When you visit the doctor, they take your pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and weight to get a general sense of your current well-being. According to experts, heart rate variability may be another valuable measurement for understanding underlying potential health conditions.
What is Heart Rate Variability?
Heart rate variability (HRV) can provide insight into whether you’re recovering from an illness, injury, or exercise. Also, it can track your levels of physical and emotional stress. It may even be a predictor of cardiac failure.
You may have a heart rate of 60 beats per minute. However, that doesn’t mean it beats exactly one beat every second. Instead, your heart beats in a slightly irregular, perfectly normal pattern. That’s where heart rate variability comes into the picture. HRV measures the time between your heartbeats. As a result, HRV can indicate how well you’re recovering and how readily your body can move between rest and activity.
How Do You Measure Heart Rate Variability?
Heart rate variability is easy to measure thanks to commercially available chest straps and fitness trackers. In fact, FitTrend allows you to connect to certain wearables from Fitbit, Polar, and Garmin to track your HRV on a given day and over time.
However, if you don’t have a wearable with the right sensors, you may have to rely on your health professional to measure it. HRV is a little more complicated to measure than traditional vitals like your heart rate and blood pressure. Doctors and health specialists can measure your HRV with an Electrocardiography (EKG) machine to take an electrocardiogram.
Regardless of how you measure your heart rate variability, you must collect it over multiple days to determine your baseline. Unfortunately, collecting and calculating your HRV manually can be difficult. However, you can use an app and a supported smart wearable to collect, track, and trend it automatically.
What is a Good Heart Rate Variability?
Each person’s heart rate variability is unique to them. Therefore, someone’s normal could be abnormal for you. So, you should only compare your HRV to your averages and avoid comparing yourself to others.
In general, the higher your HRV, the healthier you are. Your body is better at adapting to changes, and people with high HRV are usually less stressed and happier. On the other hand, a lower HRV may be a sign of current or future health problems because your body may be less resilient to changes. Lower HRV is more common in people with higher resting heart rates since there is less time between beats for variability.
However, a low HRV is not always a bad thing. In fact, a challenging workout or a night of bad sleep can lower it. If you’re in good health, your HRV will improve or return to your normal within a few days. Conversely, a chronically low HRV is generally thought to indicate declining health, illness, or overtraining. Therefore, tracking your heart rate variability over time can give you an early indicator of potential issues.
Factors That Affect Your Heart Rate Variability
Age
Your heart rate variability naturally decreases as you age. Low HRV generally indicates you may be older biologically. Conversely, a higher HRV correlates to a higher level of fitness, health, and youthfulness. Biological age indicates how well your body can self-stabilize in response to stressors.
Gender
According to one study, men typically have lower heart rate variability than women within the same age range. However, variations decrease over age 55, while the most significant variations appear between 35 and 54. The study suggests changes for younger individuals and those over 45 are due to hormonal differences between genders.
Fitness Level
Aerobic fitness can significantly impact your HRV since regular aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular function and health. Generally, higher heart rate variability correlates with higher aerobic fitness.
Medical Conditions and Medications
Your HRV may be affected by medical conditions such as anxiety, asthma, depression, diabetes, and heart disease. Also, inflammation in the body and certain medications, such as beta-blockers, can negatively affect your HRV.
Improving your HRV
Although you cannot affect some factors like age and biological gender, you can improve your HRV by focusing on habits that will enhance your health. These healthy habits include proper nutrition, maintaining a healthy weight, regular exercise, regulating emotions, and getting enough sleep.
The Takeaway
Heart rate variability is an indicator of health and wellness, like pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. It can be measured with an EKG or modern wearables such as a chest strap or fitness tracker.
Generally, the higher your HRV, the more healthy you are. Regardless, HRV is unique to you. Therefore, what is normal for you may be abnormal for someone else. Fortunately, you can improve your HRV with a sensible diet, maintaining a healthy weight, regular exercise, and minimizing stress.
Tracking your HRV over time can reveal patterns that may provide deeper insight into your health and well-being. That said, your health cannot be determined by a single number. However, HRV can be an important piece of the puzzle because it provides an early warning sign for fatigue, recovery, illness, or other stresses to your body.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
