I’ve found the summary disposition results (or rather suggestions) from the ithlete unit exceedingly broad at best with my athletes. However at the same time, I’ve been relatively satisfied with what it gives me during their competition phases.
I’m much more satisfied with using the Polar devices with PC Coach. Though these are older models I can get more realtime results with this software during active training sessions. However this becomes more of a manual comparative assessment activity.
In my experience recording supine and then stadning makes a huge difference in the readings. Even if you wait 5mins + to take the readings. Below info is from the ithlete founder:
“Experienced athletes tend to have low resting heart rates (anything below 60bpm lying down is known as bradycardia, and many athletes are even lower than that).
The heart rate variability test used by ithlete measures the changes in your heart rate when you breathe in (speeds up ) and out (slows down).
Researchers have found that if your resting HR is very low lying down (45 bpm or less) then the gap between heart beats reaches a maximum value when you breathe out, and saturates or hits the end stops as it were! No problem medically, but it limits the range of measurement and you might miss some changes & further improvements in your daily value.
When you stand up, your nervous system adjusts your heart rate upwards about 10 bpm or so (depends on your height, build etc), and you see the full range of HRV when you breathe.
Researchers also found a slightly better ability to detect overtraining from HRV in the standing position.
So we recommend doing the measurement standing up, but if your resting HR when you are well recovered is in the mid 50s or higher and you are more comfortable doing the test lying down, then I don’t see why that should not be OK. Some recent research studies have done morning HRV tests lying down on moderately fit recreational athletes and had good results.”
In my experience consistency of use of a method makes up for any lack of accuracy in data collection by different devices,as while data from a single evaluation (or by a certain device) may be more or less reliable,analysis of dynamic trends of data consistently collected are always more meaningful to a purpose.
Consistency almost always trumps accuracy. YOu can only compare like to like and since the goal is to look at trends, that’s what matters.
This assumes that accuracy is not too far off. If a given device varies by a greater amount than what you’er trying to track, it’s useless across the board.
Lyle - are you still using your HRM for analyzing your HRV? I would have been curious to see how it corresponded to your own personal training program and some overtraining scenarios.
I’ve been monitoring myself daily for the past few months. I’ve dropped my use of caffeine and have noticed significant differences in my HRV readings, as I found my coffee consumption correlated with mood swings, anxiety and other issues.
However, I am not in any organized training program training for an event.
I’m usually in the low 50s (HR) and I take readings pretty soon as much as I wake up, I’m talking about the ithlete.
The only problem (apart from sometimes the frustration of getting it to work) is sometimes a ±5 difference in subsequent readings.
My algorithm is: I take two and if they are pretty much the same (± 2) I keep that. If they are far off from each other, I keep taking readings and notice tendencies. For example:
80-72-78-78, that’s it, I keep 78.
HRV seems decently (inversely) correlated with HR.
I wonder how many of the people gathering HRV dataare doing real statistical analyses to look for relationships among variables. I think not many.
Agreed
And the Polar approach has been validated in one paper I recall.
The concept is sound. The application is not
In the real world I cannot agree more
We do this daily with upwards on 20 team sport players every day of competition training and consistency is the most important factor.
FAR too many people worry about precision in a sport where precision goes out the window in the warm up - let alone the game.
The key word here, might I suggest is, “reliability”
Once the method is reliable and repeatable - in the real world - accuracy is largely irrelevant.
Yes, I mistyped. Reliability in terms of the measurement being reliably the same. It doesn’t matter if a scale if 5 lbs off so long as it is always teh same 5 lbs off.
The reservations NumberTwo mentioned are pretty compelling.
If the test is only six minutes long first thing in the morning…hell, I hit my snooze button three to five times before I get up!
Also, it seems like six minutes of data would necessarily cut back on potential for variation compared to the ithlete by well…about six times, though as svincenz stated, you could always repeat the test a number of times on the ithlete.
Can the reading be used straight off the Suunto / Polar, or does it have to be manipulated?
The data can be collected by the Polar or Suunto and imported directly into Kubios HRV which allows you to display multiple statistical analyses. The most important one is the plot that shows you the influence of the sympathetic vs parasympathetic nervous systems (Frequency Domain Analysis). Send me a PM with your email address and I’ll send you a summary output sheet produced by Kubios HRV.
This is the data output the program was giving me
Hi Lyle, there are errors in the analysis, you have much parameters out of scale.
You have to use the filter option.
Then, there is an error in the choice of the time analysis, this give you incorrect data and FFT spectrum!
HRV has specific rules, if you don’t respect their, you’ll have only “numbers”.
You can send me your file: armandovinci@gmail.com and I’ll do an analysis for you.
I am getting goosebumps from all those graphs… more, more! 
I agree with Armando’s assessment. Do you have other examples Lyle that we can examine?
I am a novice in this area. Would someone with experience be willing to do a short tutorial on what this all means?
I two sentences …
The variation in timed interval between heart beats suggests reflections of aspects of the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
Conclusions are drawn as to functioning of organism, and neurocardiac regulation, through influence of the ANS - (sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system).
(There’s quite a bit out there and under HRV and Omegawave in the search function on CF.com too)
I’ll put something together for you. Maybe a quick video. Once you get the basic elements under your belt, this can be most useful for analysis.
I don’t give a shit so no, this file is from 2 years ago and I don’t bother with HRV anymore. I don’t have the raw data anyhow.
After my watch crapped out, I couldn’t give the first damn. This was just Kubios set with it’s standard setting and saying ‘ur settings are wrong’ requires more than a blank assertion from you to me. Again, I don’t give a damn.