How Heart Rate Variability can assist with fatigue management

This blog post will go into how as a full-time office employee, husband, Triathlon coach and Ironman athlete I deal with fatigue management and how Heat Rate Variability helps me better understand when to suck it up and when to listen to my body.

Life is busy for most of us, as age group athletes we juggle full-time jobs and almost full-time training. For most, including myself, this will lead to a constant feeling of fatigue and the age old question of “am I too tired to do this session?”.

I have gone through the times when I have listened to my body and made a good call about my level of fatigue and had times when I tried to push through and dug a deep hole for myself. These days data continues to help us throughout a number of areas in life and as athletes. Power for cycling, Heart Rate for long runs and stroke efficiency for swimming, I have always loved using metrics but also know that you must take into account how you actually feel. Now I am using HRV for fatigue measurement.

To be able to better understand the difference in my feelings of fatigue I started using Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is not simply the number of heart beats per minute based on our pulse but more specifically the variation of these heart beats. For a more in depth explanation visit the Quick start guide on the HRV4trianing website using this link. This variation is a key metric used to better understand fatigue levels. I looked at and downloaded several applications and landed on HRV4training as the best application with the most in depth data points.

The HRV4training application creates a score which they call Recovery Points. This score takes into account a number of factors as well as a number of subjective data points such as muscle soreness, sickness and potential injury. Below is an outline of one of my weeks, you can see the average over the previous months and the trending levels of fatigue. This allows me to better understand where my fatigue levels are at and when my body actually needs some rest.

As with all metrics and numbers it needs to be taken with you own body and training in mind. I have had several examples where I felt tired and sore but my HRV was trending positively and I smashed my session. I have had times when I felt sick and needed a break and my score was very low and I took the time off and only missed on session. So it is about understanding yourself and this has been a great tool to help do that.

As a full-time office employee, husband, Triathlon coach and Ironman athlete I would definitely recommend athletes take the time to better understand their fatigue and how it can impact their training and quality of life.