Sorry, this isn’t exactly a training question but …
On August 28 I felt wonderful. Did my fastest every ebike ride around my favourite route and it felt easy and the watch agreed. Next day… a cold!! Darn!
Since then my resting and active HR has been steadily increasing and my body battery decreasing.
Since it started exactly on the day of the cold I’ve been telling myself that its just the cold but my doctor also doubled one of my antibiotics on the 10th of August and that AB is associated with Qt interval prolongation, tachycardia and well… heart attack. I worry that the AB + the cold has done something.
I’ve had low BB and high resting HR before but not relentlessly low/high like this.
So I was wondering if you peeps who pay so much attention to HR and illness etc. see the same thing when you or your clients have a cold?
Anyway here is my heart rate and BB for the last month:
You answered one of your concerns in your last post, wait (including riding) another week.
As for HRV at night, it will be lower when you go to bed due to the stress and active nature of being awake. It was explained on a recent podcast; listen from 10:00 onwards for the specific bit on measuring it as far away from the last stress as possible (11:40)
Listened to the podcast. Going to bed is stressful! It is! That’s true. Although he’s saying dinner is stressful. I’ve got back in the habit of falling asleep to a soothing audiobook which means my phone is on my bedside table so I can easily do an HRV measurement in the morning.
I stopped doing it because the results with the HRV app dropped horribly when I changed phones, which makes you wonder about the apps accuracy! I think the lower values with my new phone are probably closer to the truth.
I’ve found another bit of info to reassure myself.
Looking back over my RHR graph I see that it shot up way higher than I’m seeing with this cold after a covid vax . That effect lasted 6 weeks!! Ack!
I love that I can see the correlation between health events and RHR etc. with intervals!
And I just discovered the Max Body Battery field!! I love data. The fitness page is almost like gamification. Gotta keep that purple line above the blue one or … something.
I have pneumonia That’s why I’m not recovering. Things are getting better now I’m sucking on Ventolin. But I think I’m pretty awesome. I’ve been snorkeling for hours on the GBR and walking (albeit slowly) in the Daintree all with pneumonia! Doctors should be more impressed.
Hi @Samantha_Lane
Just discovered this thread…catching up.
Sorry to hear you’re dealing with pneumonia…I’ve had that and it was approx 6 weeks before i felt like i had enough energy to train again (2-3 weeks of just lying down a lot to start that period).
Wrt to your original question, I started tracking data about 18 months ago… i have been recording the following daily:
HRV
Resting HR
“Sleep score” (via fitbit)
A ‘how i feel’ score (similar to RPE but with the day in mind, not a training session)
Comment about my situation (e.g. symptoms if i’m sick, feeling energetic, feeling tired, etc.)
During this 18 months, I have caught Covid, had a bad flu (not covid, nor pneumonia), and a lighter head cold (also not Covid positive). I also had a few weeks this past May where I had no symptoms but my data looked suspiciously similar to the ‘lighter head cold’.
What I’m seeing…
HRV drop is a leading indicator to getting sick (by a couple days) quite consistently.
Resting HR, like you, increases with signs of symptoms (except for this strange few weeks in May 2023)
Sleep score, seems obvious, falls in line with symptoms.
HRV starts to increase to normal levels slightly before symptoms disappear (again…leading indicator)
Resting HR lags.
After Covid, it took about 3-4 weeks to return to “normal” but did bump up slightly at that point before dropping again slowwwly for the following 8 weeks.
My bad flu (Nov 2022) saw a much larger jump in Resting HR (concerning amount!) and it took until mid-February before i was back to me pre-flu Resting HR. Again, a slight bump up at that point and then back to ‘normal’ 2 weeks later.
May 2023 strangeness…saw a similar bump in Resting HR as during Covid. I had no symptoms and didn’t test positive for Covid during this time. I also saw the similar drop to normal (after 2 weeks) and then a slight bump up before settling back to normal a week or so later.
I’m also wondering if the summer heat wave(s) play a role too as I see slight bumps in Resting HR and drops in HRV through very hot/humid weather. That may have caused the slight bump up after recovering from Covid in 2022.
Btw…I recently set up a way to import my “Heart/Sleep” spreadsheet into Intervals via Wellness and have mimicked my google sheets charts in the Compare section.
Who that’s a lot of analysis you’ve done. I’ve only just started using HRV4Training again. Its very annoying because it always puts the wrong day for my measurement so all my HRVs turn up the day before. I’m trying to think of a way to correct that automatically, maybe using a dropbox script but I don’t have the time right now.
How did you get your spreadsheet into intervals via wellness? Is it automatic? Can I do the same thing to get my peak flow spreadsheet imported?
I appreciate it.