Using Heart Rate Variability to Guide Training – FasterSkier

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In my coaching and consulting work, I get a lot of questions about using heart rate variability (HRV) to guide training. This is a follow-up to a previous article, where I want to move from theory to practice and show how HRV has been one of the most valuable tools I’ve used to assess recovery and adaptation in endurance athletes.

There is no shortage of research documenting the value of HRV in endurance training. That’s well established. What matters to me is how it works in coaching practice. In my experience, HRV is especially useful for helping athletes avoid the most damaging downsides of poorly implemented training. Most of the big performance issues I have seen over the years could have been avoided with the use of HRV.

Over the years, I’ve collected long-term HRV data on many athletes, some spanning close to ten years. The example I’m using here covers nearly four years and serves as an excellent illustration of how HRV reflects training implementation, adaptation, and the consequences of training changes over time. This athlete was 50 years old at the start of the data set, but I’ve seen the same pattern in juniors, elites, and masters’ athletes alike. The trend is the same; only the absolute HRV values differ.

Most of the athletes I’ve worked with over the past 15–20 years arrived with either inconsistent training or worse, chronic over-training. In this example, training lacked consistency and relied too heavily on endurance work performed at intensities that were simply too high. To be clear, many of the long-term problems I’ve seen, performance stagnation, recurring illness, persistent fatigue, would have been obvious much earlier had HRV been used properly.

The chart below shows an overview of the data, collected using a Firstbeat sensor and analyzed through the Firstbeat Sports platform. With improved training structure and better implementation, this athlete’s RMSSD baseline steadily increased: