 This video is not going to be a research review on heart rate variability. So if that's what you're looking for, keep searching. Sorry. Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyke. Today we're talking about heart rate variability. So HRV as it is abbreviated is a common measurement for health and recovery. So this idea is what is heart rate variability? So it's the variability of duration between beats. How long is the period between a heartbeat and the next heartbeat? When you get an EKG, that's that like the squiggly line thing where they hook the electrodes up to you, people can look at the spikes on those and they can measure the distance between them. And that gives you a measurement for heart rate heart rate in beats per minute. Generally is how we're rating them. If I take a bunch of them, what heart rate variability kind of represents is if it is increased, if my heart rate is more variable, that means that beat to beat might be 10 units on one, and then it might be three units on the next one. And then it might be four units on the next one. And then it might be 11 units on the next one. And there's not this like really consistent pattern. It just kind of like bounces all over the place. It is less predictable. The, I guess the converse of that is for people who have really elevated heart rates and for people who have really overworking hearts, they don't have as much heart rate variability. So that beat to beat interval is basically the same every time their heart beats. And that is normal when your heart rate is elevated. So even during exercise, people who are healthy aren't gonna have quite as much heart rate variability. That's what that means. So the way that I think about this, what does heart rate variability represent? It's kind of like anything could happen in your body and it's probably mostly fine. And your heart just kind of gets super chill when you're really healthy. It's like, it's okay, 11 units. Oh, there's something going on. Go over the three units. You almost got it, four units. All right, yeah, let's go 11 units again. This is fun. And that's kind of how it's just able to respond really quickly. That makes a lot of sense to me because that is kind of how people who are really healthy, who are really fit, who are really well conditioned, that is how they operate in the gym. If you ask them to do something really, really intense, they can do it. But then if you give them time to rest, they rest really well. They don't walk around all like, like they're trying to get in a fight. They just walk around very chill and let their body recover. Some of the best power lifters in the world, for example, are like this. They'll take 10 minute rest periods and they'll sit down and be lazy, so to speak. It's not laziness, it's just recovery in this respect, at least. So heart rate variability, it's often used now to get back to heart rate variability. It's often used as a measurement for the state of the nervous system. So if your HRV is higher in general all the time, that is kind of this indication that you're a little bit healthier. If it gets really, really high, even relative to your numbers, that is kind of an indication that things are really bad and your body doesn't really know what's going on. And then if it gets a little bit lower relative to your numbers, relative to your average, then that is this indication that your heart is working hard to try to keep up, okay? If it's high in general, that means you're healthy. If it's really high relative to you, that means your body can't keep up with anything. And if it's a little bit lower than it normally is, that means your body is trying to keep up with things. Now, that is kind of an oversimplification. This is supposed to represent all of the autonomic nervous system, which is that part of your nervous system that isn't controlled by you consciously. But the heart is only a small piece of that. And so when I take heart rate variability, there's a lot of other stuff that could be going on. And if I take heart rate variability and I use that and try to extrapolate it to everything else, it doesn't really tend to pan out. So moral of the story is there are some tools that measure your heart rate variability and use that as an indication of whether or not you are ready to work out really hard on this particular day. I've used those, I don't think they work very well. I don't recommend them to any of my clients. What I recommend is if you feel really bad or if I can tell something bad happened today, we're gonna take it a little bit easier. And if you feel real good and you're antsy and you're talkative, then I'm gonna let you do an extra set and I'm gonna tell you to put more weight on the bar.