[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media. Video. Print. Podcasts.
[00:00:05] Josh Kennedy: Welcome to the show. Today's topic is can HRV and resting heart rate guide your training priorities? Uh, the answer is yes. That is the end of the episode. Thank you very much and goodbye. Uh, not really. I think we need to start, James, with defining what HRV is for people in case they don't know.
[00:00:22] James Breese: Yeah, so I've written this down, so I'm going to read this on the sheet to make sure I get this right. So heart rate variability, or HRV for short, is a measure of your autonom autonomic, see I've got it wrong already, autonomic nervous system that's widely considered one of the best objective metrics for physical fitness in determining your body's readiness to perform.
[00:00:40] James Breese: Now it's very different to heart, heart, your resting heart rate, stuff like that. Because heart rate variability is literally the variance in time between the beat of your heart, right? And it's not about being the lower the better, it's the, the, the greater the varia, variability, the more your hand, your body's able to hand, to readily handle fitness.
[00:00:58] James Breese: God, I can't even say that today [00:01:00] again.
[00:01:00] Josh Kennedy: The more, the greater the variability, the more ready your body is for physical exertion. So we put it like that, which is, yeah, that's the science bit, which is, um, before I knew about heart rate variability, I... Genuinely would have thought it would have been the other way around, but it's not.
[00:01:14] Josh Kennedy: Um, so yeah, more variability
[00:01:16] James Breese: is better. There's lots of factors that influence HRV and everything. But what we tend to see is this, is that if you have, it's like an inverse, um, to the resting heart rate, for example, if you have a low, uh, HRV score, it means you tend to have a high resting heart rate. And likewise, if you have a low resting heart rate, you tend to have a higher HRV.
[00:01:40] James Breese: That's the important thing. It's like an inverse relationship. Yeah, that's essentially what we want to see and see it time and time again. Now, the reason we're talking about this today is because we've had a potential client, somebody who would come to us who shared their very, very low HRV score with us and very, very high resting heart rate with us.
[00:01:59] James Breese: So [00:02:00] you know, we want to talk about how it impacts our decisions when we're working with clients like this and just share experience working with other people. We've had this in the past too, and how it's, we've had to work around this because it's not as simple as go and work out and do this type of training.
[00:02:15] James Breese: What it tends to mean for us is that assuming all lifestyle factors are normal, i. e. they don't drink much alcohol, they eat well, they sleep really well, there's not much stress going on. What it tends to lead to us is that... They have very poor aerobic capacity and they need to work on their cardiovascular development.
[00:02:35] James Breese: It's a system development, not meaning that we got to go and work out and do hit high intensity workouts or just run really hard or bike really hard as quickly as possible. We've actually got to help them develop a system of cardiovascular development. and build it up slowly to improve the system overall.
[00:02:53] James Breese: Is that, I think that's a good way to put it, isn't it, Josh?
[00:02:55] Josh Kennedy: Absolutely. I definitely agree with that. I think it's important to point out in terms of the strength matters [00:03:00] system, model of training, whatever you want to call it. Health comes first. That's first and foremost. Whenever we get a new client, we put them through our assessments, we get their health data.
[00:03:11] Josh Kennedy: And when we see, if we see something like a high resting heart rate, um, and if they have access to heart rate variability as well, and it's a low score. Then that's like, you know, that's a red flag for us. We've got to say okay As you say you look into the lifestyle factors first. What other things are going on?
[00:03:29] Josh Kennedy: While they eating like what are they sleeping like how much are they walking? Are they walking at all? What's the hydration level like? What's their work life balance? What type of job do they do? Are they stressed so much stuff goes into it Of course, um, once you take all that into account, as you say, you know, if you've got a high resting heart rate and low heart rate variability, 100 percent cardio is your number one priority because without your health, you've got nothing, right?
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[00:04:27] James Breese: Don't wonder. Now book your free strategy call at strengthmatters. com forward slash website today. Exactly. And it's highly likely they have something called aerobic deficiency syndrome. So it's something to build up here and that ain't something you're going to fix by doing high intensity workouts.
[00:04:43] James Breese: It's long, slow stuff to build volume over time. So if anything, walking is a starting point here, like building up walking for volume is a great way. Introduce slow run, walk, jog type, type elements where I'm talking really slowly and minutely and building [00:05:00] for time. So you're running for a minute, walking before doing for 15 minutes to begin with, then 20, then 25 and 30, but keeping it really simple and easy.
[00:05:08] James Breese: So your body body is building this, this base, this foundation to handle it. So at the moment your body can't recover fast enough. to handle everything else that's going on. And it's just, it's a lack of development. It's like a, it's like a baseline system that we have to develop accordingly to put it back together again.
[00:05:26] James Breese: So high intensity is not the, uh, it's not the winner here. We've got to build it slowly here to build it up to, then maybe we can go some high intensity later on down the line, but weight training as great as it is for doing body composition and looking good. Yes. Keep doing that. However, it's not going to improve your HRV scores.
[00:05:46] James Breese: Unless we have a system of cardiovascular development to go alongside it. Everyone
[00:05:49] Josh Kennedy: loves doing the high intensity anaerobic work, but you know, when you put your health first, it's probably not your priority. And as you say, in terms of like the way, the way we do [00:06:00] training, we have the 20 minute walk test.
[00:06:02] Josh Kennedy: Can you get 1. 5 miles in 20 minutes? If you can, awesome. But if not, you've got to build up to that. And as you say, building steps up to 7, 000, ideally. But continuous working, you know, we like to get people, um, you know, working continuously up to an hour, whether that's walking or maybe doing some easy mixed modal work or whatever it is.
[00:06:23] Josh Kennedy: And then, you know, obviously, once we get them doing that, you can make things a little more intense for them. And that's generally, you know, we do see good improvements in resting heart rate and heart rate variability.
[00:06:34] James Breese: Exactly. And we tend to see this a lot with people who have the fear of God put into them by any form of cardio.
[00:06:39] James Breese: So if we would say to them, Hey. Uh, if I was to ask you, yeah, exactly. Well, there's that, but there's also people who are like, well, if I asked you to run a 5k, what would you say to me? You'd probably get a punch in the face. So it tends to be a lot of people because this is why they associate cardio with pain and suffering.
[00:06:56] James Breese: Whereas cardio doesn't have to be pain and suffering. It could be enjoyable if [00:07:00] you get it right at the right intensities. To help people enjoy it. So what it will do though, then is improve their ability to recover faster, sleep better, make better decisions, whether it's in work, training, life, whatever you want to call it, and they'll just have way more energy to go with it.
[00:07:16] James Breese: So it's, uh, it's such an important factor and then obviously perform better. Absolutely. You know, you know, in terms of performance, we definitely want that, but this is what we tend to see it with a lot of people. This is the general population in itself. That those who associate training and cardio with pain and misery.
[00:07:33] James Breese: This is what we see. And when we see this, we know we've got to go easy with them to begin with and slowly build them up to speed. Otherwise, we could, again, instill more fear of God into them. And it's why they hate it so much.
[00:07:48] Josh Kennedy: Exactly. We don't want to insult anyone, but would you say in our experience, we get that slightly less hatred of cardio from Europeans and slightly more hatred of cardio from our American [00:08:00] clients?
[00:08:00] James Breese: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All the time. Because it's just the way it is. You know, Europeans are more endurance based sports. Americans are more power. Type baseboards. That's the, that's, that's, that's the way, way it goes. But like I said, it's not just training we're looking at here now. It's all sorts of things.
[00:08:18] James Breese: We use HRV. We ideally want to monitor everyone's HRV and resting heart rates continually. I do it. I use an app called Athletic. I measure every single day. I see how Poor eating habits or lack of sleep impact my day to day habits and HRV and how it impacts my Ability to train at the right intensities and that's what we're going to be using this for It's to make better decisions to work out the right intensity to improve your quality of life and your health at long term and long term performance, too So there's so many things to think about.
[00:08:48] James Breese: So yes, do we use it absolutely all the time We do use it as often as possible But in terms when we see these types of numbers, it's, we know it's potential aerobic deficiency syndrome, and we've got to build them up [00:09:00] slowly with cardiovascular capacity.
[00:09:02] Josh Kennedy: Absolutely. So if someone is listening into this and they've just checked their resting heart rate, and it's like, I don't know, 78 or something like that, and they've got a terrible low heart rate variability score.
[00:09:11] Josh Kennedy: Couple of quick tips before we sign off about what they should prioritize.
[00:09:15] James Breese: Start walking more at lower intensities to begin with and build it for volume. And if you want to do some form of cardio. I would suggest using the math method of having a heart rate watch or something where it's 180 minus your age.
[00:09:28] James Breese: So say you're 40, minus 140. Work out continuously for your heart rate less than 140. That's a really simple way to do it and just keep it nice and easy. So at the end of it. You, uh, you feel more refreshed as opposed to you do, uh, feeling tired and exhausted.
[00:09:44] Josh Kennedy: Exactly. Exactly. Uh, favorite methods of doing that row a salt bike.
[00:09:49] Josh Kennedy: If you've got access to one, especially salt bike, cause there's no, um, no technique involved, just jump on and go. Um, that is it for this week. Uh, please don't forget to rate review and subscribe. And if you [00:10:00] want to learn more about our training system, go to strengthmatters. com forward slash system.