Dr. Andy Galpin

And so what we're going over here is not to say that HRV or sleep are not good metrics to take.

They clearly are.

It's just that you're going to find things in the respiratory rate that you're not necessarily going to see in other places that give you great clues about overall stress.

So strongly encourage you to pay attention to respiratory rate.

And we'll talk about that plenty in the future.

So at this point, we've now got a much better understanding of why our cardiovascular system matters to both performance and health.

We know a little bit more about how it contracts and some of the unique properties that exist within it that differentiates it from some of our other tissue like skeletal muscle.

And then, of course, we've learned why we breathe and how that relegates many other functions like our sleep, recovery, and, of course, overall performance.

Using all that, we can now discuss the three I's, which are how do I investigate, how do I interpret, and then how do I intervene on improving my cardiovascular fitness?

Let's start with the first I, investigate.

Now, depending on the metric you're interested in, something like a heart rate can be done with no technology whatsoever.

You can simply put your fingers up to your neck, count your heart rate, divide that by the time domain, and get your heart rate.

Easy example there.

Most classic one we teach is start a stopwatch,

Count how many times your heart beats in 15 seconds, multiply that by four, and then you'll understand how many beats you're taking per minute.

You could also simply just measure it for one minute, count those numbers, and that's fine.

But in reality, most of you probably have some sort of fitness technology app or watch or something of that sort that's going to tell you that number already.

As far as things like HRV and respiratory rate, we're going to have to cover those in their own individual episodes as you've got a lot of options and there's some context there.

I will tell you again, most fitness technologies will give you some insight of that, whether directly on the app or something you can get if you dive in to the data a little bit further.

HRV is really challenging though because there's a lot of ways to measure.