- [Taren] Morning, Trainiacs.
Gotta do a little run pre-hab
where I put a weight on my knee and lean forward,
try to keep my heel down.
Try to unlock a blockage
at the front of my ankle
that physiotherapist found.
We had a fairly busy day today.
I had to do a big run,
eat,
go do a tiny little swim,
podcast with David McNamee,
but
main show today,
I wanna share with you my heart rate variability results,
and how to interpret potentially yours,
for the purpose of obviously just
getting faster, better, stronger, in training,
while staying healthy and injury free,
and not having to put a kettle bell on your knee.
Alright!
Let's get into a
(sigh) long treadmill run.
(mimics sad trombone)
(high energy techno music)
(Distant dance music)
(moves into clearer dance music)
(Groans) Oh God.
Alright. Okay.
18.8k and
an hour 30.
Building.
Go follow me on Instagram.
I'll post the workout there.
Alright.
Swim. Quick.
Swim.
(Upbeat Dance Music)
After that long, race pace,
heat training run,
that swim did not go well.
Very stiff.
Very slow.
In other fun news, look who came with me for a workout.
How was your workout?
- [Kim] Good.
- [Taren] Ooh.
So what did you do for a workout?
- [Kim] 10 minutes on the bike,
and then I ran for 10 minutes on the track.
- [Taren] 10 minutes on the bike,
and 10 minutes on the track.
Does that mean we're gonna see a TK?
Everyone's askin'.
- [Kim] Get real.
I don't get my hair wet.
There will be no--
- [Taren] DK.
Duathlon Kim.
New Youtube channel.
(equipment bounces)
Whoa!
That rocked me.
We just did the podcast with David McNamee,
and he said "How's it goin?"
And I was like, "life is shattered right now,
"I just did a long run,
"added some heat training into it,"
and he was like, "Oh yeah.
"Soon as you include heat in anything,
"takes a lot outta ya."
And that took a lot out of me!
Probably less than NTK's 10-minute run.
More on that another time.
Alright, so what we've got here
is my daily heart rate readings
from the overnight Oura Ring's tracking
of heart rate variability,
going back to November 22nd 2018,
all the way up to February 16th 2019.
And I just read a blog post
that I'll link to in the description below,
and it's from Doctor Dan Plews,
the Plews,
who is on our podcast,
and it was explaining how he uses heart rate variability
in a way that is more practical,
whereas for years
heart rate variability tracking was like,
well yeah, you can do it,
but how do you actually apply it to training?
This is how you apply it to training.
So I will link to that blog post below.
If you're interested in heart rate variability,
you should go and read that.
I will also link to TriathlonTaren.com/HRVTraining,
where you can download the spreadsheet
that ends up making this graph for you
if you are tracking heart rate variability.
After we go through all this,
I will tell you that
even if you aren't tracking heart rate variability,
there is a way that you can
very easily use this spreadsheet,
that is at TriathlongTaren.com/HRVTraining,
to actually do the same thing
without having a heart rate variability monitor.
So here's the gyst of this.
The top line here,
and the bottom line,
are the 30 day rolling averages
of what's called the smallest meaningful change.
That's what Dan Plews calls it,
and that is the half a standard deviation
of the 30 day rolling average of your readings,
and it's not just the rolling average
it's the difference of your readings,
which is why I just say go download that spreadsheet
because it's all kinds of fancy math
that Dan Plews helped me work out,
but what this is
is if people end up
dipping below
the bottom smallest meaningful worthwhile change,
like I did here in December,
that's an indication that you need to take a day off.
Now if you are, however, trending upwards,
what you wanna see is something like this
where you're trending upwards.
You want your heart rate variability
to be increasing day to day,
because that is an indication
that the balance between
the amount of training you're doing
and your life stress
is appopriate enough that you can be making improvements,
and we'll look at a couple of examples
where that did and didn't happen.
Now number one,
look at what happened from December 20th to December 28th.
There was just an absolute drop off.
Now even though we were at home,
and my schedule was fairly normal,
and training was fairly normal,
I actually even had backed off the training
because I was watching
my heart rate variability go down significantly.
what this is an indication of,
is how many events you've gotta go to,
and how much crappy food you've gotta go to,
and even though I limited all my drinking
to like, at most three wines,
it was still a big enough load on my body
that it was an indication that
hey, you've gotta back off,
so I dipped under that smallest
meaningful worthwhile change,
really backed off,
meanwhile there are all these coaches,
and masters groups, and run clubs out there
that are like, "Burn off the Christmas calories!
"Increase your training!"
and that is the exact opposite of what you should be doing,
because we all go through these sorts of things.
So I will also link to a blog post
that I did while I was going through that
about how coaches have it wrong
about how to traithlon train during the holidays,
and these are the things
that you can start picking out
when you're heart rate variability training.
Now you can see,
when I was more settled in the middle of December,
and I was starting to get back into training,
there was a nice increase.
After all of the holidays,
there was a nice small increase again,
but it went down immediately
the very first day that I traveled to Lanzarote.
Now in the first couple of weeks of travel,
and keep in mind if you weren't following,
that from January 4th to February 6th,
I was traveling for all but five days,
so from January 4th,
I was able to balance the training nicely,
and the travel wasn't too detrimental on my body,
but it eventually just caught up with me
and it became too much
to the point that you can see that I ended up,
until I got home from
Tucson on January 27th,
I was starting to pay the price
of trying to train while traveling.
I come home,
and all of a sudden,
I am coming back into things,
I have to go to Boulder,
so I edge down,
and since I've been back,
I've been on a nice upward trajectory
besides the last few days
where training load got fairly heavy,
but it's still high enough
it's beyond the top
smallest meaningful worthwhile change
that I'm still quite happy with it.
So how do you end up using heart rate variability?
Well a few things.
Number one is you want to see a general upward trajectory,
and that's an indication
that you are balancing the training load
with your life stress appropriately.
So regardless of what your heart rate variability number is,
you wanna see that nice upward trend.
Now if you start seeing a downward trend,
you start thinking,
"Okay, am I getting enough sleep?
"Am I recovering well?
"Am I getting the proper nutrition?"
It's just an indication of what you should be
maybe changing as far as training load or life stress load.
Next thing is that
if you end up dipping under
this area,
the smallest meaningful worthwhile change,
that's an indication of either a day of rest,
a complete day off,
or a series of days off,
because your body is significantly hampered,
and you can see that the times that this happened,
it was after a series of poor meals and nights out in a row,
and these are nights out in a row like going to 11pm.
It's not like I'm partying until all the hours,
but these are the things
that place a load on your body
that you might not think about.
It's the hard day of travel,
going international to Lanzarote,
it's a series of travel weeks, here.
So you start seeing these trends
as you gather more and more data,
and understand from reading Dan Plews stuff,
from reading some of my stuff,
from watching these videos,
how you can actually appropriately balance your training,
so that you can become the best athlete that you can be
by giving your body
the most amount of training that you can
with whatever situation life gives you.
That's it.
We can only be the best version of ourselves,
and this is a way that you balance that.
So a couple of things,
number one, if you are on Team Traniac,
I think you can get $50 off an Oura Ring.
I recommend using this,
because of all the things that I've tried,
it's the most consistent reading that I've ever got.
If it's a low reading I'm like, "Yeah that makes sense."
If it's a high reading it's like, "Yeah that makes sense."
Whereas other devices that I've used
tend to have really big spikes and troughs
and things like that.
Now that's kind of taken out
by the spreadsheet that you can go and download,
but I like good reliabile data,
and garbage in, garbage out,
so get reliable data.
Second thing,
is that I told you that you don't necessarily
have to do only heart rate variability training.
What I'm finding
as I'm starting to put a book together
about total heart rate training for triathletes,
is that you don't necessarily
have to use heart rate variability training,
because heart rate variability
is very closely correlated
with overnight resting heart rate.
So if you wanna start trying to use things like this,
like the tracking and starting to get data and metrics,
and you have a device
that tracks your overnight resting heart rate,
you can potentially start
putting those numbers into that spreadsheet.
Now I don't know if it's going to work quite right,
but that's an option for you
that if you don't wanna go
and start doing heart rate variability training,
you can use overnight resting heart rate training
because there is a very strong correlation
between this reading and that reading.
Personally I've found that,
and I've looked up some studies
that have said, "Yeah, seriously correlated."
So Traniacs, that is heart rate variability training.
That's how it's helped me.
If you look at my fitness numbers that I've built,
even while traveling over the last month,
it's all time high fitness numbers
that I've done while only being home
five days out of five weeks.
So it's given me the tools to understand
what I can dose my body with.
I haven't got injured.
I haven't got sick.
I was kind of a little bit sore
in just the last few days of travel,
but this is powerful stuff,
I was very happy with it.
Alright.
Links to everything are in the description below.
You got homework to do, Traniacs.
Later.
- [Kim] Hello?
Anybody in there?
Trainiacs?