I've blogged about heart rate variability training a few times in this blog.
What tracking HRV can do is;
1 - Let you know how your body is reacting to the stressors you are placing on it
and;
2 - Let's you see how individual stressors affect you over the short and long term.
Through the use of daily rituals, increased planning and execution of daily behaviors, you can make some pretty interesting changes in your ability to self regulate.
Small, and what might look like insignificant but consistent habit alterations can result in critical health markers improving (resting heart rate, blood pressure etc), decreases in body fat and a dramatic increase in productivity in both your professional and personal lives.
As humans we love routine - our minds love it and our bodies love it - as it means we never really stray too far from our normal level of stress and thus never really stray too far from body's baseline position.
As humans we also can't control everything all the time and there are definitely times when routine falls to the way side such as work trips, deadlines and family issues.
This is also fine as the body needs to stress to adapt and build upon which the basis of any form of training.
What is not done by most people in these cases is to know just how much these times of routines, coinciding with an increase in stress, affects you mentally and physically.
I see it all the time in studio with clients and it actually happened last week. A client had deadlifted 103kgs for 6 reps, which was hard no doubt, but he still had some reps in the tank so as usual we increased the weight for the next session, with the aim of completing 6 reps again at 105.5kgs.
Not a huge jump at all but after a week of family issues, he could only manage 2 reps with the increased load.
That is exactly what mental and/or physical stress/fatigue can do.
The body feels this stress and then wants to become more efficient with what it decides to use energy on. With a greater proportion of energy now being required to deal with the increased stress, it leaves less energy to do what seems like insignificant stuff (such as lifting something heavy) at that time, and down regulates energy to do so - meaning you can't run as fast, lift as much or feel as energised.
Another example happened to me over the weekend.
I trained 4 days in row but got to bed slightly late on Friday night. Again Saturday night I had a really late one (2:30am) and was up at 8am. It was no suprise that my HRV dropped from 7.3 Thursday (a score representing when I am at my most freshest) to 6.1 Friday, 6.2 Saturday and 5.7 Sunday.
I didn't train Friday, Saturday, Sunday so there was no residual fatigue from that affecting my scores, it was simply my sleep pattern and duration was out of whack.
That's how easy you can stress the body. Now put on top of that long work hours, high physical stress and big night out and you can see why you can be worn out long before the week even begins.
Coincendtly, but not suprisingly, my resting heart rat went up each of those days to from 57, 58, 64 and 62, meaning my body was working pretty hard but not to do anything physically or mentally, it was purely doing a lot of work to regenerate my body.
So to start self regulating your body then start looking at the simple things such as sleep (consistent wake/sleep times), management of intensive stressors (high vs low stress, mentally and physically), blood sugar management and brain health/performance (nutrition/supplementation).
By regulating yourself diligently during consistently, the 1 off events that push your stress to the limit will not have as much affect on the body because:
a - You'll have more energy reserve to deal with the added stress
and;
b - You'll be far better equipped to deal with it
Just think about if I slept 5hrs every night what my scores would be?
You know what?
That's probably you and it mans you;re health is degenerating a lot faster then you think it is and weight management would be a nightmare.
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