What is a Normal/Good/Bad HRV?
Updated
by
Hewitt Tomlin
HRV is a measure of beat to beat variation in your heart rate. In a broad sense, it can be a way to measure the stress that your body has endured from a day and how your body is responding to that stress. The best time to measure HRV is the morning, as this will provide an accurate depiction of how your body has dealt with stressors of the previous day. If you drink coffee, start work, or workout before using your device for that day, your HRV reading may be skewed. It is best practice to get a reading as early as possible in a day.
A person’s HRV is individual and there isn’t a perfect or bad score per se, but there are reactions to stressors that would indicate proper response from the body. After a day of high activity, you would want a score that is higher than what you normally would receive after a day of little to no activity. This would indicate a good response from the body to managing the stress placed on it. If you receive a lower score after a stressful day on the body, that may indicate you need more recovery for the ensuing day.
In good practice, one should pay attention to HRV on a regular basis to understand what is a normal value for you. This will allow you to understand when you have had a stressful day or a more relaxed day previously. Knowing this, it may be a good idea to give yourself some time to acquire a few days of readings in order to understand how your body responds to stressors.
In later iterations, HRV will be used to provide more valuable information to you through our application. With the accumulation of this information, we can take the concepts explained in the above paragraphs and turn it into reports for you directly.
Below, we have a normalized range of HRV in individuals based on age group. This should be used for educational purposes in understanding where one might fall in a regular sense. But again, your HRV is unique to you.
