Handy Stuff

Been a bit slack on posting the last couple of days as is often the case when I am up here at Moore River. Always nice to take the chance to disconnect with routine and recharge a little, which is why I often let myself get a bit lazy. 

It has been an absolutely awesome trip up here, just as it should be. Relaxing and exhausting all in one hit. I have got in some good training, had a lot of downtime and generally not thought about work and any of the other usual stresses of life for the last two days. We head home today, but once again today should be another fun day in the sun (or partial sun at least). 

I thought I would make this post because a rather interesting blog article from TrainingPeaks came into my inbox on Saturday.This one in fact.

Interesting blog article from TrainingPeaks

In my experience, these blog articles can be a bit hit and miss depending on who has written them. Sometimes they can be a bit wishy washy, not incorrect or anything, just not particularly useful or insightful. However, sometimes they have some really interesting, data driven, informative articles, such as this one about the correlation of HRV and illness. 

Having just started using HRV I am not entirely surprised about the contents of this article, in fact I had sort of assumed it worked this way, ie if the HRV is going down then there is a cause, and one of those causes may be illness. I was interested to see how much more accurate it is than resting Heart Rate. Once again, not surprising, HRV is a more advanced metric. I talk to a lot of my athletes about using resting Heart Rate to track things like health, recovery levels etc because it is a metric that they all have available to them. However, I have been thinking lately that I should push more of the athletes towards HRV. I think some of the newer athletes would struggle with the extra technological burden, but I suspect the more experienced triathletes would probably latch on to it. After all, what isn't to like about an advanced metric that is driven by technology. 

So far I have been finding HRV to be quite useful, if just as an independent confirmation of what I am feeling. While I don't plot HRV against resting HR and CTL from TrainingPeaks as they do in the article, it is something I do keep track of together and I agree with the article that when taken as a whole it can help paint a pretty complete picture of where you are tracking in terms of health, illness and over training. 

Very handy.