What it is:
The variation in time between heartbeats.
Why it’s important:
It offers a snapshot of how well your autonomic nervous system (ANS) functions.
The ANS regulates involuntary processes like heart rate, respiration, and digestion.
HRV is a marker of both cardiovascular and mental health. “Essentially, HRV can tell us how well the body is adapting to stress,” says Reed. Variability is desirable; reduced HRV is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure, heart failure, and heart disease.
How to measure it:
Many fitness trackers and apps are equipped to measure and track your HRV.
How to improve it:
Reed recommends focusing on four things to improve your body’s resilience to stress: sleep quality, stress management, hydration, and aerobic conditioning. “HRV tends to improve with balanced training loads, adequate recovery, and reduced chronic stress,” she says. “Overtraining, poor sleep, and illness can suppress it.”
When it comes to exercise specifically, one meta-analysis, in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, found that aerobic and resistance training can improve HRV. Aerobic exercise can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, increase circulation, and bolster your parasympathetic, rest-and-digest nervous system function.
Resistance exercise, on the other hand, can increase muscle mass, improve metabolic health, and calm your sympathetic, fight-or-flight nervous system. The result? Better nervous-system balance and a more resilient body.
Fitness Markers to Watch
There are myriad ways to measure fitness and longevity. Discover two more fitness benchmarks that can offer the most useful insight at “3 Fitness Markers to Watch,” from which this article was excerpted.
Comments (0)