In this post I want to discuss another pillar of health – sleep (and HRV)! What you see on the picture is my Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV is not the same as heart beats, but they do work together in the sense that your HRV is higher when your pulse is low and vice versa. So what is HRV good for? Well HRV measures the variation in the time interval between heartbeats. It is measured by the variation in the beat-to-beat interval. HRV shows how adaptive an organism is hence it represents a meaningful measure of health, a variable heartbeat indicates a good state of health, while a constant heart rate is a warning sign.  There are a variety of factors that can influence or change your HRV metrics such as:

• Respiration
• Exercise volume and intensity
• Rest and recovery from workouts
• Hormones
• Metabolism
• Chronic health conditions
• Stress
• Sleep habits and quality of sleep
• Diet
• Age
• Gender
• Genetics

One important thing to understand is that the HRV is personal to you so the only you should compare yourself to is you. I use HRV to give me pointers around how much stress I can put on myself on that day hence it helps me to decide what activities I will or will not do that given day. But at the end of the day it comes down to my own feeling of course, I will not let a technical gadget dictate my day but rather let it influence my day to a certain extent.

To read about my first year with the Oura ring and my learnings you can go hit..