Recent articles and updates [August 2024]
Heart rate variability, wearables, entrepreneurship, training talk and some ramblings
hi there 👋
I hope all is well.
Here is my newsletter including articles and updates from August 2024. I hope you’ll find it useful and I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your support.
Please feel free to comment below or in the articles should you have any questions, and I will follow up soon.
Take care!
Heart rate variability (HRV) 🫀
Differences between heart rate and HRV. In this blog, I used some of my recent data to highlight how heart rate variability (HRV) can often be a better marker of our stress response, with respect to heart rate, and also covered some of the reasons why that might be the case, in terms of our physiology (i.e. how the parasympathetic nervous system impacts heart rhythm). Learn more, here.
Should we measure HRV in the morning or before exercise? This is a question that came in recently through HRV4Training’s customer support channel, which I think can be useful to others, hence I’ve started a new series of short Q&A blogs. You can find the answer, here.
How Should You Measure Your Morning Heart Rate Variability? (HRV). Morning measurements of resting physiology (heart rate, heart rate variability), are arguably the most practical and effective way to capture our acute response to daily stressors as well as long-term or chronic changes in baseline physiology. In this blog, I cover simple guidelines and try to clear up some confusion when it comes to taking such morning measurements so that you can ensure your data is high quality and representative of what you are trying to capture: your body’s response to major stressors. You can find the article here.
Podcasts 🎙️
TrainingPeaks CoachCast. I met Dirk Friel many years ago when I was living in the US. It was nice to re-connect recently and chat about HRV for the TrainingPeaks CoachCast. You can find our conversation here, and learn how to effectively measure and use HRV data alongside subjective feedback to optimize your training and recovery.
Articles 📝
Interview for Rouleur: Demystifying HRV training: Why it works for the pros and how it could work for you. A few weeks ago I had a chat with James Witts, who put together this nice article about HRV and its use in professional cycling. In the interview, I cover the basis of HRV as well as provide a few pointers on how the data can be used in applied settings.
Building 🛠️
Tracking Progress in Endurance Training. Over the years, mostly because of frustration with what was available out there, I’ve built different tools to help endurance athletes track progress with their training. In particular, it should be clear by now that we are unable to track progress effectively using training load analysis tools (e.g. chronic training load based on TRIMP or TSS, or any other metric), and that we need to look at progress from different angles, and with different tools. Here are three tools that I’ve built and that I find useful in different ways, which I explain in this blog post: Interval analysis, Lactate threshold estimation (or critical pace / speed), Aerobic efficiency.
Training talk 🏃🏻♂️🚴
Training log. It’s been a low-profile summer for me, with quite a few difficulties after a great race at the 100 km de Passatore at the end of May (training and race report here). Hopefully, we’ve turned a corner and training can get a bit better soon. In the meantime, here is my training diary for this year.
Ramblings 🤌
I left Twitter / X last month, hence I’ve used more Substack also for additional updates and comments that are not blog posts, which you can find below.
It’s been 11 years of HRV4Training. You can learn more about our independent business in the blog I wrote last year about our journey, here.
Congratulations to Francesco Puppi for racing really well yesterday at OCC. Francesco is a great person and athlete, and I’m grateful we had the chance to connect in the past. Here is my chat with Francesco about HRV, which we recorded some time ago, but remains one of the most useful I had, in my view.
A paper about heart rate variability (HRV), training load and subjective data. In Autonomic Response to Training Load through Daily Control of Heart Rate Variability in Female Athletes, Juan Jose Palos and co-authors look at the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV), training load, and subjective data in a professional football team over 6 weeks, using the HRV4Training app.
An update to the blog above covering individual responses to back-to-back high-intensity sessions, here.
That’s a wrap for this month.
Thank you for reading, and see you next month!
Recent newsletters:
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 (currently inactive)
Personal Substack
