HRV Tracker for Watch

I am 81 and obsessed with staying healthy for another 10 years at least! It’s pretty clear that research coming about now is that we actually can get up to 8-10 months back for every year we age and those stats are getting better all the time. (See Ray Kurzweil for deeper data). One thing is clear, our heart is a major key to our health and having a measurement that lets us know how we are taking care of our heart is an excellent piece of data. I’m an engineer so I love data and these data from the HRV tracker are really helpful to assess how I am doing relative to my recent and long term history. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s worth knowing how we are doing so we can adjust!

It’s a cool app, easy to use and interpret, clean interface. I’d give the app a 5 star and be a major advocate for it, if it had three key features. 1) consistent with how the Whoop device operates based on their extensive research on HRV and usage by professional athletes and coaches, I’d like to see the option to have the app use only one critical hrv value in place of a daily average of multiple readings, namely a reading taken during deep sleep at night. This could be a reading associated with the lowest heart rate at night while sleeping. The reason for this feature is that your hrv reading when you first wake up in the morning is most indicative of your physiological capacity to take on strain for the day. A daily average is not as informative because there are multiple factors during the day that can decrease or increase your hrv, which may not be indicative of your capacity to take on more strain. Alternatively the app could just use a reading immediately after you wake up and you are at resting heart rate. 2) allow the app to sync with TrainingPeaks, sending only only that single deep sleep or morning value. 3) provide some interpretation of the hrv trends. This will require the app to establish a baseline over time so that it knows what your lows and highs are, which in turn can offer coaching advice. For example a 50 may be a high value for an untrained non athlete but low for an athlete who can get values above 100 consistently. Hrv is meaningless to the average person without some analysis relative to their fitness level, baseline data etc. It’s just a bunch of numbers. So, I got an hrv value of 32 today. So what? Should I run that 20k or not? Should I take the day off or do more active recovery?

I have an Apple 4 watch. I wanted to know my Heart rate variability and this does that. It’s pretty basic but is easy to use. I also added it to my watch face and you don’t have to use the breath function for it to work. I almost bought a whoop because I wanted the info quicker. The recommendations I would make are to have the info come up in a score form based on sleep, HRV and workouts or other things. I am a coach for CrossFit and this is something we can use. I look forward to the update and would love to help if you guys needed some info. Thanks