A Deep Dive Into HRV: The Myths & Truths of Heart Rate Variability Testing
Ben Greenfield Life
Ben Greenfield
4.6 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2015
⏱️ 62 minutes
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Summary
Australian HRV researcher Dr. James Heathers (pictured above) is one interesting dude.
On a professional level, he is a Ph.D and an Endeavour Research Fellow in Electrocardiology at Poznan University of Medical Science, where his research revolves around measurement issues in heart rate and heart rate variability.
On another level, he has an extremely interesting and thought-provoking blog, where he writes about health, science, medicine and bioethics, and has articles on topics such as medical sensors embedded in tattoos, how drinking affects sleep quality, how peptides are used for doping by professional athletes, and much more.
In our discussion in this podcast, James and I take a deep dive into HRV, and our topics include: -How James went from being an experimental psychologist to instead being immersed in HRV research... -Very interesting ways to use HRV that tend to fly under the radar, including computer gaming and cognitive performance enhancement... -Whether HRV can really measure the things that the self-quantification industry often claims it can measure (e.g. sympathetic outflow, or blood lactate, or ‘readiness’)... -When a high HRV may not be a good thing... -Which supplements and medication affect HRV... -The main areas of research in HRV now that James is most excited about, including something called HRR and breathing ladders... -And much more!
Warning: if you know nothing at all about HRV, you will probably need a good intro to HRV prior to listening in, because this particular podcast is a bit more advanced, and skips over the basics of HRV.
The good news is that there is over three years of HRV articles and podcasts on BenGreenfieldFitness.com, and here are the most popular and useful: –The Do-It-Yourself Guide To Using Heart Rate Variability Testing to Track Your Stress and Nervous System Health (podcast) –Everything You Need To Know About Heart Rate Variability Testing (podcast) –What Is The Best Way To Track Your Heart Rate Variability (HRV)? (podcast) –25 Ways To Know With Laser-Like Accuracy If Your Body Is Truly Recovered And Ready To Train (article) –Do Professional Sports Teams Have It All Wrong When It Comes To Optimizing Performance & Recovery? (article)
Other resources we discuss during this episode: -Article on metabolic breathing ladders -How HRV correlates to blood lactic acid -The effect of fish oil on HRV -Bitalino (a second-generation research grade ECG machine that you can buy for a few hundred dollars) -The SimBand (Samsung has released a research platform for developers called Simband, who can now use the platform to build their own software applications without having to build their own hardware) -Video magnification of HR using a webcam (a lab at MIT developed a method of pulling your heart rate straight out of a webcam picture) -GreenfieldFitnessSystems NatureBeat app for HRV
Do you have questions, comments or feedback on HRV? Leave your thoughts at BenGreenfieldFitness.com and either myself or James will reply.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here and I hope you're ready to strap on your propeller hat because |
| 0:06.8 | today's podcast actually involves a pretty deep dive into something called heart rate variability. |
| 0:13.3 | And I got to be honest with you, I was a little bit afraid during about the first 20 minutes |
| 0:17.7 | of this episode that this was just going to be extremely theoretical blue sky stuff. |
| 0:24.2 | But especially towards the end of the episode, we got into some really interesting discussions |
| 0:27.6 | about everything from how supplements and medications affect HRV to do it yourself, ECG monitoring |
| 0:35.5 | that's literally the same quality as you can get at a hospital to the concept of using |
| 0:40.3 | something called metabolic breathing ladders. |
| 0:43.3 | And it really turned into a quite interesting yet still very nerdy discussion. |
| 0:49.4 | So a couple of things. |
| 0:50.9 | First of all, all of the show notes for this episode because there's plenty of links |
| 0:54.6 | to research articles, etc are over at bengreenfieldfinance.com slash advanced HRV. |
| 1:02.3 | And then second, I honestly do not expect you to understand much of this episode unless |
| 1:10.0 | you have a basic understanding of heart rate variability and HRV going into listening to |
| 1:16.5 | this. |
| 1:17.5 | So if you don't have an understanding of HRV or heart rate variability, don't start here. |
| 1:22.8 | There are other podcasts over at bengreenfieldfinance.com. |
| 1:26.0 | I'm going to link to the best three podcasts and the best two articles that I've ever had |
| 1:33.3 | appear over on the website that you can use as a way to really learn everything that you |
| 1:38.4 | need to know about HRV prior to taking this deep dive into HRV. |
| 1:43.6 | So I'll put links to all of that stuff along with all of the show notes for this episode |
| 1:48.7 | over at bengreenfieldfinance.com slash advanced HRV. |
... |
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