Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Training/Recovery

You spoke about the limitations of HRV in giving an accurate picture of “recovery” as it is only a single metric in a Q & A podcast episode (which I can’t for the life of me find now).

I do quite a bit of aerobic training (swimming and paddling as I intend to do some paddling races) (plus 3 resistance sessions of BBM templates) and have been wearing a WHOOP band for a year.

It is largely useless in that it doesn’t prompt me to modify my training behaviour in any way based on my recovery scores, as I go on how I feel (RPE) and don’t look at it prior to training.

My question is — given all the beat up about HRV being so informative, which I think is largely for marketing purposes — what other metrics affect our performance and recovery? I was trying to explain to a friend with a WHOOP why the information we gain is limited but I couldn’t elaborate on specifics.

As an aside, the one thing I like about and the reason I got it is it is WHOOP gives me reassurance re: how much sleep I get as I tend to underestimate this. I see how you say it could nocebo re: sleep but for me it seems the opposite. That said, I certainly don’t NEED a WHOOP and won’t be renewing my membership!

There are hundreds, if not thousands (probably more) inputs that influence performance. Things like:

-training history
-current training
-nutrition status
-expectations
-mood
-motivation
-environment
-sleep
-genetics

  • etc.

These things aren’t reliably integrated within HRV or whoop’s algorithm, making both less specific than we’d want them to be to guide (or predict) programming.

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