Monthly Newsletter: September
Monthly Newsletter: September
heart rate variability, wearables, entrepreneurship, training talk and some ramblings
hi there 👋
I hope all is well.
Here is my newsletter for September, with links to the individual articles I’ve written in the past month. I hope you’ll find them useful.
Please feel free to comment below or in the articles should you have any questions, and I will try to follow up.
Take care!
Heart rate variability (HRV) 🫀
The big picture: 7 years of heart rate variability data: I often share snippets of a few weeks to a few months of my heart rate variability (HRV) in response to various stressors. In this blog, I want to zoom out over the past seven years and look at the big picture. A lot happens over such a long timeframe. In terms of health, I crashed badly in mid-2021, almost without noticing, despite a very clear downward trend in HRV that lasted for years. One night, almost out of the blue, my heart started beating erratically, and it didn't stop doing so for weeks. It was a big health scare, leading to behavioral and lifestyle changes that slowly would once again change dramatically the picture, this time for the better. Read the full story, here.
Capturing physiological stress using heart rate variability. I recently shared some of my data showing very good agreement between morning and night measurements of heart rate variability (you can see it here). There are of course differences, typically due to stressors timing and how night data tends to be tightly coupled with whatever you did in the evening, but my data tends to be aligned between these two protocols, on many occasions. Ironically, when visiting Oura in Oulu and experiencing different stressors, morning and night data decoupled in informative ways. Learn more about the differences between morning and night HRV measurements in my case study, here.
Research 📝
Heart rate variability in physiological and pathological conditions. This month I was part of the committee evaluating Sabah Hammoud's doctoral thesis, heart rate variability in physiological and pathological conditions. The Ph.D. defense was here in The Netherlands, at Radboud University, and the work was carried out between the Radboud University Medical Center and the Lebanese University in Beirut, Lebanon. In this blog, I provide a few pointers to her papers (most of the thesis has already been published in peer-reviewed journals), as I think there are quite a few interesting findings in there.
Podcasts 🎙️
How to use Biometric Data as the Backbone of Your Intuition. Last week I had a nice chat with Andres Preschel about stress and heart rate variability. We discussed a bit of everything: stressors, individual responses, technology, habits impacting our data, and more. Check it out at this link.
Ramblings 🤌
Visiting Oura. Last month I visited Oura in Oulu. I have been working with the team for about 3 years and a half, but mostly during the pandemic, and as such, this was the first opportunity I had to meet in person the many people I have been interacting with in the past few years. In this blog, I provide a few pointers to the work we have done together during this period of time, from sleep stage estimation to heart rate variability.
Building 🛠️
HRV4Training Pro: I have released the new HRV4Training Pro and have written various articles that can serve as an overview of the different features. You can find the user guide here. I hope you’ll like the new platform, and would like to thank you for your support.
Training talk 🏃🏻♂️🚴
Winschoten 50 km. In August I ran the Winschoten 50 km, a road ultra here in The Netherlands. I had originally signed up for the 100 km but then changed my plans given a summer of running issues (see here). Eventually, the race went really well, as I finished 4th on quite a hot day, and reached my goal of sub-4 hours (3h 58’, see here). This blog covers the race and my training leading up to it, which included plenty of cycling.
Training log. As the name says, this is simply my training diary for the year.
Next weekend I will be running the Chicago marathon, and I’m quite excited to see what I can do after this atypical summer. If you are going to be there, let me know.
Thank you for reading and see you next month!
Archive:
Marco holds a PhD cum laude in applied machine learning, a M.Sc. cum laude in computer science engineering, and a M.Sc. cum laude in human movement sciences and high-performance coaching.
He has published more than 50 papers and patents at the intersection between physiology, health, technology, and human performance.
He is co-founder of HRV4Training, advisor at Oura, guest lecturer at VU Amsterdam, and editor for IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. He loves running.
Social:
Twitter: @altini_marco.
Personal Substack.
