411: Heart Rate Variability Simplified Marco Altini
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2020
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Heart Rate Variability Simplified
Marco Altini
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“I know my body!” is something I hear from yoga students constantly. Sometimes they want to keep practicing and shouldn’t (due to injury or illness) maybe they want to stop practicing and shouldn’t (because the breakthrough is a few poses away). I wish we all knew and understood our inner world as well as our outer world, but most of us don’t.
Quick check-in: do you know your resting heart rate right now? Do you know your respiratory rate? How about your blood glucose level? These can all be measured at home, and yet most of us don’t. We don’t know our bodies.
Of all the quantified self measurements, heart rate variability is perhaps the least known and utilized because it requires math and a daily commitment to check - but it delivers powerful insight into your readiness state based on your stress levels. A healthy heart is not slow and steady like a locomotive, it’s highly agile and variable like a cat meandering through a field. On this week’s show, we’ll give into the how and why of heart rate variability.
Listen & Learn:
- How a healthy heart is not slow and steady but instead agile and variable
- How the variability of your heartbeats is a direct window into your nervous system
- How overtraining and lifestyle stress can affect your HRV score
- How breathing, rest, and a good training schedule can improve your HRV, reduce the risk of injuries
Links & Resources:
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Marco is a data scientist, programmer, and has a PhD in applied Machine Learning. He leads data science at Bloomlife, a digital health startup focusing on helping expecting mothers have a healthy pregnancy. He’s been developing apps since 2012.
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
- Onions & Garlic Flexibility
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Many of us have very low interoception, this idea of knowing what's going on inside of us, |
| 0:08.2 | knowing our urges, our feelings, our hormones, our cravings, our digestion, our respiratory rate, and our heart rate. |
| 0:17.0 | Many of us are unaware. |
| 0:18.8 | We know the political activities of three different countries. |
| 0:21.8 | We know the real-time coronavirus numbers all |
| 0:23.5 | around the world, but we don't have an idea of what's going on with our own heart. |
| 0:27.0 | On this week's show we'll chat about heart rate variability. It's a recurring theme on the |
| 0:31.6 | show. It's a little bit of a nerdy difficult one to unravel, |
| 0:35.0 | but once you understand how it works, |
| 0:37.0 | it's a really great piece of quantified self-knowledge |
| 0:41.0 | to add to your toolkit. Here's how it works here. If you go to the gym |
| 0:44.7 | and you put your hands on a heart rate monitor or you wear a chest strap and it |
| 0:48.9 | tells you that your heart rate's beating, let's say 120 beats a minute, 140 beats per minute if you're jogging |
| 0:54.5 | or something like this. |
| 0:55.8 | This is an average beats per minute. |
| 0:58.1 | The device is just rounding up or down. |
| 1:00.3 | It's averaging in a minute. |
| 1:02.4 | And they're pretty accurate, but again, it's an average. |
| 1:05.0 | And an average is not exactly. |
| 1:06.0 | The reality is your beat-to-beat variability in a healthy individual is quite pronounced. |
| 1:12.0 | And what that means is rather than a healthy heart going |
| 1:15.0 | boom boom boom boom a healthy heart mica boom boom boom boom boom |
... |
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