Heart Rate Variability (HRV) - Measure Your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)

So today I want to introduce you to , maybe a new concept .

I don't know if you've ever heard of this before .

It's called heart rate variability , HRV .

HRV is like a measurement of the variations between the heartbeats .

Okay ?

So if you think about it , when your heart beats you have different distances between the beats .

And you would think you would want those all exactly the same , but the more varied the distances or timing between the heartbeats , the healthier the person is , the higher the HRV is .

And the more these distances or timing are the same , the lower the HRV , the less healthy the person is .

And I think a good concept to kind of wrap your wits around it is just your ability to adapt to your environment .

If you're good at adapting to your environment , you're gonna survive better .

If you run up a hill , for example , and you can adapt to that , you're you're gonna be very healthy .

But if you just barely stand up and you pass out because your body can't adapt to that , you're not gonna be in good shape .

So HRV , heart rate variability , is a technology that's very researched and can help a person understand , where they are stress wise and their ability to adapt to stress , as well as their ability to recover from stress .

And , a lot of people use this technology , in exercise to determine number 1 , should they work out hard today or should they take a day off ?

Are they overtraining or do they have enough potential recovery to handle a really good workout ?

Like , there's a lot of lifestyle things that you can do .

Food , exercise , activity , sauna treatments , cold bath , nutritional supplements .

This technology allows you to have feedback to see if what you're doing is benefiting you or making you better or not .

You basically use this little device that you would put your finger in and it'll pick up information of all of your heartbeat and put it into , some software which gives you these graphic illustrations of what's going on with your stress and recovery , even your biological age .

So in practice , I've used this on patients all the time .

I depended on it .

It was a really great tool to kinda look what's behind the scenes to see what's happening .

And so I recently reached out to the company after probably 12 years of not using it , and they have come a very long way in refining this technology to simplify it , to make it easy as a do it yourself .

And , so , now this device and the software is available to anyone that wants to get it .

I'm gonna put the link down below .

When we're done with the video if you wanna check it out .

But , the price is very reasonable .

You can check up to 6 people in your household .

There's no monthly fees , and you pretty much can have your own science lab to figure things out because you really can't take things to the next level , improve things if you can't measure it .

So anything you have have to measure it , whether it's a blood pressure cuff or a pulse rate or whatever , if you can measure it , then you have this feedback tool to see if what you're doing is working or not .

Heart rate variability measures the autonomic nervous system right here .

The autonomic nervous system is the system that works on automatic that you don't have to think about it .

It's involuntary .

So this includes blood pressure , breathing , digestion .

Now , of course , you can control your breathing but then if you forget about it , you'll still keep breathing .

So there's an involuntary component to this .

There's 2 branches .

1 is the sympathetic which is the flood or fight , and the second 1 is the parasympathetic , which is the rest and digest .

We didn't name it sympathetic and parasympathetic .

We named it stress index , which is your ability to adapt to stress , and then we named it recovery index , your ability to recover from stress .

So the simplicity of this is that HRV is the tool to measure the autonomic nervous system , which controls a lot as you can see right here .

Every tissue in the body is controlled by it .

And so this is a window to look inside your body to kind of see the state of where you are .

A lot of people are heavy on the stress or sympathetic mode or sympathetic dominance and they're low in the recovery or the parasympathetic .

So , this kind of explains why they can't sleep .

This is why they're stressed .

But I create a lot of videos to understand this a lot more and how to use this and then what to do to improve these graphs .

And even if you don't get this device , I'm gonna include the training videos down below so you can check them out because there's a lot of great data that I put together .

I'm gonna give you 1 example .

Let's say you go to sleep at night and you have a hard time going to sleep .

Well , the parasympathetic nervous system , the recovery system is always active and it's pushing your pulse rate down .

And if that's weak , okay , and then you're also heavy on the sympathetic , the flight or flight , then you're gonna have a hard time going to sleep .

So you'll just lie there and your body won't turn off .

So that parasympathetic is the system that pushes you into the deep delta wave non REM , phases of sleep where you're rejuvenating and you're recovering all the body functions .

So you'll see when you take the graph , if you can sleep good then you'll see that graph will correlate .

If you don't sleep good , that graph will not look very good .

And then the second half of the sleep is kinda controlled more by the sympathetic nervous system .

And this is why , kind of like the wavelength REM sleep is a very active wave similar to when you're awake , but you're actually asleep .

So if you have a problem with the sympathetic nervous system , you may find that you might not get that last bit of sleep , that REM sleep .

So then , if you're trying to correct that , improve that , you're gonna be scanning down all the potential things that could be stressing you out , and then you'll chip away at that , and then you'll retest back and forth to see if it improves , to really see if that was the thing that was causing most of this problem .

It's also another great tool to help you , not over train .

I'll give you an example .

When I train hard and I I sprint up like a mountain , right , and I'm just , like , pushing myself , and then I recheck my , my biological age the next day , I'm , like , 80 years old .

So that kinda tells me that I should probably take a day off , right , and just rest .

And then I'll check on the next day and see when it comes down and comes down to the point where I'm safe to actually do that again .

Whereas , before , when I didn't have this , technology , I would tend to push myself a little bit harder than I should and overtrain and wonder why I had more inflammation and had other issues .

And , 1 really cool thing about this is biological age .

Right ?

You're able to look inside your body and see the age of your cardiovascular system and arteries .

You're able to determine how elastic and how resilient they are .

You can also measure the rate of aging , which is a really cool graph too .

And , there's a lot of things that can improve this graph and make it worse too .

Like , it'd be a really great experiment to have you go out drinking 1 night and then do a before and after of the graph .

You'll see big changes .

There's also some training on just breathing exercises that you can dramatically improve your graph .

So I just wanted to introduce you on this technology , heart rate variability and exactly what it does , and it measures your autonomic nervous system .

And , if you'd like more information about this or would even like to see the training videos , I put that down below .

Check it out .