What position to take your HRV – lying down or standing?
Who, what & why? It’s a question we get asked a lot at ithlete: should I take my morning measurement lying down in bed, or standing up? Our response has always been that if you have a low resting heart rate (less than 55 bpm), then you should be doing the...Recording and importing Sleep into ithlete Pro
As athletes, sleep is our No1 recovery enabler. Examples of comments we get from new ithlete HRV users are ‘my morning HRV is nearly always good so long as I’ve slept well’ and ‘that extra glass of wine made me sleep poorly, which affected my HRV and recovery the next...HRV response and other lessons from a long Gran Fondo
As some readers will remember, two years ago I prepared for the Mallorca 312, the longest (and possibly best organised) Gran Fondo cyclosportive event in Europe. Last weekend was the third time I have done it, and my target was to beat the previous two years’...Mallorca 312 cyclosportive race report
Once again this was one of my main target events for the year, and the training camp I performed in Tenerife in March was intended to prepare me for over 5000 vertical metres of climbing in the 312 km of the event. This has now become one of the premier long distance...Short report from the BASES conference
The BASES conference is an annual get together of researchers, practitioners and sports scientists, principally from the UK. We attended partly to support Perform Better, our UK distribution & support partner for the ithlete Team system. The first session I was...HRV response to stress predicts degree of sleep disturbance
Research summary of an intelligent study trying to understand the relationship between daytime heart rate variability (HRV), HRV response to periods of worry and sleep disturbance.
Tuesday’s Tip – the importance of the first 4 hrs of sleep
Most people like to think of total sleep time as the main metric associated with sleep quality, but in fact the first four hours are the period for key restorative functions, especially in athletes & sports people.