why, but it is clear that how we feel is hardly a good determinant of performance (see my blog about the Amsterdam marathon, racing a PR after being sick, traveling, etc. - and overall feeling terrible for a while). This is not to say that how we feel doesn't matter, but my view is that what we can do on a given day is not determined by how we feel (or by our physiology either), but using these data (both how we feel and the physiology) we can balance stressors better and train better over time, eventually leading to better performance. My point here is that using the data "in general" (for training or just life, in the day to day), is different from trying to use data to predict performance on a given day based on the daily values (which might depend on a number of things, let alone that these are rare outlier situations, and as such, difficult to generalize from). As Andrew Flatt once siad, if subjective feel was all that mattered for performance, the best athletes would be the most pampered. Maybe over time we will learn more about these relationships, but for now, I would say it is quite normal to have discrepancies, and maybe such discrepancies can teach us something about our individual case.
In my case, I’m currently tweaking my bed set up (new toppers, etc) and my sleep can be kind of spotty these days while I experiment with trying to get a more comfortable sleep surface and yet I sleep cold (Chilipad) and have very good habits around sleep and my HRV is generally pretty good even on days where I don’t feel or perform my best.
One question I’ve had as I use HRV over the years: how is it that some days my subjective feeling can be so bleh (as after a not great night of sleep) yet HRV remains in the upper end of my normal range? What accounts for this sort of dissonance between the objective and subjective?
great question. I do not have an answer on the why, but it is clear that how we feel is hardly a good determinant of performance (see my blog about the Amsterdam marathon, racing a PR after being sick, traveling, etc. - and overall feeling terrible for a while). This is not to say that how we feel doesn't matter, but my view is that what we can do on a given day is not determined by how we feel (or by our physiology either), but using these data (both how we feel and the physiology) we can balance stressors better and train better over time, eventually leading to better performance. My point here is that using the data "in general" (for training or just life, in the day to day), is different from trying to use data to predict performance on a given day based on the daily values (which might depend on a number of things, let alone that these are rare outlier situations, and as such, difficult to generalize from). As Andrew Flatt once siad, if subjective feel was all that mattered for performance, the best athletes would be the most pampered. Maybe over time we will learn more about these relationships, but for now, I would say it is quite normal to have discrepancies, and maybe such discrepancies can teach us something about our individual case.
In my case, I’m currently tweaking my bed set up (new toppers, etc) and my sleep can be kind of spotty these days while I experiment with trying to get a more comfortable sleep surface and yet I sleep cold (Chilipad) and have very good habits around sleep and my HRV is generally pretty good even on days where I don’t feel or perform my best.