I have a Fitbit--have had it for over 2 years and I'm addicted to it. The first thing I do when I wake up is look at my sleep score. I also track my resting heart rate.
In this self-mastery program I'm in, they talked about heart rate variability (HRV), which I had never really heard of before, especially not in the context of something that should be tracked. I looked into it with my Fitbit and turns out my Charge 2 didn't carry that metric.
Well, now it does. So I was very interested in finding out what my HRV was. I consider myself to be quite healthy for my age, although my RHR tends slightly high, especially if I have a couple of glasses of wine 3 days in a row.
I was shocked to see it's 11ms. Apparently at my age it should be close to 50. Younger people and athletes have HRV upwards of 80. I did some research and I find that a low HRV is correlated with poor cardiac health.
So, my plan of action is to see if I can get to see a doctor for a very belated check-up. Not sure how that will go, given how bad COVID is these days, but hopefully I can get in some time before the end of the year.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to follow some of the suggestions I've read on the internet to raise HRV scores--notably, I'm cutting out alcohol and increasing my exercise--I'll try to get my 10,000 steps in every day at least.
My question is--does anyone have any advice on the types of consumer health trackers that focus on cardiac metrics? I'm thinking specifically of WHOOP or EliteHRV, and a couple of others I've seen. Or do you think my Fitbit should be enough. The difference is the more cardiac-oriented devices track recovery rates after stress, and you can also check HRV throughout the day, as opposed to getting only one daily reading following sleep.
Any experience here?
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Originally Posted by JaneV2.0
