Heart Rate Variability and Athletic Performance

[McBain]

http://anabolicminds.com/forum/content/heart-rate-training-978/]

The weight on a barbell will never lie to you. Maybe you grew up in a world where even the dumbest kid in class got a Super Good Tryer award, but when you walk a heavy squat out of the rack, it's going to honestly tell you how strong you are.

We've all had those good days. The bar sits ominously on the floor weighted close to a personal record. You walk up, take a deep breath, and deadlift it so fast it feels like you could've power cleaned it.

Likewise, we know what the bad days feel like. You walk out asquat that should be barely over a warm up and it feels crushing. Everything hurts. All you want to do is take anap.

The difference between your good gym days and your bad ones are determined largely by the status of your nervous system. Just as you stress a muscle in training in order to force it to adapt and become stronger, your nervous system is being stressed, recovering and attaining a new level of strength.

The cycle between stress and recovery matters to your muscles and it's acrucial factor in the health of your nervous system as well. There's a fine line between the right amount of stress, sufficient recovery, and going too far.

How do we know where we are in that continuum? What can we do to ensure that we have more good days in the gym than bad?

Enter Heart Rate Variability

There are many different ways to monitor nervous system status, from detailed sleep analysis to sticking tiny needles into nerve fibers to measure sympathetic traffic. They all work to varying degrees. The preferred method, due to ease of use, accessibility, and accuracy is monitoring heart rate variability, or HRV.

HRV allows us to take the guesswork out of day-to-day manipulation of training intensity and recovery. It helps to individualize control of the processes necessary for mental and physical performance as well as resistance to sickness and injury.

What is HRV?

To understand HRV, you need to know the basic structure of the two branches of the nervous system.

Autonomic nervous system. Controls the body's functions necessary for survival such as breathing, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, and organ control.

Voluntary nervous system. This is consciously controlled and allows you to perform daily functions like lifting weights, running, or picking up a coffee mug.

Within the autonomic nervous system there are two sub-systems that coexist in apush-pull relationship.

The first is the sympathetic nervous system, which creates the "fight or flight" response. This increases physiological performance when a stressor is introduced. The second subsystem is the parasympathetic nervous system, which counters the body's response to the sympathetic system and helps create an environment conducive to rest and recovery.

Don't think of them so much as a gas and brake pedal because they don't fight each other. Rather, consider them in terms of a continuum, working in unison to varying degrees.

Your heart doesn't beat in aperfectly steady, metronomic fashion. Rather, the frequency of your heart rate varies with respiration. Each time you exhale, within milliseconds the brain sends an inhibitory parasympathetic signal to the heart that slows it. As soon as you inhale, that signal drops away and sympathetic tone increases, causing a slight increase in heart rate.

This back and forth balance provides a window into the status of the two components of your autonomic nervous system. If the parasympathetic "rest and digest" system is strongly activated, you'll see a high level of variability in heart rate. If the sympathetic system is dominating, the parasympathetic system will be blunted and variability will be low.

This allows insight into how your body is responding to allostatic load, which is the cumulative demand placed on your neuroendocrine system to maintain homeostatic balance under dynamic conditions.

Selectivity: Strong Stress Response and Rapid Recovery

Beyond the immediately visible body composition measures seen from training, it's important to understand the deeper psychobiological side of performance.

Often the difference between an Olympic podium and "also ran" status, or a successful graduate of Special Forces Selection and washing out comes down to neurological components of performance.

Ideally, an individual has a powerful, sympathetic response to an acute stressor (like acompetition), along with an equally powerful parasympathetic response when it comes time to rest and recover, whether that's on days off from training, de-load periods, or even breaks between rounds in an MMA fight or tennis match.

Compared to more average competitors, Olympic caliber athletes and Special Operations personnel have simultaneously stronger sympathetic responses during competition and higher parasympathetic input during rest. They swing further to either side of the continuum.

They tend to have lower baseline stress hormones with greater diurnal variation of cortisol, meaning that they have significantly higher levels of cortisol in the morning than inthe evening, which allows their body to fluctuate between higher arousal during the day and deeper recovery at night.

Elite Performance versus "Here's your participation ribbon" (...)

Les mer i artikkelen!

Poenget er altså: Man kan bruke variasjonen i hjertefrekvens som et estimat på hvor uthvilt man er, og bruke dette som styringsverktøy for å regulerere treningsvolum og intensitet.

NB: Dette gjelder naturligvis både innen kondisjon og styrke. Men tråden måtte postes et sted, da det ikke er noe generelt treningssubfora her.

Opprinnelig postet på Fitnessprat.no:

http://www.fitnessprat.no/f21/heart-rate-variability-and-athletic-performance-39619/

[Norsubsea]

Interresant lesning som bekrefter litt av det jeg har kjent og følt på flere ganger.

Dager hvor det har vært mye "stress" på arbeid, hjemme, altså de dagene ikke alt går på skinner så har gjerne treningsøkten heller ikke gjort det.

Mens de dagene man våkner på morgenen og bare har lyst til å løpe ut på verandaen og rope god morgen norge, full av energi. Alt klaffer, du kommer 2 minutter før til bussen, bussen er på tida, på jobb er oppgavene dine unnagjort på rekordtid slik at du får tid til litt ekstra kaffeprat med kollegene, de dagene går treningen så det suser og du føler du kan sette maksrekorder på alt du gjør på treningen.....

Men det det hele vel bunner ut i er vel det samme som alltid; lær deg å kjenne kroppen din, lytt til hva den sier deg og du vil kunne nå alle dine mål. Motarbeider du din indre stemme, motarbeider du også din egen fremgang.....