I have been invited to give a talk about my research at Tampere University of Technology.

This was a nice opportunity for me to go over what is now more than ten years of work I have done in the field. I started back in 2009 developing hardware, firmware and software for wearable sensors, and then went into a PhD in data science applied to physical activity. Eventually, this work led me to the entrepreneurial route, starting companies with the goal of furthering our knowledge on complex relations between physiology, health and performance, thanks to large-scale studies and user generated data. This process brought me to my current goal, which is to empower the individual decision making process with accurate, transparent and effective tools such as HRV4Training.

​I tried to provide a decent overview in this talk, you can find the slides below or at this link.

James Witts wrote a piece on polarized training (or 80/20 running) for the June 2019 issue of Runners World UK. My case study was featured, you can find it below. 

For a deep(er) dive into my data from a few years back, at this link. 
​

In this post, I'd like to show some data to highlight a few important aspects when analyzing your heart rate variability (HRV) data. In particular, I'd like to cover some misconceptions about the relationship between training and HRV as well as the importance of lifestyle and psychological aspects (context!).

We'll use my own data collected between January and April 2018, so 3 months in which I went from best shape of my life to injured and then back to training regularly post-injury, but in poor shape (detrained). We'll look at:

1. The basics: acute response to high-intensity training
2. The more interesting stuff: positive long term adaptation to high intensity and high volume training
3. Context: negative response to poor lifestyle choices following an injury
4. Feedback loop vs fitness marker: assessing full (physiological) recovery
5. Putting it all together

I hope this case study can be a good starting point to identify useful ways to look at your data using HRV4Training Pro.

I​n this post we’ll show two methods we have implemented in HRV4Training Pro to let you easily track changes in aerobic endurance while preparing a running or cycling event, so that you can analyze your progress:

• Aerobic efficiency
• Cardiac decoupling (currently in Beta)

Using these two methods and analyzing changes systematically over time with respect to your historical data, it should be easy to track improvements (or lack thereof) over time and make meaningful adjustments to your training plan.

​Learn more at this link.

​In this post, we go over the 12 weeks leading to Serena's first marathon. 

We'll see how HRV data can be used to analyze positive adaptations (increasing or stable HRV baseline) and to determine when to hold back if necessary (HRV baseline below normal values, or maladaptation detected).

We'll also see how to analyze training intensity distribution and how to determine race pacing strategy using HRV4Training Pro.

As always, while this post is about data, there is no use in data without common sense. Data is not here to replace our brain. Data is here to help us improve our understanding of our body and perception of stress and effort - something we are really bad at, especially as recreational athletes. 

Hopefully, the tools we have developed as well as this case study will help you to learn more about how you respond to stress and to manage things better. 

Thank you again Serena for working with me in these three months and congratulations again on your sub-4 marathon.

Train smart, run faster

​Today's blog post is about a fun project I had the pleasure to take part in thanks to Dan Plews and Rob Arkell. The project was ran by buyagift, and the idea was to determine which spa treatment is more relaxing, so that you can gift the most relaxing treatment for Mother's Day.

Obviously, we used HRV4Training to assess physiological stress. HRV4Training is the first and only validated app that can measure heart rate variability (HRV) without requiring anything more than your phone, and hence it provides an easy way to measure stress non-invasively.

While we normally work with athletes, our body responds to training and lifestyle stressors in the same way (which is why we cannot look at just one or the other), and therefore by using HRV4Training we could capture stress (and relaxation) resulting from a specific treatment, in an objective way.

Ten UK mummy bloggers were each given a spa treatment and asked to measure their stress levels – or Heart Rate Variability (HRV) – once during the most stressful moment of their day and again after their spa treatment. Buyagift then compared the different readings to determine the most improved stress rates and unveil which spa treatments truly reduce stress levels the most.

​The experiment setup is quite similar to what we would do in a pre / post experiment in clinical settings, trying to figure out the impact of a particular stressor or relaxation exercise (e.g. meditation, or in our case, a spa treatment) - what we also call acute HRV changes. 

Dr Daniel Plews, Physiologist and Buyagift’s stress experiment consultant comments: “The survey reveals that mums need to take more time to relax as too little sleep and too much stress can have serious long-term physical and mental health implications. As 4 in 5 families don’t know which treatment to get their mother, this experiment was designed to reveal which treatments help mums de-stress the most by analysing mums’ stress levels. We did this by measuring HRV, which is an accurate, non-invasive measurement of the variation between consecutive heart beats intervals. It reveals signs of physiological stress, as HRV is typically higher (more variation between heart beats) during relaxing activities and decreases (less variation between heart beats) during stressful activities.”