Thatās not ābasicā. Thatās exactly what you should do. The numbers donāt give you the only ātruthā. But they give you a warning that maybe something is going wrong. It should trigger you to investigate a bit more then usual and try to find out what exactly is going on.
Numbers out of the normal range can mean a recovery or health problem, but it could also be the result of a poor measurement caused by distraction during the measurement or a problem with the sensor or ā¦
If you have a very constant routine of sleep/train/measure, tings will be more stable. But if for some reason, you train late in the evening, it is normal that a whole night measurement will yield a lower result. Simply because a big part of the night contains the early recovery phase. Opposed to when you train early in the morning and then have a work day with little physical activity where most of the recovery has already happened before you go to sleep.
I started using Elite HRV with the H10 and have a chart showing the Garmin HRV as well, and they do differ (as in Garmin is indeed more influenced by the last evening).
Now Iām thinking of getting the Oura V3 for better sleep tracking (Garmin kinda sucks, and I only have one Withings Sleep Sensor, so half of the week Iām not getting any data from there). So Iāll probably switch to manual readings using the Oura (3min āworkoutā to get HRV - first thing in the morning, just like the Elite HRV/H10 Iām doing now)
Iāve only done one morning reading so far with EliteHRV and H10. Garmin gave me a HRV avg of 53 (throughout my sleep of 7h30m) on my watch whereas EliteHRV gave me a reading of 58 for the 2min test soon after waking. Iāll track both over the next few weeks and see if overall averages align.
Just posted by Marco Altini on Twitter.
Most effective method for recording HRV is first thing in the morning while sitting. No mention here of device preference. Link below to an article he wrote in June this year
I use my Garmin HRM-Pro chest strap and it works a treat. All the EliteHRV material I have read strongly suggests a Polar H10 which I have but find the Garmin more accurate and reliable in my heart rate tracking. What do you use?
Polar H10 but with the strap from the Garmin Dual. I had problems with the original Polar strap after only 8 months of use.
Garmin Dual gives very good results for rMSSD with Kubios and in general, but I decided to buy a Polar H10 because it is so widely used by developers and it is as far as I know the only one on the market at this moment that can output an ECG trace (130Hz sample rate).
I got a H10 for just this
But Iām thinking about switching to an Oura Ring as I usually donāt train late in the evening or eat late, so the difference between nightly and morning measurements should be negligible. My garmin however is not that accurate due to wearing a titanium bracelet instead if the silicone strap, which means that especially when laying down it can be the case that the optical sensor wonāt rest against my skin perfectly.
Iām currently waiting for my Oura Ring and am planning to use it for morning readings like Marco Altini explains in a blog (donāt have the link right now)
The API (Oura API (2.0) Documentation) gives me HRV (as rMSSD) for sessions - so just do a 3+ min session in the morning, and HRV is supposed to show up for that session. But there is no SDDN anywhere, however for sleep periods they give you HRV data as a list of values - Iām not sure what exactly those values are. If they are raw data, could I in theory calculate SDDN myself? that way Iād have SDDN from the sleep periods and rMSSD from my morning reading?
I can also recommend the Kubios HRV app (and also the free desktop version, which is way more detailed). I dumped HRV4 because if I rarely) happened to miss a day, it complained. Then it lost contact wth my chest strap; I tried using the camera/ flash, but that got to be a pain. Elite just seems to be occasionally random. I wrote to them about some numbers that were coming out strange (><20% off compared to both HRV4 and Kubios, for a while and got a weak reply about āchanged in lifestyleā, that really didnāt apply). Kubios is free, and works well with the Decathlon store Heart Rate Monitor strap (about ā¬30). It also doesnāt ask personal questions, like if I drank, exercised or not (nobody could give me a clear answer on whether entering anything there changed anything on the output āscoreā for the other apps). Iāve been using both Kubios and the same HRM since 2017, elite and HRV irregularly during the similar time.Image shows HRV from 2017-to date; noticeable is the last three months drop for me - ties in with currentlife AC HRV from 2017|690x85
It doesnāt and it shouldnāt because anything that influences HRV already has effect on the measurement. If you would also make it count with subjective scores, the effect would be doubled!
There may be apps taking it into account for the Readiness score, but they are wrong.
Dump Readiness scores because every app calculates this in a different way. These values are useless.
What that info (caffeine, alcohol, etcā¦) can do for you, is make correlations visible. If you inspect long term HRV history and distinctive subjective scores, you can detect eventual relations.
The subjective scores are there to assist with looking at the trend data. Many of us would forget when we had a bad nightās sleep, or a little too much alcohol. Having the scores plotted, makes it easier to do the cross checks.
The same is done with testing and interval workouts, eg. 4x8m at FTP. Subjective scores like feel, RPE are used to correlate to the Power and HR. Being able to compare, is useful to be able to make changes for the next time.
Dump readiness scores? What do you mean by that? Sure arenāt the MatLab and Excel sheets effectively giving a readiness score except itās not a 1-10, itās a text based guidance (rest, hit, lit etc). Theyāre readiness scores?
Readiness scores are an interpretation of the measured values RHR and rMSSD and ā¦???
Some apps seem to take other stuff into account, others donāt. And neither of them is telling you what they use or not. Thatās why these interpretations never alignā¦
The MatLab and Excel tell you exactly what is used, RHR and LN(rMSSD) and to what the measured values are compared (30d avgā¦).
Thereās no āinterpretationā, itās a mathematical outcome.
