Heart rate variability, or HRV, is one of the newest training metrics available to athletes and has rapidly become very popular. Going beyond just heart rate, it measures how much your heart rate varies beat-to-beat. That has value because our variability goes down when we’re fatigued and goes up when we’re well rested. Which makes HRV an amazing metric—if it were that simple.
The problem is that like many physiological metrics, HRV can be affected by a lot of things, including travel, altitude, food, and stress. As a result, while many training tools claim to give you a lot of sophisticated and reliable recovery data based on your HRV, the truth is that it’s usually open to interpretation—and context matters.
Here to help us navigate this potentially valuable but complex tool is Dr. Brad Lichtenstein, a licensed naturopathic physician, educator, biofeedback/meditation trainer, and for over 25 years was a professor and clinical faculty at Bastyr University supervising the mind-body medicine curriculum. He has authored chapters on mind-body medicine in published textbooks such as Integrative Men’s Health and the Advanced Clinical Textbook of Naturopathic Medicine, and you may have already watched his TEDx talk on YouTube.
He explains to Chris Case and Dr. Griffin McMath what HRV actually is, how it’s measured, and also helps provide context to the greater understanding of this data by elaborating on the many things that impact HRV. We discuss the effect of sleep and nutrition, and how HRV can be effectively integrated into training. Finally, we cover the psychological side of monitoring HRV and discuss what the future of this tool might look like.
Joining Dr. Lichtenstein, we also hear from top coach Isaiah Newkirk, the director of the Project Echelon pro cycling team, and physiologist Julie Young, who both talk about how they use HRV with their athletes. Finally, we hear from aspiring pro cyclist Jack Burke about his experience using HRV as an elite athlete.
So, put on your chest strap, and let’s make you fast!
Episode Transcript
Griffin McMath 00:00
Chris, hello and welcome to fast talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Dr Griffin McMath here with co host and co founder of fast talk. Chris case, heart rate variability, or HRV, is one of the newest training metrics available to athletes, and has rapidly become very popular going beyond just heart rate, it measures how much your heart rate varies beat to beat. That has value, because our variability goes down when we’re fatigued and goes up when we’re well rested, which makes HRV an amazing metric. If it were that simple. The problem is that, like many physiological metrics, HRV can be affected by a lot of things, including travel, altitude, food and stress, to name a few. As a result, while many training tools claim to give you a lot of sophisticated and reliable recovery data based on your HRV, the truth is that it’s usually open to interpretation and context matters here to help us navigate this potentially valuable but complex tool, is Dr Brad Lichtenstein, a licensed naturopathic physician educator, biofeedback meditation trainer, and for over 25 years, was a professor and clinical faculty member at Bastia University, supervising the mind body medicine curriculum. In fact, through one of his students and colleagues, Dr Cindy, hope I was a student of his curriculum as well. Dr Brad has authored chapters on mind body medicine and published textbooks such as integrative Men’s Health and the advanced clinical textbook of naturopathic medicine. And you may have already watched his TEDx talk on YouTube, if not, definitely go check it out on this episode. Dr Brad explains what HRV actually is how it’s measured, and also helps provide context to the greater understanding of this data. By elaborating on the many things that impact HRV, we discuss the effect of sleep and nutrition, how HRV can be effectively integrated into training, and what that means for both athlete and coach. Finally, we cover the psychological side of monitoring HRV and discuss what the future of this tool might look like. Joining Dr Brad we also hear from top coach Isaiah Newkirk, the director of the project Echelon Pro Cycling Team, and physiologist Julie Young, who both talk about how they use HRV with their athletes. Finally, we hear from aspiring pro cyclist Jack Burke about his experience using HRV as an elite athlete. So put on your chest strap and let’s make you fast. Well, hello, dr, Brad, I am so excited to have you join us. Thank you so much for joining Chris and I today at fast talk.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 02:34
Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. So
Griffin McMath 02:37
I think the best way to start this conversation about HRV is really setting the table, a phrase I like to use often. Can you give us an HRV overview? So we’re all working off the same definition. What is it? What’s it actually measuring? What does it reflect? Let’s dive right in. Okay,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 02:56
so everyone’s familiar with heart rate. Heart rate is just the number of beats per minute of your heartbeat. So when your heart beats, you measure it, you feel your pulse. So you could be feeling your pulse for a minute. And by the way, for people measuring their heart rate, I do recommend people measure it for 30 to 60 seconds, rather than do it for six seconds and multiply it, because that’s not going to give you a real accurate measure, but we’ll talk more about measurement in a minute. But that’s your heart rate, heart rate variability, which has been measured for quite some time now, but the science keeps evolving, and we don’t know everything yet which is going to be like. The thing I say at the beginning, heart rate variability is the changes in the temporal variation, the changes in time between subsequent heart beats. If you’re looking at something like an ECG, an EKG, it is the difference between the R peak, so that, if you know what an EKG looks like, that spike, so it’s the time difference between each heart beat, and that’s what heart rate variability is. And what heart rate variability reflects is a number of influences on the heart. It’s not just sympathetic and parasympathetic, which a lot of people like to reduce it to, that’s a major impact the neurological influences. We’ll talk about some more, I’m sure. But breathing and all of these things can change your heart rate variability. The research in heart rate variability has been going back, well, actually, even in the time of Galen, back in many centuries ago, doctors looked at the changes in your heart rate with exercise, your heart rate would go up, and then the variability would change. The standard rule of thumb that people talk about now is that more variability is better, and I really caution against that, yet at the same time, I’m going to say that. So I’m of two minds. If your heart rate was static, if you had a pacemaker for. Instance, and if your heartbeat was 60 beats per minute, then there would be 1000 milliseconds between each heartbeat, and there would be absolutely no variability. We want variability because variability says that our system is changing over time. For example, if you ran up the steps and your heart rate didn’t change, and there was no variability, that’s not a positive thing. So before everyone stands up, your brain sends signals down to your heart, to your blood pressure receptors, everything to change your blood pressure, change your breathing, change your heart rate, so that you don’t pass out. And this is what happens if there’s no variability, you know. So we want variability. So that’s a kind of a quick overview. I know we could go deeper into all of these things, but that’s what heart rate variability is. It is the variations in heart rate, and you do have to look at both heart rate and heart rate variability to get a very good picture of overall health and function.
Griffin McMath 06:02
I love that you’re off the bat. We’re talking about. HRV can’t necessarily be used as a standalone. This defines all of these other things by itself. So you’re already implying that there needs to be other things considered to provide a more comprehensive picture. So I think that’s a great segue. Yeah.
Chris Case 06:21
I think what you’re saying is context matters, and for our audience, athletes, endurance athletes specifically, I’m curious if you could take what you just said about HRV and heart rate and bring it to that context. Why is this or why should this be something that endurance athletes are paying attention to, and
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 06:42
I would just change your questions. You like that? Sure? Why? Why is it something they could pay attention to? There’s so many ways of answering it. And as I think about this question, I’ve been asked it so many times, I phrase it a little bit differently. You know, I am, despite being a naturopath, despite being really interested in experiential learning. I really love tech, so I have behind me all the things I’ve worn, them all, and I’ve also spent a six month period where I was wearing multiple of these devices at the same time. We can get into that a bit later, and I tracked all the data. So the point of saying this is data is useful if you know what you’re measuring, as you said, the context and how you’re using it. So in that regards, for an athlete to track HRV, it can inform you with some other parameters, about your training load, about over training, about state of health, but it also can inform you about other things, like lifestyle factors and how those impact you. So the one thing, and I think I say this to people who call me two or three times a month, they’ll call me up and say, you know, my HRV, my blank, my device told me my that I didn’t sleep last night, or it told me I’m not doing well. I’m over training, or my HRV is low, and that’s bad. And I was like, I don’t think your app told you that. Some do tell you some things. None of these apps, by the way, none of these wearables, can tell you about your sleep. They measure all these other parameters. They can measure movement. Some can measure temperature. They can measure heart rate, heart rate variability, blood flow, and they calculate those things together to inform what they think is sleep, because at certain stages of sleep, so you gotta be careful. I’m getting to your question. You’ve gotta be careful what you’re measuring. The other thing about these I’m pointing at my phone. You can’t see this. The thing about these devices is when I ask people, I say, Do you know what HRV metric you’re using? There’s a number of metrics, root, mean squared of successive differences, sdnn and N, 50. You know time domains, frequency domains. Most people don’t know that. So it’s really important if you are going to track these things, to inform yourself as to what you’re measuring and what it represents. So the main thing about short term readings is what these apps do. They’re short term and long term readings. Long Term readings, most people know about if you go to a cardiologist and they put a halter monitor on you for 24 to 48 hours, that measures a different thing, usually a standard deviation of the end to end interval the different one these short term ones are measuring, usually something called the root mean squared of successive differences. Typically, what that measurement reflects is parasympathetic influences on the heart, on the sinoatrial node, on the heart rate. Okay, well, how is this important to athletes? Because there’s a number of factors exercise over training, lack of sleep, food. There’s so many other factors that can influence your heart rate variability. So in my idea, and a number of other people who I think are smarter than. I will say, checking your morning readings, not necessarily your nighttime readings, can show how you recover, because heart rate variability shows how you recover from stressors. It shows a number of other things, but it shows about recovery from stressors. So to your point, if you’re training really hard and you check your morning reading, which has to be compared to your average over time, your coefficient, something we call a coefficient of variation. If you check it over time and compare it, you can see how much your heart rate variability changes, and that can be, can be a gage as to whether you are in overtraining mode, that it will be detrimental to you to continue training that day or not. So that’s one way, I think, the most common way, to use it to see if it helps you with your training mode and how you’re doing with that. Did that make sense? It
Chris Case 10:57
does make sense. There’s a lot of caveats in there, because this is super complicated, and this is probably jumping ahead. Human beings like simplicity in a lot of ways, and that, I think, is the problem. And companies know that, and so they create devices that are complicated, but then take all that complicated information and shove it into an app that has pretty colors and simple graphics. And perhaps, again, I think we’re jumping ahead a little bit, but maybe there’s a comment here that you want to make about a cautionary tale of relying too much on what color the app is telling you one day or another based on this information which has its flaws in terms of measurement and all sorts of things, oversimplification, all sorts of things,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 11:43
completely. And I can tell you that I’ve worked with a ton of athletes, and several of them, not all of them, several of them. I say, Stop wearing your blank. Just stop wearing it. Gold Standard. Get in touch with how you’re feeling. I mean, if you wake, and this is where you start to look at the apps readings, and you say, you wake you feel full of energy, not that nervous energy. You feel energetic. You feel like you’ve slept. The app tells you you didn’t sleep and your HRV is low. Check in with yourself. You know, we don’t just use it. That’s why I say it’s a tool. And again, I’ve looked at a lot of the apps and some of the apps that I’ve used. I remember maybe about five years ago, some apps that said you’re stressed. I was like, I’m not stressed. I have biofeedback equipment that I actually use. I can do a real ECG. And I’m looking at all this, and I understand why it’s telling me that because I was breathing at a lower rate. By the way, anybody breathe a certain rate, breathe in the range of five to seven breaths per minute without over breathing. Most people over breathe. There’s something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. That’s where your breathing when you exhale, the parasympathetic vagus, the vagus nerve of the parasympathetic the 10th cranial nerve, exerts an influence on the sinoatrial node and instantly slows down your heart rate. That’s why respiratory factors influence short term Heart Rate Variability readings. Why is this relevant? If you’re pacing your breathing when you take a morning reading one day and then you’re breathing at 12 breaths per minute the other day, you’re not comparing the same thing. So one would say, Oh, you have higher HRV, oh, you have lower HRV. Oh, this is so if you have an app that tells you about these zones, your HRV is really high. That’s great. You could be getting sick. You have to take it into consideration about looking at your normal heart rate that day. You know what your diet was like either you did certain medications. So the caveat is, take it with a grain of well, not salt, because we don’t want to have that that’s going to affect your heart. Definitely, I’ve done this myself, where I’ve had I’ve measured my morning HRV, and then I drank a glass of water, and it was just like, one minute after like, so I did it, and then I did again, and it was completely different that I had more HRV. So again, you have to look at those things and keep those in context. I know we like to simplify it. You know, I’m a certified biofeedback trainer, and certified trainer and heart rate variability biofeedback. And I know even the public and even some of my colleagues, they come in and say, This is what’s going to help with HRV, and it’s like so we have to take it in context. I still think it’s a useful tool. So know what you’re looking at.
Griffin McMath 14:21
There are a lot of factors that affect HRV and can throw off your interpretation. But here’s coach Isaiah Newkirk explaining how HRV can be immensely beneficial when you use it to track the impact of one of those factors, such as travel.
Isaiah Newkirk 14:37
I do use variability with my athletes, it’s a fine balance, though, you need to make sure that the data you are receiving is valuable, and then if that is reflective of kind of the response you’re looking to receive. So if you’re throwing a certain training at an athlete, are you looking to. To see that they’re coming out the other side in a freshened state. So I use it for something like that. Another example of how I use Heart Rate Variability might be if they are traveling and might be receiving fatigue in that way. Are they at altitude, for example, are they trying to prime out for a race and taper? So those are a few examples of what I might use heart rate variability
Griffin McMath 15:24
for that’s so helpful. And I think in the context of athletes, I mean, you’ve already pulled out a couple examples of things that athletes would take note of, and one of the first ones, I think, is recovery. So if we dive in specifically to recovery, how you know when an athlete or a coach is thinking about using HRV as one of the tools on their tool belt to empower a better recovery. How can this tool, HRV, reveal when an athlete has recovered sufficiently to train again, or when they may be overreaching, like at risk of burnout?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 15:57
Great question, because I think this is one area that these apps work well, or these wearables work well if you’re using the right timing of the measurement. So since HRV is really looking at recovery from stresses and a number of other things, but you know there’s medication stressors, food can be a stressor. Sleep, one hour of lost sleep can reduce your overall HRV. Going through time zones can change your HRV. So that’s an interesting thing. So if there’s athletes who are traveling, there is some benefit to traveling ahead of your game, your whatever you’re doing. So one of the best ways to use this for an athlete is to look at your recovery, and that would, in my opinion, and not just mine, I keep saying that not be measuring during sleep. A number of these programs will measure your HRV at sleep. Sometimes they’ll measure throughout just for five minute period. But when you’re sleeping, you are in a more parasympathetic state if you had a heavy training day the day before, or even in the night before, it will take you a longer period to recover. You want to notice how you are recovering. So for my athletes, I recommend the very first thing they do when they wake up, usually is go to the bathroom and have a glass of water, is what I say to people, but to sit up, don’t do too much walking and take your two to five minute measure of your heart rate variability. Several of these apps that I do like will not give you a HRV score until you have measured a month or even a week of that. So you can get something called the coefficient of variation. You can see over time how much it changes so when you sleep, and then you wake, if you’re waking at the same time every day, and you measure that, you will see if your HRV has elevated or has decreased, if there’s more variation or less variation, and that can be a good indication of your recovery. And for over training, you know, if you’ve over trained your HRV, there’d be more stress on the system. It’s more complicated than I’m about to say, but you will seem more sympathetic. You will have less parasympathetic recovery. So there’ll be less parasympathetic influence on the sinoatrial node, so there’s less variation. And so that can be a sign of overtraining. What you also need to do with that, though, is monitor, what did I eat that day? Did I travel that day? You know? So it might not just be over training, it might be these other factors, but if all things are the same, that could be useful. And so coaches can also look at that and see what’s happening as well, and then say, maybe we adjust our workout that day for your needs. And I see that, especially when I work with triathletes or marathon runners who are preparing for the marathon.
Chris Case 18:53
I just want to have you clarify a few things for people that this is all really new to because I think we’ve gotten it’s complicated, as we’ve already said, when you say variability, what do you actually mean different lengths of time between beats? Yes, and I’m sure there are people out there that are less familiar than we are about parasympathetic versus sympathetic nervous system. Could you explain how those two come together or come to bear on this? HRV,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 19:22
excellent question. You know, this is one of those things that happen. When we talk about these things all the time, we assume understanding. So we have several branches of the nervous system, and something called the autonomic nervous system that seems to run behind the show that can regulate different parts of our body. We have the sympathetic nervous system that is really the mobilizing system. It is what keeps us active and mobilized and doing things. So we often talk about stress response, but it’s not just the stress response. You know, if I’m talking to you now and I’m engaged and I’m excited, my sympathetic nervous system is speeding up. Can speed up my heart. When we talk about the stress response with sympathetic it’s what keeps us going. So if I start to get cold hands and feet, my blood vessels are constricting because it’s moving the blood to muscles that need to be active. This is sympathetic activity. Parasympathetic activity is more of the rebalance, regeneration, what we talk about, the rest and digest system. In order for you to sleep, you have to get into the parasympathetic system. When you eat, to digest your food, it requires parasympathetic activity, which is why none of us should ever eat at our desk while working. It’s gonna
Griffin McMath 20:35
happen. I’m sorry. I’m not winning any gold medals anytime soon. So
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 20:41
what a look at my desk this morning as before. So when we’re in parasympathetic state, that’s when muscles rebuild. That’s when certain aspects of our immune system, T cells can regenerate. So what’s interesting about the heart? The heart has its own internal pacemaker. If you cut the sympathetic and the parasympathetic influence to the I said, sinoatrial, no, that’s the main pacemaker that gets the stimulation to start the contraction of the heart. If you cut both of those innervations to the heart, the heart will beat on its own around 90 beats per minute, 90 to 100 beats per minute for all of us. So what’s really interesting is it’s the parasympathetic activity to the heart that slows it down and gives us more variability. For any of your listeners, I mean, if they’ve never felt this before, if you just find your pulse, if you just find a radial pulse, or carotid pulse, if you can feel the pulse, just take a big breath in and hold it. And what you may feel, hopefully will feel is your heart rate speeds up, and then if you take a slow, long exhale, you’ll feel the heart rate slow down, meaning the space between the heartbeats gets bigger. That’s the variability we’re talking about. And for the majority of people, with that more variability, again, if you have a pacemaker, if you’re on certain medications, you won’t have that variability. That variability is associated with better health. So the parasympathetic influence. Getting into that parasympathetic state, for the most part, helps us recover, helps increase that variability. So that’s what we’re trying to do. And most of us are in a chronic sympathetic state. I think most of us where we’re always on guard. Our heart rates always speeding up, and there’s less variability. Every time we exercise, we kind of decrease, if not completely eradicate, our variability, because you are in a sympathetic, dominant state. That’s the point of exercise. But there’s less variability. So there’s something called the ceiling effect, if, if I’m exercising, I’m trying to get my target heart rate, and if my heart rate is going up to 100 120 beats per minute, there’s no room for it to go much higher. There’s less variability. When I’m sitting here at rest and I’m slowly, evenly breathing, my heart rate can go up. The Space Between heartbeats can get smaller, which means the heart rate speeds up on the inhale, and then as I exhale, the space between heartbeats will get longer, and I can see a range between my heart rate that doesn’t always show up on certain apps. You can’t really see that change. Some of them do show that. So rule of thumb is, we want the heart rate to have some variability. There’s more parasympathetic activity. It suggests we’re recovering. So if we’re in more sympathetic state, we’ll have less variability in that morning reading, there’ll be less variability, and that suggests that we’re still in sympathetic and it’s not necessarily the best time to train. To that
Chris Case 23:30
point we were talking about sort of, I’m trying not to use the terminologies that companies use, but basically, some devices and their apps will give you basically say you are ready for a workout today, right? So that calculation that they’re making is that based off of the extrapolated thought about how recovered you are, or how should people think of that readiness to work out? That’s a
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 23:53
great question, because it fits with the design and the simplification of this, right? So hopefully, the app that tells you how ready you are and that score, hopefully that app has measured your daily HRV that’s measured at the same time. So we’re not talking about random HRV throughout the day, but it’s measured it at the same time, same conditions, sitting up, because sitting up, lying down, your HRV is different than sitting up, and it’s different than your HRV standing, because those postural changes actually have a stress on the system, and we want to see some of that. So measuring that at the same time, hopefully those apps that tell you that are comparing it to the fluctuations, you know, the average that you get as a baseline, and then comparing how much it changed each day. So, you know, there’s interesting ways, like, you know, if I scream boo at you and you jump while you’re measuring it, your heart rate is going to jump up to 120 it’s not staying at 120 beats per minute for very long. Them, but it does that just for a quick second and then comes back down. It’s the space between the heartbeats, and that’s how you calculate it. So it’s gonna say the app might say you’ve got a really high HRV today, but it’s because how you measured it at that moment wasn’t accurate. So if that app wearable already has something to compare it to, and you look at your heart rate, your average heart rate, then you might say, Okay, it says that I’m ready. It’s making that extrapolation. I think checking in with myself, I feel like I have the energy. I feel recovered. But you know, if you over train, and you know, I had a cold for a while, and then I just didn’t do anything. And of course, the next day I go to exercise, what do I do? I know this. I’ve talked about this. I do the same thing I did two weeks ago at the same intensity, and then the next day I’m like, Oh, I can’t walk. I can’t so because of that over training, that pain, that muscle ache, is my heart rate was elevated. If my heart rate elevates, it affects my HRV. But my HRV score, this is called, we talk about normalized HRV. If my HRV score still goes up and down the same amount, it might say, Oh, you’re okay, but it’s like, uh, I don’t really think it’s a day to push myself.
Griffin McMath 26:17
So earlier, you were talking about coefficient of variation, and you talked about a period of 30 days, is this kind of I’m trying to, like, extract a practical thing as a coach is listening to hear you talk of like, oh, I can’t just tell my athlete to get a device with HRV data and then implement it the next day. So there really needs to be an onboarding period. And should they just ignore the data for the first 30 days? So
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 26:43
that’s one thing I’ll be adamant about. Yes, most of the apps that I favor, that I talk to people about do have anywhere from a week baseline coefficient variation to some have a month. So there does need to be some onboarding, and you can still look at the scores, you can still look at the data and connect it with your lifestyle. Some of my favorite devices have extensive journals, and you can get bogged down in those journals, but some of them have journals like saying, Okay, did I take my magnesium yesterday? Did I not? I didn’t take my magnesium. Okay, that’s interesting. If I keep track, there’s no way the app will keep track of that. You’re just logging it as everyone knows, alcohol raises your heart rate. It raises your heart rate for almost everybody, it decreases your heart rate variability then, then it impacts sleep. I can say I’ve done enough work with I have. It’s anecdotal, but it’s evidence that I have data from from a number of people. I work with. Cannabis does the same thing for a lot of people, but they said, but I slept better, and it’s like your heart rate, heart rate has been elevated and your heart rate variability is low. That’s an interesting thing to see. You know, what do we do with that data that would say that they wouldn’t be ready to train the next day? Yes to your question, let me just say that emphatically again, yes, I do think it is necessary to have onboarding to prep yourself for how you’re going to use the data, when you’re going to do it, the timing, what you’re going to look at, how you’re going to track it. That’s such
Griffin McMath 28:16
an interesting you know, humans, especially nowadays, we want instant gratification. So you go out, you spend all this money on this new device, and it’s almost like, you know, I’m sure it’s within the user manuals, but for the purposes of this episode, I think it’s just such an interesting point. You know, go out, spend the hundreds, or however much, of dollars on these devices, but then don’t let yourself fall prey to that instant gratification trap, like buy it, and then kind of, I want to say, forget it, but just don’t have expectations within a certain time frame that you’re going to be able to make good on the full picture of what’s available for a little while. And what’s interesting is, you talked a few times about this, and it kind of like a loaded way, like we’ve talked a little bit about salt. We’ve talked a little bit about your sleep and what you eat. You talked about magnesium and this impact. And in preparation for this episode, we were looking at current, or as current as possible, research related to HRV, when it comes to HRV in autonomic recovery, there are some studies that show that HRV is a key marker for how the body recovers from training sessions, including the impact of sleep and nutrition on HRV. Are there any specifics we know, or you know from research that people can take concrete action on besides more sleep and better nutrition, so besides more and better what do we know about the specifics between sleep nutrition and how it correlates with HRV,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 29:43
yeah, no, it’s a great question, because this is what people always ask, like, how am I using this? What am I doing this for? You know, there’s some interesting data that is coming out, you know, and data is just data. I mean, we pray to the God of saya and research all of a sudden, and I’ve been in this field for. 30 plus years now, and I remember when I started, everyone was supposed to eat small, frequent meals. Then they were supposed to eat, you know, and that, now it’s keto, then it’s, you know, this and that, and intermittent fasting, and yeah, when you fast, guess what, your HRV will improve. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a healthy thing for you, because you also have to look at what happens to your heart rate when you’re fasting as well. So there’s a number of factors in this. So one thing that I was going to say is to the way I like to use this, it is a great question. The way I like to use it is to do my own research. What I was going to say about sleep, that’s what I’m sorry I got lost in my own thought. The way I was going to say about sleep is there’s some interesting new data saying this idea that people need eight hours of sleep. There’s a number of people whose time mechanism. They don’t need eight hours of sleep. It seems like everybody needs at least six, but to know what’s happening. So when I was wearing three wearables at the same time, and I was measuring these and tracking them, some of them would say, Oh, you slept really well. It’s like I was awake, but I was sitting in bed and I was meditating the whole time. And I know I was awake because I could tell you what time. That’s what’s interesting. It’s like. So it said I recovered. I didn’t really sleep. So when you say more sleep, I would say, look at your sleep health. How are you engaged with your sleep? When you say better nutrition, there are some interesting apps that say that they can help you determine your food allergens. Because you said better nutrition, wit, is better because I’m allergic to dairy and gluten, and I know what happens if I eat something I’m allergic to, my HRV goes down. My heart rate goes up for over 90 minutes. I mean, that’s something that’s maybe specific for allergens. If you’re an athlete and you have pollen nearby and you’re allergic to it, guess what? Your HRV levels might be really changed significantly. And it’s not because you over trained, it’s because your heart rate is going up, your HRV is going down, and it’s because you’re around pollen when you’re sleeping. So your question, I’m saying it’s important to really look at lifestyle, how you’re engaging, and then use this as a way to check in. You know, as I said, I’m certified in biofeedback. Biofeedback is where we hook up people to a number of different sensors to watch their response. You can ask them a question. We could just make say something like elections, and just watch everybody’s heart rate go up and all skin conductance. But the goal of biofeedback is not to rely on the tool. The goal of biofeedback is to help you make your unconscious physiological processes conscious to you so that you become more aware. And then you don’t need these things to make determinations, so you use them as a tool. And this is why I think you can use HRV if you log this is what I did today. This is how many hours I was on the screen. This is when I was on the screen, we spend so much time wearing blue blocking glasses, which some research is now saying doesn’t really seem to help, in effect, find out if it affects your heart rate variability. You can still take your morning and see if you recover from that stress. No,
Griffin McMath 32:53
I think it’s interesting that the pollen part, right? So I know you already talked about alcohol, cannabis and the impact on HRV. So some of these things related to our diet, you talked about sleep, not just in quantity, but looking at the impact of our environment during sleep and what that could be doing to our HRV. So I think people can start to look at their HRV after night of sleep, and not just think about quantity anymore, but think about other factors that could be impacting quality, which I think is really interesting and
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 33:26
can also determine in light of those factors. You know, the number one factor animals and other humans in your bed disrupts your sleep. But what’s interesting is, did you recover? You know, HRV changes throughout the sleep cycle. Are you waking up? Does your cat wake you up? Our cats are banished from our bedroom, actually. Now cats wake you up in the middle of REM sleep. Is that going to have an impact? It will have an impact on your nervous system. But do you recover? So you take your morning reading and say, Well, okay, yeah, those things happened, but I still recovered. So it’s interesting to use as a tool to help guide that. It’s not definitive, but yeah, looking at the quality of sleep, a yes, we want those simple things, what we should do. We want those six prescriptions. Just do this, but really talk about, how does it impact my body? And come back to that, notice what it’s like. Can
Griffin McMath 34:16
we make the assumption from earlier in the conversation where you talked about salt, and then it was like, that’s a whole conversation. Can I make the gross assumption that added salt or high salt diets are just disastrous on your HRV, I’m saying that intentionally to be inflammatory, just to try to see if I can get a rise. Well,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 34:37
no, no, no rise in my blood pressure. Salt doesn’t affect everyone the same. What I would say is, let’s think about more now. Let’s get more science. Let’s get more physiology. Aerobic activity helps with increasing HRV because aerobic activity affects blood volume, and then stroke volume, blood volume. The amount of volume in the blood vessels. Stroke volume is how much the heart can pump out. When you do cardiovascular exercise, you increase your stroke volume. When you’re dehydrated, what happens your blood volume decreases your stroke volume increase. You know, it gets hard. You know, when we talk about sympathetic some people say, Oh, I feel like my heart is beating fast. And when we measure it, their heart isn’t really beating faster. It’s beating with more force to get the blood volume out. So ergo, anything that for you, dehydrates you, decreases your blood volume can actually decrease HRV. And this is, I know there’s, this is the talk about inflammatory let’s not just talk about salt, high processed, ultra processed foods. Not all Ultra processed foods are have the same effect, but if you look at the chemical constituents, what’s it doing to you and your blood volume? And then that it’s something to consider. So
Griffin McMath 36:02
let’s take a minute to hear from Julie Young, who flips the scripts and what we were just saying, and points out that HRV can be very valuable for athletes who aren’t good at reading themselves.
Julie Young 36:13
I would say same thing. I did not use HRV, but to as I say, not as I do. So I do use it with my athletes. And I think for me, kind of a two sides of it, kind of, you know, I think it is valuable. I feel like some athletes are really it’s hard to be objective about, you know, recovery and rest. And I think it’s a good kind of back marker. Think we have to be careful with it too, because I feel like sometimes it really toys with an athlete’s mind, especially, you know, you’re going into a race, and obviously, you know, oftentimes you sleep lousy, and that may be in the tank, and, you know, not letting that distract from the performance. I actually, too, really, just like resting heart rate, quite honestly, you know, just to kind of get those patterns and just kind of keeping it simple.
Griffin McMath 36:59
It was so beautifully illustrated. While you were talking about that, I was genuinely thinking about our blood vessels and stroke volume and definitely having flashbacks of studying physiology. But that’s so great. I’m wondering if this is a great point, Chris, where we can maybe pivot into integrating this into training. Yeah.
Chris Case 37:19
I mean, I think we should. The overview that we’ve given so far. It’s very clear that this is complicated. I’ve said that many times, but there are benefits to using these tools. I think one of them might be the idea, and you’ve already mentioned it a couple times, that this is a data point that can help you triangulate, if you will, where you are at or where an athlete might be. Any good athlete will benefit from having a good sense of themselves, whether that’s in a workout or outside of a workout. They can test their legs, so to speak, climbing up the stairs and say, Are they ready for a workout today? Are they not ready for a workout today? How does that relate to what my HRV is saying to me, in a workout, how are you feeling? What’s the RPE of that workout? What’s the device telling me, what’s my power meter telling me, what’s my pace? All these things you’ve worn a lot of these devices. You’ve tested them for a really long time. I feel like we have been a little bit critical, but I feel like you’re also a fan of these, and I guess what I’m looking for here to give to the audience is best practices of how to use these, whether that’s like, how to even put them on your wrist, what’s the right tightness so that you get accurate readings. When should you listen to them? When should you not? You know, like, what are all the things that you’ve learned from wearing these devices over the years that can help people use them better and get better data? Oh, that’s
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 38:45
an excellent question as well. Let’s start with the two types of devices that you can use to measure to make the measurement. There are two types. There’s a chest strap. Any chest strap is an electrical measurement. It’s like an ECG. So you’re looking at the electrical current. Chest straps are the main one, right? So wrist straps are not usually those. I’ll get to that in a second. So chest straps, the benefit of an electrical measurement is it is less influenced by artifact. Now I’ll explain artifact when I talk about the other type of wearables, which are a photo plethysmograph, a PPG, that’s a light source that is shined through the capillaries, and it’s looking at how much the blood vessels dilate and open and close and open and close. And so if you look at an in real time measurement of the photoplethysmograph. It looks like a wave that’s similar to an ECG, but it is not an ECG. So chest straps, one of the reasons people don’t like them. They say it’s hard to put on. Or if you want me to take a morning reading, then you’re going to say, do I sleep with it? And then I just get up and put it on. And you know, it has to be a little bit wet so you could get it, and has to have good contact. And there’s a lot in the literature of these different companies measuring and say, hey, my photo. Play this McGrath is just as good as an ECG. The problem is with the photo. Play this McGrath, a light source is shining through to your capillaries, whether it’s on a wrist or on a finger movement immediately, even if it’s on your camera phone. That’s one of those. The camera phone is pretty all of these, I should say, are getting so much more accurate than when I started doing this in the 90s. So it’s much better. They’re pretty accurate. However, with a photo plethysmograph, your phone, a ring. People like the ring because it’s easiest to wear. And with the wrist straps or on the wrist, you move your arm, you move your shoulder, you swallow, it’s going to change your blood vessels so you have to remain still. And if you remain too stationary and rigid, you’re going to affect the blood flow as well. So just moving your hand or your shoulder can give you a different HRV. So if you want accuracy, I prefer the chest strap. But if you’re not going to do it, then you can use the phone. So that’s the first thing. You have to look at what kind of device you’re using. Like I said, even the phone, they’re pretty accurate again, if you’re not moving, all of them have some things that I like. There’s some I like more. The problem also with the wearables. Because I was wearing one on my finger, I was wearing one on my wrist, one on my other wrist, and one on my chest, I was wearing those for several months. The other thing that gets in the way is light source. So I’ve worn several I can show you. I have a number of them for the wrist, and in my sleep, it turned over and it would shine in my eye, and it wasn’t going to be able to get a great reading. If I was laying on my arm, it wasn’t getting a great reading. I mean, so there’s some flaws in that. Now, if I’m doing it in the morning, I’m hopefully not going to have that issue, but light from the environment can also impact that, so you want to make sure that it’s really well covered. So those are the two different things. The second thing about best practices, I really am adamant about this. I don’t do nighttime readings. I have so many patients who will do nighttime readings. I just don’t recommend them anymore. They can give you some interesting data, but I am really interested for athletes, people want to see if they recovered just from mental stressors to do a morning reading. And so time of day does matter. You want to be consistent with it, and I recommend going to the bathroom first and then drinking some water, because through the night, you’ve dehydrated. Now, some people have challenged me and said, well, don’t you want to see how you are without drinking the water? It’s like I also try to get people to drink water. So I’ll have them have a glass of water first, and then sit up, because that position is more like the rest of our day, and we will see if we recovered from lying down, and then measure your HRV with whatever app you’re going to use. There’s a number of them, and then you will see how you are. But the other thing I want to say another factor for the photopathy graph, if you have Raynaud’s, if you have Raynaud’s, and you’re wearing a wrist or a finger sensor, what happens is your blood vessels are constricting, right? Well, the light source is going through your capillaries and measuring how much they dilate, they expand with every heartbeat your heart beats and it sends the blood. If your temperature of your hands is like less than 75 or so, I know some studies that talk about 74 specifically, your heart rate measurement is completely inaccurate because the light source isn’t seeing how much it expands, because it’s not expanding much. This is another reason why morning reading sometimes, if you’ve been in bed and you get up, hopefully you’re warmer and you can get a more accurate reading. This is why, if you’re using a wrist strap and you’re outside, and it’s really, you know, wherever you’re measuring, you know you got to think about what your blood vessels are doing. See, this is and that’s a very important fact. Like when I work with patients with Raynaud’s their readings, because I’ll use biofeedback equipment and put a finger sensor on. It’s a great finger sensor. It’s $450 I don’t get accurate readings. So just some other cautions I wanted to say about that. Are there
Griffin McMath 44:16
any other populations or health conditions, physical body differences, right? Someone like me who’s going to put a chest strap on the considerations as an athlete. I mean, I’ve seen companies who now integrate the chest strap into sports bras and things like that. Are there other physical considerations or conditions that athletes should think about when implementing HRV?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 44:39
Well, the first consideration about what device to use, what you’re going to measure is, which one are you going to actually do? That’s probably the most important. I’m not going to you know, I know that my one that was on my wrist was more accurate at the time than the one that I put on my finger, but I hated wearing the one on the wrist, chest strap. You know, it’s just, I’ve got it. It’s pain. This. The other thing to think about also is any neurological issues. I don’t mean major neurological issues, but if you have, like Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, if you’re suffering from some other thing, I’ve done this with, you know, more expensive biofeedback equipment measuring heart rate from one finger to the other, and this finger had less blood flow than this finger and or I had nerve damage in this hand. We’re nitpicking here. Now I’m not usually concerned, but with athletes, it can be really important. With photoplethystographs, if you have a dominant hand that is actually much more muscular, you got to look at where you’re going to put the light source, because is it going to be on the top or the bottom? Because it’s harder to go through that. And scar tissue, by the way, if you have scar tissue, callous is built up. Some of these, depending on where it is and what you’re reading, it won’t read through it. So those are rare that come up, but I have seen those come up, especially the nerve the nerve impingement areas, and then the blood flow just wasn’t we measured it on another hand, and it’s like, wow, it’s like, wow, it’s completely different. And then I could do a real ECG and find out that it mirrored the left hand, but not the right. So just some considerations minor. Griffin, did you have a question? Are you? So, you know,
Griffin McMath 46:11
I literally was doing, I was doing Thoracic Outlet stretches while talking to Trevor yesterday in the office, and I was sitting there, and I I’ve had a crash, and so one of the nerves down this arm, and since it’s my non dominant, I tend to put devices on my non do not oh my god, you know what I’m trying on my useless arm over here. And it’s just because I don’t like when it gets in the way. And so out of convenience, I always put it over there. And it’s just making me think about the data that I’ve been collecting and like, wait a minute, and that’s
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 46:46
where I would go to an ECG, maybe, which would be more accurate, a chest strap. Yeah,
Chris Case 46:51
I was actually going to turn the conversation towards sort of the psychological side of these devices. What comes to mind? I was reading a book recently, and they talked about these devices in professional athletes. And some professional athletes are probably wearing them because they like the data. Some people are probably wearing it because they’re sponsored and they have to. But regardless of that, a lot of these professional athletes were saying they see the benefits in getting the data, but two weeks before a really big event, it goes away. They don’t care what the device says. If they’re not recovered, it doesn’t matter. I’m still doing this big race, and they don’t want that impact on their psychology. So I’m curious, Dr Brad, if you have any thoughts there in terms of what these devices, what this feedback is giving people psychologically that is both on the good side and the bad side.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 47:44
I am so appreciative of you bringing that up so I don’t have to. So you introduced it. I really am. I read a report, and I don’t know where i i read two different things about people, having poor, not athletes, the general public, using these people who were wearing this were having poorer sleep because they’re more anxious about their sleep when they look at their dad. I don’t doubt it. Yeah, and I’ve had real deep conversations with people, real intense conversations, saying, How did you sleep last night? Well, my blank told me I didn’t sleep well, and how do you feel? Well? Told me I didn’t sleep and they couldn’t get past it. That is a concern for me. It’s like some of our concerns about AI. The concern is we’re not trying to be reliant on it, and so if it is going to have an impact, it’s a tool. You use it. Don’t let it use you. So you said that two weeks before many people it goes away. I have, as I said earlier, several people, I say, Take that off. Don’t wear it, because they get more anxiety. And last month, I had a patient come this, a new patient come to see me, and who told me she was at a talk somewhere, and the person who was talking about wearing this device, she said, Well, I’ve been wearing it, and my HRV was blank, and he said, Oh, you need help. That’s bad. And I asked, I pressed it like, did they really say that? He said, Oh, yeah, that’s bad. Bad HRV, no, let’s just, let’s say one thing. Let me say one thing about that. The one problem with that is we do not know your normal, your baseline since birth, we do not know what it is like, and so these ideas of low HRV and more is better. It’s not the case. Yes, the one measurement that seems to have some clinical relevance is really when you go to a cardiologist and wear a 24 hour halter monitor or 48 hour monitor. That number, that HRV metric, is called the SDN, N, standard deviation of the normal to normal interval, and that’s looking at both parasympathetic and sympathetic influences on your heart. But the big problem with that is lifestyle factors could really influence it. So if you’re wearing it for 48 hours, but you just happen to be in a car crash, i. Or your house burned down or said, you know, you’re not getting a normal to normal interval reading. So there’s so many fall abilities, but those numbers for the sdnn are the only thing in literature that really seem to be a good standard about high or low and your short term device cannot give you sometimes they say they gave you the SDN n, but it is not a good reading. It has to be a long term reading. So again, this is how looking at these numbers. My students knew about the sdnn, and they looked at it after a biofeedback session, and went, oh my god, it’s low. And I was like, it’s a 20 minute reading. It needs to be 48 hours, 24 you can’t compare it. So if it’s going to create more anxiety about health. Don’t buy them. Don’t invest in them, unless, unless you’re sponsored. And then I respect that one, if you’re sponsored to wear it fine. Where
Griffin McMath 50:48
is HRV still valuable for athletes who have a pre existing high level of body awareness, or is it just more beneficial for those who are newer to training may not have developed that intuition yet. My first answer was
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 51:02
going to be, yeah. It sounds like it would probably be better for people who didn’t have that awareness, because it could build awareness. But the problem is, if they don’t have that awareness, they might lean into the data and what the apps suggest, whereas people who have some can check it if necessary, yeah, if you have a bunch of body awareness, if you’re an athlete and you say, I want to really look at my diet, you know, I want to spend this month looking at my diet or my training regime and see if, like, that’s helpful, you know, and I’m just using it with curiosity that could be a useful tool. Do I recover? So with
Griffin McMath 51:33
all this talk about implementation, we recently heard from athlete Jack Burke on his experience implementing HRV into his daily routine. Let’s hear what he has to say.
Jack Burke 51:44
So I have a sleep tracker thing, like a thing that measures my HRV when I’m sleeping. That’s the only time I do it. Yes, I have it, and it’s very accurate, but I don’t think it’s actually useful for anything, because if I wake up in the morning and I slept terrible, I know I slept terrible before I even look at the thing. So I’m like, Okay, it’s just confirming what I already know. I mean, that’s also because I’ve spent my whole life like paying attention to this stuff, so maybe I’m good at it that way. And that’s sort of the answer I get from a lot of the pros that I talk to as well, that it’s like, yeah, okay, it’s accurate. But what do I actually do with this? Versus, if you’re sort of new to training and you don’t really know, it’s like, Oh, I feel a little bit sick. Should I be training? Like, should I toughen up and just do it or actually take a day off? Maybe it’s helpful for that. I’ve sort of settled on a better answer for that. And this comes from, like, the years that I was working and going to school and doing all the other stuff when, like, your sleep couldn’t be great, where, if I have one bad night’s sleep, I will just do the training. I will not change my training at all. I’ll just push through and get it done. If I have two nights of bad sleep in a row, then it’s like, okay, maybe you can still push through if it’s three nights in a row. And that never happens. You gotta be doing something wrong at that point. But that never happens to me, then I would make adjustments to it, but that’s the rule that I came up with for myself.
Speaker 2 52:46
So as you heard Dr Brad Jack Burke, this professional athlete, he’s using it to track sleep and things like that. And of course, he’s traveling. He’s competing in different places, and we’ve talked about how that impacts sleep and HRV. He has this rule of thumb, as you mentioned, if he has just one bad night of sleep, he might push through the training. If he has two or three nights of sleep, he adjusts. From a scientific standpoint, how does this kind of self awareness compare to what HRV data might suggest? And how can HRV help refine or challenge personal guidelines like that.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 53:21
So very useful, because this is what we’re talking about, how to use these effectively. The interesting thing about sleep is, I don’t know of a tracker or wearable that really I’ve said this before. Can measure sleep. You need an EEG, you need brain waves to be measuring whether you’re really sleeping. And so it’s fascinating to know if people’s sense of how they sleep and how much sleep they got fits with their lived experience, right? So in that question, I believe he said that if he had one night of sleep, poor sleep, he will push through, but if it’s two or three, he may not. Now what’s interesting is when we’ve all had a bad night of sleep, and I’ve had nights where I’ve actually slept four hours, and I got up and I taught all day, and I was seeing and I had I felt great, but if it happens another time again, not consecutive, but another time, I might wind up having a headache and feel nauseous and not be able to do it. So this is where you can use some of this data to help check in more deeply. So if you have one poor night of sleep, and you check your morning reading and it said, well, even though I had poor sleep, my heart rate was still lower and my HRV was in the same range as it has been, then I might feel like I can exercise. I can push through whatever he means by pushing through it. But if it’s another night where I had poor, poor sleep, and my HRV is really short, small, you know, there’s no variability, and my heart rate is high, then I’d say, Oh, I can’t even do it, even if it’s one night of sleep. So it’s a way of using that to help gain more insight. But again, I’m hoping the tool will then say, wait. What am I really feeling? What’s my experience here? Now, if you’re doing these readings, and there’s an appreciable change. And so this is the thing, not a one off, not a one or two times. There’s a few apps. I know that during the pandemic, the height of the pandemic, said, Oh, we have data that shows we can predict COVID. You can’t predict COVID. You can’t predict the disease. You can’t predict that, but what you can say is there is an influence on your new nervous system. So anyone, if you’re starting to get a cold or a flu, in addition to overtrading, your HRV will change. So if that happens and you feel sick, okay, you know what to do there. But if you see an appreciable difference, and you haven’t been able to pinpoint you don’t have a fever, you don’t have a cold, your HRV is going really low, and there’s not something wrong with your blood vessels. I mean, that’s still something to get checked. Then I would say it might be able to alert you that something is changing. You would be feeling it as well. I believe you’d be noticing that. But that’s one time that I would say it would be maybe a cause to go, huh? I’m getting this interesting data. Maybe I should check this out.
Speaker 2 56:09
Are you familiar with the research of Dr Marco altini? Yes. Love Dr Marco altini. Yes. I bring him up because he’s also this is from the book to the limit, which is a new book that just has come out. Michael Crawley, anthropologist, and in there, he quotes altini. They’re talking about devices and wearables and things like that. And he mentions how, in altini’s estimation, that these devices, at best, are getting sleep data about 60% accurate. What’s your reaction to that? Not everybody can see you right now, but
Griffin McMath 56:42
you I know I was pretty scary. I wish this video is that higher than you would even put it?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 56:47
Oh, that is much higher than I would say. And I’m going to use that on just personal experience. I said, I can pull out my data of my person we’re wearing three to four wearables for six months, I think that it’s an overestimation, unless people are really good sleepers, but I have not seen that.
Chris Case 57:07
I have very little experience. But the one device that I did wear, I think I wore it for six months, and I don’t think it predicted sleep for me a single night accurately. Every morning I had to manually adjust it, because it’s would say I slept two hours, or something like that. And so I would, I mean, yeah, then you’re basically just making up a number, to quote, estimate how much you slept based on a estimated, oh, I think the last time I looked at the clock, it was about 10. So I’ll just put that down. And then I woke up.
Griffin McMath 57:36
So and Chrissy, you went through two of those same devices, right?
Chris Case 57:40
I did. I wore one. We were direct communication with the manufacturer. They were like, Oh, that probably is a faulty device. Let’s send you a new one. And they sent me a new one, and I wore it same exact thing. They said, Hey, can you send us photos of it on your wrist? And I did. And they’re like, I think something’s wrong with your wrist. And I said, Okay, I think I give up.
Griffin McMath 58:00
I made Chris show me his wrist the other day in the office. I was like, yeah, they’re so right these. I mean, at risk. I would say there she could swap them out. There’s
Chris Case 58:06
slender wrists, but there’s nothing abnormal is
Griffin McMath 58:09
there, is there a warranty on your wrist, Chris? Because I’m gonna
Chris Case 58:12
have to check that. Talk to my parents about that. This is such an interesting
Griffin McMath 58:15
turning point, because the very beginning of this episode, dr, Brad, you talked about how you actually love tech, and if I’m not mistaken, you advise tech companies to an extent, right on some of this. So I’m curious, as someone who loves it, but also knows where the shortcomings are, or the faults are in this technology, or the drawbacks, what do you envision for the future of how HRV can become better? Is there a path to that?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 58:46
I’m not sure, because, and this is not something people want to hear. There’s too many factors that influence HRV. There’s long term factors, there’s short term factors, like I said, the short term factors like breathing, bear receptors, there’s hormonal factors, gender, age, those are long term factors. Of course, there’s so many other factors that influence HRV, I’m not sure how we’ll ever capture that. So it’s just looking at a point. It’s like getting a lab test done, and it says, Oh, this is there. You have elevated white blood cells? You go, Okay, now what? Something’s going on. A stress is happening in the system. Okay, got that so I do believe the devices will probably become much more accurate at capturing long term, continuous readings, which might not be usable for people’s short term. I think it’s gonna get really accurate at correcting and collecting the data, but then what? I have a stress on my system. Then what? And so then you can turn to somebody and say, turn to your spouse, my HRV is going up when I talk to you. I Okay, that’s the problem. It’s like, well, if we also don’t know that, when you’re engaged with someone, you’re having an exciting debate, your HRV might go down. You might be more sympathetic, but that’s not a bad thing. So you have to look at all of the. So I don’t know how it’s going to improve, other than the technology for measuring it. Just to expand on what I said earlier, I do. I have always been fascinated by tech, and I’m trying to move away from that. So
Griffin McMath 1:00:12
though the tech might improve, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the accuracy or our interpretation of the data will improve. AI will
Chris Case 1:00:24
help us improve that interpretation and more technology, as long as it throw more technology at it, yeah, as long as you
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:00:31
put in more data. See, that’s the thing, that’s the thing that AI can do. I’m not advocating for this, but I’m saying that’s what it can do. It can cull tons of data faster than I can. And we want it to be simple. And see, I also question people who want it to be really simple. You know, it’s life is complicated. There’s socio economic, political factors in the world for our mental health, and that’s the same thing with our personal HRV. There’s so many other factors that have an influence on our HRV. So I advocate for getting in touch with yourself, and that’s the most important thing,
Griffin McMath 1:01:06
I think, as a great pre conclusion to all of this, I said it. I said it. I think that the responsible thing to do is always understand where the refer out point is, because a lot of our audience are coaches and athletes. But at what point do they need to either work with a professional such as yourself, or even you happen to be both both professional in this and also a licensed naturopathic physician? So at what point do you seek out help beyond the tool itself? And then, when do you need medical attention? So the
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:01:43
first part of my response is saying, coming back to what are you planning on using the tool to do? So if you’re a coach, or if you’re an athlete and you want to know how to use the tool more effectively, then sometimes you can find stuff online. You could read Marco altini’s information. He has a website, and he has a device as well. And there’s a number of other practitioners. I would say that you can read or reach out to someone. I’ve done a lot. I’m not advocating for myself, but someone who knows the devices and how to interpret the data, because that might be all you need is, how do I use this data? So reach out to someone to do that. The other thing I’m going to say is, as you’re using it, don’t treat or train to the value. It’s very important. If you’re going into this and saying, I’m going to use this so I can make my HRV greater, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of problems. If you’ve been completely stationary and eating a standard, I’m just going to make it as extreme standard American diet of Mickey D’s and all that, and not drinking any water, you start to move your body, start to eat differently your HRV, we would hope would change, provided you don’t have a pacemaker, but we’re not doing this to get to 7580 on the score of your HRV. So if you’re finding, though, that there is difficulty with measuring, it, your wrists aren’t functioning. But if there’s a problem with measuring, or you’re finding you’re not getting consistent things that might actually warrant some medical exploration, just to see, like, Is there something wrong with my blood flow or blood vessels? And if you see an appreciable drop in your HRV, you’ve been taking it for quite some time, and there’s an appreciable drop and you are not feeling well, you’re feeling more fatigued, and run down that might be time to go seek medical advice.
Griffin McMath 1:03:41
So Chris, please seek medical attention for this faulty wrist. The take home there. But I think this is, you know, kind of sliding right into this near the end of every episode. We like to invite listeners to join the conversation by asking a question on our forum. So today we’re asking similar to kind of what you were just talking about. How are you currently using HRV to track recovery and performance in your training, and if you’re listening, if you could give one piece of advice to someone starting to track HRV, what would it be? So join us in our forum. We’d love to have you as a part of this conversation, and Dr Brad will send you the link to the forum too, so you can see what people are saying. I think this is a great time to do our take homes. So I think I’m gonna go first. I think for me, the biggest message when I think about all of this is that HRV is an important tool on our tool belt. But after this conversation, I feel like it’s almost like a weather vein and the top of the house right, you can see it spinning. You can see it changing. But if I were to just look at the weather vane, I’d have no idea what the circumstance is that is getting it to spin around and around, seeing that it’s spinning is enough information that, like I need to evaluate my environment. I think that’s the way I want to look at HRV moving forward. Is I don’t want to take the weather vein off of the house. I don’t care what your esthetic is. Maybe you think it’s tacky, but I think it can be done in a classy way. But I don’t want to take the weather vein off the house. I don’t want to disregard HRV as a tool altogether. I want it there, but I’m always going to take in that data with other factors included. So that’s my takeaway, in addition to one of the first things you talked about with HRV and time zones. So so many of the athletes listening to this travel a lot, whether they’re an adventure athlete or they’re competing, you know, they’re going to conna or they’re biking in France, is to plan ahead, and that planning ahead and getting there early is not just for your mental sake of easing into the travels, but it’s actually allowing your body to do what it needs to do because of what changes from the time zone. So I actually snuck in too, and that was multiple minutes, so I didn’t follow my own rules, but that’s what I’m taking away, very
Speaker 2 1:05:58
good. I will leave Dr Brad to last, if you’d like to be last. I think mine’s simple, and I would say it probably is slightly redundant with what Griffin has just said, because I love the idea of triangulation, and I want people to feel like after this conversation, they should understand the limitations of HRV, the complexities and maybe not second guess, but understand that what they’re seeing on an app screen isn’t the whole picture, necessarily, and therefore they should use their own sense of themselves, their body, other data that they’re getting from other devices, etc, your mood, psychological state, Power Meter, pace. All these things are factors that can help you understand, like you’re saying, Griffin, what the weather is. The weather vane might be spinning, but that doesn’t mean you can tell it’s raining or there’s a hurricane coming, or if it’s going to be a sunny day, or whatever. All of this context matters, and I think that’s the most important part of this conversation. So
Griffin McMath 1:06:57
I would say, Does your weather vein recover? Is going to be the thought that I’m going to keep thinking about of like, how does it recover? I’m like, is your weather vane still spinning around around, or does she recover?
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:07:06
Yeah. Or did it fall off, been
Griffin McMath 1:07:10
eradicated from the structure of the building? Yeah. Well,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:07:13
since both of you said what I was going to start to say, I’ll just echo those two sentiments. And then the thing I will add is, before you do this, really check in for the purpose. What purpose are you doing this? If you’re using it as a tool, or you think it’s going to be the gospel, is it going to tell you? Are you going to use it as a tool? So it’s similar to what you both said, and if you are going to do this, be consistent and clear, because measuring your HRV at 12 o’clock in the afternoon after having a cup of coffee or water is not comparable at all to measuring it at six in the morning when you Wake up. So know why you’re doing it, and then be consistent. It’s a practice so that you can use the tool more effectively. Perfect,
Griffin McMath 1:08:10
so beautifully. Said, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr, Brad, it’s been such a pleasure.
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:08:16
I’ve had a great time. Thank you for making this fun for me.
Griffin McMath 1:08:19
And I’d be remiss to say you know who I wish could join us in this conversation, and who would have loved to have nerded out is the person who I learned from directly while I was in school, Dr Cindy, Hope, who has worked with you. And I know, I know you two are so close as well,
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:08:35
and we have the same birthday, huh? We have the same birthday, not the same year, really. We both have the same birthday. We’re both sad. Just so happy belated.
Griffin McMath 1:08:43
Happy belated, by the way. So I just want to say that, because in preparation for this episode, and you know, we had like, a tight turnaround there, but there were so many times where I was thinking about things that I learned during my education and training. And though we got to receive materials from you, from the Seattle campus. Dr Cindy Hope is the one who really instilled and taught us, day in and day out, how to work with the individual. So just a quick shout out to Dr Cindy hope, because that’s how I got to also learn about you and your work. So thank you so much again for joining us today, and we will send you pictures of Chris’s role later, in case we can get some. And then I’ll
Dr. Brad Lichtenstein 1:09:21
tell you, you know, gotta go.
Chris Case 1:09:26
Swear they’re normal. I swear.
Griffin McMath 1:09:29
Great. Thank you so much. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts, be sure to leave us a rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet at us at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums, dot fast talklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Dr Brad Lichtenstein, Isaiah Newkirk, Julie young, Jack Burke and Chris case, I’m. Dr Griffin McMath, thanks for listening. You.
