The Do-It-Yourself Guide To Using Heart Rate Variability Testing to Track Your Nervous System Health

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and I'm here once again with someone who's been on the podcast before. You guys got a lot of awesome information from her. Last time she was on, on this thing called heart rate variability testing. Her name is Rhonda Collier and she's with Sweetwater Health, which is the developer, the Sweet Beat heart rate variability application, which is one of the applications that I personally use to continuously monitor my stress levels and the health of my nervous system and my heart rate variability. And of course, since Rhonda's been on before in the show notes for this particular podcast, I'll put a link to the other interview that we did. If you're listening in and you need to play catch up, if you have no clue what heart rate variability is and this is a head scratcher for you, you know the whole idea behind hrv, go back and listen to that podcast episode because we're not going to rehash that stuff. It's already out there. So go back and listen to it. But today we're going to delve into some of kind of the, you know, almost like, almost like heart rate variability 201. We're going to delve into some of the back end stuff that you can have access to when you're using this app or when you're tracking your heart rate variability stuff goes above and beyond just kind of that 0 to 100 score that you can get when you're measuring your HRV. So we're going to dig into that. We're going to tell you how you can also kind of access your results online and how maybe if you're an athlete, you might be able to share those with, say, a coach that you're working with or something like that and just give you some cool information here as far as HRV goes. So, Rhonda, thanks for coming on the call today.

Hey, thanks, Ben, for having me.

So let's go ahead and just delve right in. I've actually got my iPhone here because I wanted to make sure I had it pulled up in front of me. You guys have made some changes to the Sweet Beat heart rate variability app and specifically one of the things that you have now is the ability to be able to look at what you call power frequency graphs. Now can you explain what a power frequency graph is?

Well, there are several measures of heart rate variability. One of the measures is time domain, which is basically what that HRV number is that you see in the app time domain are really like a standard deviation. It's really basic statistics. Okay. Then there's another measure of heart rate variability that is called frequency domain. And you can think of that as frequency of musical notes, frequencies that come from your cell phone. It's really an electrical engineering signal processing of the heart rate signal. And so it turns out that the sympathetic or fight or flight branch of your nervous system has what we call a low frequency component of heart rate variability. And the parasympathetic or rest and repair branch of the nervous system has what we call a high frequency component.

Got it. And that also, you know, to me, and I don't know about to you, but it doesn't seem intuitive. It seems like the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system would be like the high and the parasympathetic would be the lowest. But it's kind of just the opposite, right?

Well, yeah, actually it's because the sympathetic nervous system, the things that cause fight or flight, respond in your nervous system slower than the rest and repair aspects of your nervous system. So it really is, if you get scared, your nervous system responds that actually if you think of a frequency wave, the frequency slower than the when you lie down and rest, the things come faster. So it really is opposite to intuition.

Yeah, it is, but it's interesting and it makes sense. So when you're looking at something like a power frequency graph, would that be similar to the kind of graph where recently, as I think a lot of our listeners know, I tested my heart rate variability when I was leading up to this recent triathlon that I did. And then I looked at my scores both before and after these back to back triathlons and I'll put a link to the show notes for that particular episode here when I released this. But in that we showed some of the high frequency and some of the low frequency numbers, some of the sympathetic nervous system and some of the parasympathetic nervous system feedback and you were kind enough to kind of do an analysis on those and go over them. Now are the graphs that I have in that blog post where it's just kind of like a dot graph of low frequency versus high frequency. Is that a power frequency graph or does a power frequency graph look different than something like that?

No, that's the same graph that you're now seeing in the Sweet Beat app. So the power frequency graph shows your average low frequency power and high frequency power during each session. Okay. And so you can tell. I think we should back up really, and talk about what the power levels mean.

Yeah, I'd like to do that for sure.

Okay. So basically, heart rate variability is a measure, as we've talked about before, of the flexibility of the nervous system. Okay. And when you over train, your nervous system becomes fatigued and becomes less flexible. And also the rest and repair aspect of the nervous system gets fatigued and so you don't recover. Okay. So the power frequency graph is a different measure of the flexibility of your nervous system. So for example, your average Joe or your average fitness enthusiast may have a power frequency around, let's say, an LF of, you know, 800 and an HF of, you know, 1,000. And once again, for your listeners, don't take these numbers as objectives. The nervous system is a completely dynamic system. And so the numbers I'm giving are, for example, only. Okay, so that shows a reasonably flexible nervous system. Okay. There's around 800 to 1,000 milliseconds squared of power in the nervous system on both branches. Okay. People who are really sick might have power levels of 50 in the LF and 30 in the HF. Okay, gotcha. So that's a 10x difference just for someone who's sick and a fitness enthusiast. And so that shows really not a lot of power, if you will, in the nervous system to do what it's supposed to do, which is regulate your organs, respond and recover to psychological and physical stressors.

Right, right. And then you have like strength of your parasympathetic nervous system would show that you're really able to repair and recover really well. Right?

That's right. That's right. And strength is a great word to use. It's the strength of your nervous system. Okay. And then those, those especially some of your followers, Ben, that have contacted us or we've looked at their information, have numbers in the thousands. So some of your listeners have, you know, LF&HF around 3,000 plus or minus. And then others have LF&HF anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000. Okay, so these are nervous systems that are just have a lot of strength. I love that term, an ability to respond, recover to life and all the training that they're doing.

Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. So when we're looking at these power frequency graphs as we're as, you know, the folks who are listening in maybe have their sweet beat phone apps and everything out, and they're graphing this kind of stuff. If I wanted to look at a power frequency graph, and I'm measuring my heart rate variability using this app, where in the app do I go as I'm taking the measurement or after I take the measurement to see the power frequency part? Kind of what the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system is doing, rather than just the heart rate variability number.

So you would go into summary and then go to the charts section. So up in the left hand corner there's a charts button.

Got it.

And that's where really there's all kinds of graphs and summaries. Okay. And once again, when you go into the chart session of the summaries, you're going to see a running average for all the sessions you've run. Okay. So the power chart, you'll see there will be the average LF and the average HF power for each session that you've run. Okay. So if you get over fatigued, you may see your power levels suddenly drop. And for a while, if you were to do some sort of a burnout situation. So it's a really good indicator beyond just hrv.

So would both of them drop or would just that high frequency parasympathetic nervous system score drop?

If you were systemically fatigued, you could see them both drop.

Okay, got it.

Okay. You could go from an average of, say, let's just say a reasonable number of a healthy, really fit guy of 3000. And if you started dropping down into the 1000s on both of them, that would be an indication of really some systemic, deep, systemic fatigue. Now, if you only saw the HF drop, then that would be an indication of chronic stress building up. Okay, so you get the difference?

Mm, yep. Yep. Got it. Okay. And that, that would be just like chronic stress from, from life, from exercise, from whatever.

That's right. Mental stress, emotional stress.

Right.

You know, too much partying. I think I mentioned, you know, if you drink too much, your, your, your LF can drop tremendously.

Okay.

I mean, your HF can drop tremendously. Yeah.

Okay, got it. And if you saw the lf, the sympathetic nervous system either drop or go way up. Is that something that you would see? And if so, would there be kind of like a reasoning behind that?

Yeah. So if it drops, if it drops, if it was really high relative to the HF and it dropped, that means you're really coming into balance, that you're doing something in your life that's causing your stress to reduce. Okay, Right. Because the goal is to have the LF and HF approximately be the same, you know, within the ballpark, within several hundred of each other. Okay. And even having HF way out of balance could be an indication of some sort of illness, maybe a thyroid illness where you're fatigued really different in a tired way where you don't have the get up and go that the sympathetic or fight or flight plant gives you.

Right. And you just said when, let's say your thyroid is out of balance and you were trying to correlate the nervous system with that. You said if you noticed that the HF was out of balance, you might see that. Now when you say out of balance, do you mean that it just, you know, that that high frequency number drops really low or that it just starts to get like change a lot compared to the low frequency or what do you mean when you say out of balance?

Yeah, that's right. If HS is always a lot higher than lf, meaning the parasympathetic nervous system is always way higher than the sympathetic nervous system, that's not good either. And that can be an indication of really some non exercise or stress related fatigue. Okay. For folks that really just at noon just start getting tired and can't keep their eyes open and get some consistent, you know, deep fatigue.

Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. This is all super helpful because I get a lot of questions about this frequency issue and I think this is really kind of starting to clear things up. Now when someone is keeping track of all of these variables, lets say that they want to share them. Now I know that you have like the ability to whatever, go tweet or Facebook, you know, straight from the app, your numbers. But let's say somebody wants to share these with their coach or with their physician or with someone else who wants to see their heart rate variability numbers. Can you explain how kind of like the online component of this feeds in?

Right. So I'm going to do it right now so I can walk right through it. So what you do is go to our website@beathealthy.com and then in the upper right hand corner you'll see something called My Sweet Beet. Okay. That will take you to a login page that allows you to log in using the account information that you created in the app. Okay. And what we have there is really pretty useful. It's a calendar view of your HRV sessions. Okay. And especially if you're using them for stress measurement, you'll see your different stress levels color coded in a calendar. And so what it does is let you see where you're red a lot and where you're green and blue a lot in terms of what times of day and what days of the week your stress levels are higher. Okay. Also, if you're using it for exercise or heart rate variability, the same information is there as well, but it really is this great calendar view. And so what you can do is then go on to any session that shows up in your calendar view and click on it and that will open up a session summary. Okay. It just gives the date, your tag, your location, average stress average HRV and so on.

Yeah. It's interesting, by the way, because I noticed that this shows you to like, select like and only show days that you've had higher stress levels. I'm looking at mine right now and it's like consistently. It's kind of weird. Like Thursdays are a high stress level day for me. Isn't that interesting?

It is interesting and that's why we put it in that calendar form because, you know, visual graphics are easy for the eye to take in and really start being able to see what's going on.

Yeah. So how do you share this stuff? Like if you have a coach or something.

So right now you would click on the session that you want to share and then the session summary will open up and at the bottom there's something called Notify. And if you select Notify, it allows you to enter in an email address and a message.

Perfect.

Okay, so then you just click Notify and that will send an email to your coach.

Or if you wanted to, I guess you could, like, if you want to, you could just like give your coach your whatever, like your email address and your, your password and they could just sign into your account and view this stuff too if they wanted to.

Absolutely, absolutely. You could give your coach your, your, your login information.

Okay.

Because if you're sharing it, they, they usually don't mind. You can share individual sessions that way.

Gotcha. Okay. Neat. Neat. So that's power frequency. That's how to log in online and check stuff out. Is there anything else that I haven't asked or that is new to the app that we need to mention to folks?

Well, I think one, while we're on the subject of the online sessions, once that session summary is open, you can click on the link to the session chart. Okay. And that shows a running in session measure of your LF and HF power. Okay, so I want to make a distinction between what you see in the app in terms of when we go to summary and charts, that's an average per session. What we can also see is the average within a session. And so let's say you were measuring your stress while you were driving and you noticed that at some point during the session your stress went up and you realized that that was when suddenly a truck pulled in front of you. Okay. You would know that trucks pulling in front of you stress you out. And it's kind of a lame example, but it really does give you a running LF and HF numbers to see what's going on during the hour that you're wearing it while you're at your desk is probably a better way to describe it. Certain people walk in your office and so on. So that's very interesting. That's also in the app as well as online.

Right? It's. It's the mother in law spike, right?

It is, yes, definitely.

So one thing that I want to make sure. Of course, I never like to just talk about numbers and stuff because I'm an action guy and I'm a big fan of teaching people what to do. So let's say that we see spikes, we see places where we are stressed out, or we just tend to see, for example, like a consistently low, high frequency score, like a consistently low activation of the parasympathetic nervous system system, things of that nature. When it comes to biofeedback, neurofeedback, little fixes, stuff like that. You guys have obviously kind of, I would imagine, are at the point with sweet beats where you're starting to get feedback from people about what works and what doesn't and what kind of stress control methods that they've been using. Are you seeing consistency in terms of specific methods, foods, supplements, anything like that that people are doing that really helps them optimize their HRV scores.

Right. Well, as you know, I'm also a fan of HeartMap. And so we've had some customers that have gotten some real improvement through both coherence training and other deep breathing exercises because they are concerned that their HF is always low and their LF is always high, and so they're in chronic stress. And so I gotta say that for the general situation of the LFHFs that we're talking about is the deep breathing exercise, and for those who are really chronically stressed, we've been recommending coherence training.

Right. I know that that could fill an entire book and actually, I think HeartMath actually has a book on their website about how to do that stuff. I actually I have it on my bookshelf somewhere and I don't have it handy.

But one of our customers suddenly started seeing huge improvements and had read a book on deep breathing and it was an athletic book and I can send you that Ben, for your blog, but.

It is completely improved. It might be the book that I've already been recommending quite a bit on my podcast. That one's called Body, Mind and Sport.

I think that's it. That's right.

Yeah. It's by John Duyard who runs the Life Spa down in Boulder, Colorado. And yeah, like that because I tested like you did my heart rate variability analysis going into Wildflower and you noted on that report and I'll link to that in the show notes for people who are listening in about like kind of from January until recently, how my heart rate variability numbers have been consistently dropping even though I because I have a strong nervous system, I'm an athlete or whatever, my high frequency and low frequency numbers have been pretty high, but my high frequency has been dropping consistently. Well, one of the things that I did was I actually bought that book by John Douillard. I've done some cortisol, I'm doing a lot more yoga, deep breathing, stuff like that. I'm 100% in agreement with you just looking at my own HRV scores that that has made the biggest difference because I pop pills, I take supplements, I do Chinese herbs, whatever. Nothing has held a candle to the breathing exercises.

I just found it and that is the book and the author and one of our other customers saw tremendous improvement very quickly, the deep breathing. So that really is our top recommendation from Sweetwater from our experience. But I do want to comment on your mother in law spike, okay. Because a lot of chronic stress is caused by constant and non stop mother in law spikes, okay. It turns out that daily stressors like that are built up through a lifetime to create heart disease and hypertension. And so what some of our users with Sweet Beat have learned are what are the mother in law spikes? Okay. Because they happen all the time and throughout our lives you stop noticing them. What this does is bring mindfulness to what's causing you to go into fight or flight, right? And then you can actually start making changes, doing the things that cause you to be more relaxed and not doing the things that cause you to go into fight or flight. That's also we've had excellent results from folks using mindfulness of daily Activities.

And I will be sure in the show notes to link to the Heartmath Institute. They train people. There's some stuff they definitely charge for. But there's a bunch of really good free information on that site too about how to do stuff like those coherence techniques that you talk about. And again, this is stuff that we could fill a whole podcast with, so we won't really get into it too much. But go check out the link I'll put in there to the Heartmath Institute for sure and check out some of their stuff. Really, really good website for learning how to kind of fix your nervous system with self biofeedback and stuff like that. So it's cool stuff. And by the way, we did just coined a new term, mother in Law Spike. We'll have to trademark that for sure. Yeah, create the Mother in Law Spike app. Awesome. Well, I'm going to actually, at the time that we're recording this, Rhonda, I'm just going to push this out to our phone app, the Ben Greenfield fitness phone app, right away so that people can start to listen into this. If you are listening on the phone app, go to the itunes app store. Grab the Sweet Beat, Apple. I don't even remember. Does it cost anything?

Yeah, it's $4.99.

Yeah. Which is like nothing for what you get from it. So yeah, $4.99. You get the Sweet Bead app. I'll put a link to that. I don't have a financial affiliation or anything like that with Sweet Bead. I just think this is a darn cool way to track your nervous system and take care of your body. So I highly recommend you check it out. Cool, Rhonda. Well, this was really useful.

I'm glad it was. Yeah, we've had a lot of questions on the power frequency stuff, and I'm glad we have an opportunity to speak about it with your podcast.

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the call. And folks, if you have more questions, leave them in the show notes. And also of course, Sweetwater has kind of great customer support, so you can head over to their website too. By the way, you said beathealthy.com, the website I'm familiar with for you guys is sweetwaterhrv.com is beautiful beat healthy the same thing.

Both of them go to the same place.

Okay, that's what I thought. All right. Be healthy is easier to remember. Okay, cool. I'll put a link to that in there. And thanks for coming on the call today, Rhonda. I appreciate it.

Thank you Ben.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.