"The 33"-Road Bike Racing - Under/Over Training? Going beyond morning resting heart rate and mood questionnaires.

For quite a while now athletes have been advised to take their morning resting heart rate as a way of determining if they have recovered sufficiently to train hard that day. Elevated MRHR suggested incomplete recovery, illness or even the beginnings of overtraining syndrome.

This made me wonder if more information could be harvested from a more detailed device like an EKG. A quick search led me to this paper where they used heart rate variability (HRV) as a way of prescribing training intensity. Using this system the athletes improved significantly more than the scheduled training control group.

Endurance training guided individually by daily heart rate variability measurements.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17849143&ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
We concluded that cardiorespiratory fitness can be improved effectively by using HRV for daily training prescription.

This study used athletes participating in a training camp (overreaching) and concluded that HRV can be used to measure the training state of athletes.

Changes in heart rate variability of athletes during a training camp.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17061939&ordinalpos=19&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
In conclusion, HRV might be used to monitor the training state in athletes.

Here they measured the exercise dose-response relationship using HRV
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=15890758&ordinalpos=45&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

At this time it is unpractical to do this yourself but it does show you we are near an age where strapping a device to your chest and maybe pricking your finger for blood tests (microfluidics and MEMS anyone) may be all that is needed to come up with a near optimal training system. Gone are the days of scheduled under or overtraining.

Anybody have an extra EKG kicking around they want to lend me? Oh never mind here is how to make one for less than 5 bucks.
http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jnguyen/ecg/ecg_index.html

Sweet, I DO have a $15,000 EKG that I can play around with.

Cat 1 here I come! :D

They should be able to measure HRV with a simple chest strap like our HR monitors. It is just another calculation for the HR computer to do - and not a very difficult calculation at that - I imagine the processor they have in an HR watch could do it.

They should be able to measure HRV with a simple chest strap like our HR monitors. It is just another calculation for the HR computer to do - and not a very difficult calculation at that - I imagine the processor they have in an HR watch could do it.

OK, after reading the abstracts, I am not sure this is true, but It may be. I'm thinking the HRV is just a measure of the variability of the interval between heart beats - likely a standard deviation from the mean. If this is the case, I think this feature could be added to a HR monitor pretty easily.

I think this feature could be added to a HR monitor pretty easily.

I agree

Sounds like a job I'd like to take on in the OpenSource world with the quarq power system...

If only I had a development system...