Heart Rate Variability – Marco Altini
Marco Altini is an expert in Heart Rate Variability measurement for sport and he has developed an app to measure it.
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Timestamps to the show
03:30 Background in sport science research into technology, health and performance. He is interested in wearable sensors and heart rate variability.
05:00 How did you get interested in HRV? From Biomedical engineering background, I found this emerging subject.
06:30 What is physiological stress? Training can be defined as workout intensity and the number of reps you do these lead to physical stress. Add in psychological stress from other factors and the combination is physiological stress.
08:00 Heart Rate Variability – as your body tries to maintain homeostasis. It’s easy to understand blood pressure. As we get stressed the body tries to maintain balance through the heart rate rhythm. The HRV number varies and a high stress situation will lower the HRV number.
10:00 Research has been around for a long time into HRV. Now it’s easy to measure. HRV is a marker of health rather than stress.
13:15 Marco Altini developed the app that measured HRV on a phone using the camera lens and your finger tip pulse. Before it was possible to do lab measurement but even cheap sensors cost $40-50. 8 years ago he developed the app and validated it in a lab using ECG.
16:30 How can you control HRV? Ensure the data is collected accurately – your morning routine should always be the same and consistency helps your measurements. HRV-guided training is a way of using the data. You scale up or down the intensity of sessions based on your HRV measurement. The test includes screening subjective questions and derived metrics.
21:00 Response to alcohol intake is typically stronger than any training session impact on HRV. So drinking and rowing is an issue for performance.
22:00 Elite sport and HRV – when training is well planned as HRV tracks other stresses which the coach is unaware of otherwise. Increased stress is in HRV but intense training blocks do not mean HRV goes down – if you respond well to the training HRV stays steady.
26:00 Altitude training with triathletes and testing HRV. Those who adapted better had a change in resting physiology in week one of the camp.
27:30 Who train using HRV? – From club amateurs to the NBA. He worked with Daniel Plews at Rowing New Zealand who did his PhD on this topic.
30:00 Website links with advice and articles on HRV4Training – which is Marco’s app – it also includes a coach model.
– personal website / bio: https://www.marcoaltini.com/
– the HRV guide: https://medium.com/@marco_alt/the-ultimate-guide-to-heart-rate-variability-hrv-part-1-70a0a392fff4
– HRV4Training: https://www.hrv4training.com/
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