your heart: rate and variability
By dr. bell moody, PT, DPT
Your heart, one of the most crucial organs of your body, gives us such valuable information about your health. By examining it's rate, variability, and blood pressure we can learn the strength, adaptability, resilience to stress, and so much more. What's important for us to know?heart rate
Your heart rate is one of the most accessible pieces of data we can use. There are multiple ways you can obtain your heart rate: manually taking it by counting the beats of your pulse of a one minute time frame | a smart watch or activity tracker such as a fit bit, apple watch, garmin watch, whoop, oura ring, etc. | an ECG/EKG | a pulse oximeter | A normal resting heart rate (how fast your heart is beating in the absence of exertional physical activities) is 60-100 beats per minute. If your heart rate is lower than that it could mean your heart is more efficient at pumping the blood through the entire body. Ex: It only requires 50 beats to supply blood to the body versus 70. If your resting heart rate is higher than 100 beats per minute it could mean your heart is weaker, it has to work harder to pump the same amount of blood throughout the body. Your resting heart rate is usually identified through long term trackers like a fitness watch or in the medical setting a Holter monitor. heart rate variability
This is the amount of time between two beats of your heart. So if your heart is beating 60 beats per minute its not beating exactly every 1 second evenly. Some beats might be every 1.5 seconds some every .75 seconds etc. This is heart rate variability. What does it mean? This is an indicator of your body's ability to respond to stress and other activities. Ideally you want your heart rate variability to be high-the more variable your beats the more your body and mind can switch from active/stress/movement mode to relaxation/rest/digest mode. How do you determine your heart rate variability? Through chest monitors such as ECG/EKG, whoop. Some other wrist and finger activity trackers can estimate your HRV however the most accurate is chest monitoring. how to improve?
How can you improve these metrics? 1. Hydration - this is one of the simplest ways to improve your hearts functioning. Providing your body and heart enough fluid to function will help these numbers improve. 2. Nervous system regulation/stress management - prioritizing a physical way to be more resilient to stress such as deep breathing daily will improve these numbers and functioning of your heart. 3. Sleep - rest and recovery are essential to improving the strength of the heart. If you're allowing your body rest from physical and mental demands while you sleep and sleep well, your heart can rest and be stronger the next day. There are many other ways you can improve your resting heart rate and heart rate variability such as:adequate nutrition, adequately programmed exercise and active recovery, 