I agree. Trouble sleeping is usually a sign it’s time for me to back off. If I wake up an hour early, all anxious and rushing to go to the gym, I have trouble getting tight and locked in under heavy weights. It’s like I feel clumsy trying to lift.
I don’t want any old training day to feel the same as the day of an important test or presentation.
Those weird phantom pains keep you in line. When they’re not there it’s tempting to get wild and then end up tearing something loose.
The trippiest and most frustrating moments are when I mentally want to push it, but I start moving and immediately know it’s not going to happen
Very frustrating!
Especially if it’s the day of the big competition. It’s also tough to see the frustration and confusion when one of your Bros is expecting a big lift and then feels really bad when they miss.
Let me rephrase that, how about if you feel “good” (definition: not bad, not run down) and your gut feeling is that you could have a productive heavy day but the watch (notorious for having an inaccuracy of 30%) disagrees with you?
Or to put it this way (please consider this a separate series of questions), if you didn’t have the watch, what would you do? What if you had a coach or training partners that were allowed to look at your HRV but you yourself aren’t, what should they do?
This is exactly why I haven’t got one. I lift main lifts 4x/week, have two cardio/ab days, climb 3 times/wk and hangboard (finger training) twice/wk. I’d be clawing on the walls if all I got to do during a week was press on a dynamometer. Also, I’m not sure a week would cut it because the first few days you are still recovering from your workouts.
Most of the coaches, authors, lifters and scientists who’s work I’m into talk about waving your training volume and intensity up and down. Or starting a training cycle easy then gradually pushing harder. Or not doing more work than you can recover from.
Most of the programs I’m into were designed around the feedback from hand-squeezers and HRV. The watch didn’t contradict what everybody said to do, it verified the classic “rules” of how much work to do and how much to rest.
Part of good training is pacing yourself so you can train long enough to actually make some progress. Often I feel like I could push on, but the program says to back off. The idea is to take 1 step back so you can then take another 4 steps forward.
Without the watch I’d hopefully be smart enough to follow the plan and back off instead of blasting forward. If my coach and training partners looked at my HRV they would say “See? Dude is elevated, that’s why we’re not going balls to the wall today.”
I did some research about HRV and recovery came up in a post of mine… you’ve convinced me to purchase a smart watch with HRV capabilities.
I think that you’ll like messing around with it. If you’ve already been playing around with tracking volume and you’ve been training steady for awhile the numbers you get will actually mean something. Like you know what’s a “big” workout or an “easy” workout for you, so you’ll be able see the impact on HRV and learn to connect the dots easier.
My Apple Watch gives me an HRV reading, but I don’t understand how to use it at all.
Does it tell you your resting heart rate? Or lowest heart rate you get down to when you sleep?
It does. I don’t wear it when I sleep, so it would tell me, but it’s not a measurement I’ve been taking.
Years ago, I moved from training deadlift weekly to training it every other week, and found it to yield significantly better results. I wonder if this is part of why it worked. The general concept of ‘that lift requires longer recovery time for me’ was definitely what made me do it, but I’m wondering if this, specifically, was a factor.