How to Improve Your HRV | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I'm curious as to what happens or what one should do if their HRV is reduced for maybe
00:00:08.120 | three or four or more days in a row.
00:00:10.720 | Absolutely.
00:00:11.720 | The next question that I'm going to ask is, "Ian, am I in that adaptation phase?"
00:00:16.320 | If so, I'm going to still ignore it just like I did if it was a single bad day, but I'm
00:00:21.640 | going to start watching it very carefully.
00:00:23.760 | I may actually now introduce some other tests, so I may use a performance test, we may look
00:00:31.140 | at something else, maybe ask questions, maybe have some communication either with myself
00:00:34.960 | or somebody else.
00:00:35.960 | I'm going to start paying more attention, but I'm still really not going to take much
00:00:39.160 | action until that crosses more than seven days of consistent problems.
00:00:45.240 | If it does do that or we're in a peaking phase, then I'm going to go to another set of solutions
00:00:51.000 | that are truly going to pull me out of the hole rather than just be those acute stage
00:00:56.320 | shifters.
00:00:57.320 | These are more what I call chronic stage shifters.
00:00:59.200 | Now some of these are actually very similar to the ones we've used before.
00:01:03.240 | For example, thermal stress.
00:01:06.960 | So I can promise you if your recovery score is in the tanks and you walk outside and you
00:01:14.200 | jump in your 35-degree water and you get back out, what's going to happen is your HRV score
00:01:19.040 | immediately afterwards, I'm talking within seconds, is going to be significantly compromised.
00:01:24.040 | In other words, think about that, remember a low HRV means a high sympathetic.
00:01:28.280 | I promise you cold water will put you in a high sympathetic drive.
00:01:32.440 | However, and we've tested this pretty extensively, looking at HRV zero, 15, 30, 60, 90, all the
00:01:42.000 | way up to 180 minutes post.
00:01:44.160 | And on average, you will see your HRV score continue to rise after that.
00:01:49.900 | And so while you have this immediate sympathetic response, you will immediately then respond
00:01:55.400 | at about 30 minutes on most people, depends on the person though, and that score will
00:02:00.680 | be improved for several hours afterwards.
00:02:03.640 | So heat can kind of have a similar effect.
00:02:07.720 | That actually, again, is sort of an acute fix, but over time, as we've described earlier,
00:02:14.000 | that can also have a little bit of a chronic effect.
00:02:17.360 | We can also then get into areas like sleep.
00:02:19.860 | And so now we're going to start playing and exploring why are you sleeping poor as well,
00:02:25.040 | or was your sleep score fine but your HRV was low.
00:02:28.840 | That's a little bit of a different answer.
00:02:30.160 | If your sleep is getting compromised, then we're going to start going into and making
00:02:32.920 | sure we're improving our sleep.
00:02:36.260 | In terms of like brain stuff, instead of maybe playing a game or having music or some of
00:02:42.440 | those other tricks, those aren't going to really have a chronic effect.
00:02:45.200 | But you can do things like work on social connection.
00:02:48.880 | That's actually been shown to improve recovery over time.
00:02:52.560 | You can do things like journaling or meditation, and those have an acute effect as well as
00:02:57.660 | a chronic effect.
00:02:59.360 | So again, if you go journal right now, you'll probably feel better, but also we know that
00:03:03.480 | over time that will gradually improve things.
00:03:06.240 | So adaptogens and things like that also can have a chronic effect.
00:03:11.580 | So can things like electrolytes or food or hydration, if those things were off.
00:03:15.960 | So we're going to go to a whole number of areas, but those are the primary ones.
00:03:21.440 | Outstanding of all that, of course, it may be simply a time to go back and reassess our
00:03:25.920 | training program.
00:03:27.640 | That's truly the case.
00:03:28.640 | So that's where we're at.
00:03:30.140 | If so, we're probably going to either completely remove training or drop it to like 50 percent
00:03:37.360 | or so until we start rebounding back to baseline.
00:03:41.680 | And that's generally the numbers we use.
00:03:45.360 | For many people who are not training for a competitive sport and maybe aren't pushing
00:03:50.840 | themselves really hard, you know, maybe they consider themselves somebody who exercises
00:03:58.040 | in order to maintain health and aesthetics and longevity, et cetera.
00:04:04.320 | And they never really finish any workout completely exhausted.
00:04:10.100 | They're sleeping okay.
00:04:11.520 | Their appetite's okay.
00:04:13.480 | Can we assume that they are recovering well or maybe they're not creating enough of a
00:04:21.600 | adaptation response?
00:04:22.600 | Like there's no progressive overreaching.
00:04:24.920 | And so there's really no stimulus for recovery.
00:04:27.960 | What I'm saying here is on the face of it, I think is obvious, right?
00:04:32.320 | If you don't train hard, there's nothing to recover from.
00:04:35.200 | What I'm really saying is, is the ability to recover itself something that we need to
00:04:40.520 | train?
00:04:41.520 | In other words, can we get better at recovering?
00:04:44.160 | And the analogy here would be something like focus.
00:04:48.140 | In order to perform work of any kind, but certainly mental work and physical work, we
00:04:54.720 | need to be able to focus.
00:04:56.800 | The ability to focus is the reflection of a bunch of neural circuits and chemicals and
00:05:01.080 | hormones, et cetera.
00:05:02.160 | But we know roughly what those are.
00:05:05.040 | And we know that if you are poor at focusing, for every small bit of time that you can focus
00:05:10.500 | a little bit longer, even if it's a matter of seconds, those circuits themselves get
00:05:14.340 | better at focusing and so on and so forth.
00:05:17.760 | So in other words, is the recovery system, however broad, neurotransmitters, hormones,
00:05:22.160 | neural, muscular, immune based, et cetera, can that system or set of systems become better?
00:05:28.860 | Can we get better at recovering?
00:05:31.080 | Meaning can it become faster and more effective?
00:05:35.420 | Can we think of the recovery system as kind of a blade that gets sharper by engaging recovery?
00:05:40.380 | Because if so, then there's strong reason for people who are not pushing really hard
00:05:46.480 | to push at least a little bit harder than is comfortable for them every once in a while
00:05:50.200 | to make sure that that system doesn't start to slide back.
00:05:53.320 | Remember, physiology is listening to everything you do and it is always responding.
00:05:59.240 | So the analogy that I will meet your analogy with that I use here is the bowling alley.
00:06:04.920 | So you've probably been bowling before and you've used the bumper lanes, right?
00:06:09.560 | Bumper lanes.
00:06:10.560 | I've gone bowling before and I've spent time in the gutter and I've spent time on the pins.
00:06:14.680 | Okay.
00:06:15.680 | So it's been a while.
00:06:16.680 | We used to have a bowling alley in the town where I went to and it was fun.
00:06:19.600 | We used to slide around on our shoes and all the kids would hang out there.
00:06:23.240 | I feel like, do they still have bowling alleys?
00:06:25.000 | I don't even know.
00:06:26.160 | It feels like something that may have gone the way of the mid-2000s.
00:06:30.320 | I don't care if no one bowls anymore, you're not going to ruin my good analogy.
00:06:33.760 | Okay.
00:06:34.760 | My intent wasn't to ruin your analogy.
00:06:36.320 | Okay, tell us about bowling.
00:06:38.320 | All the bowlers are going to come after me with bowling balls or something.
00:06:41.560 | Right, you're going to get blasted with all the stats on elevations.
00:06:44.920 | Don't hurt me.
00:06:45.920 | Sorry.
00:06:46.920 | Cool.
00:06:47.920 | So if someone were to go bowling and they didn't want to put their ball in the gutter,
00:06:51.200 | you could put these little bumpers in those lanes and these little foam pads that go in
00:06:55.120 | the gutter that if your ball is going towards the gutter, it hits those and bounces off
00:06:58.060 | and goes back in the lane.
00:06:59.560 | Right?
00:07:00.560 | Okay.
00:07:01.560 | So in this entire conversation, and this is actually true of a lot of the way people approach
00:07:05.440 | their fitness and health, people are very concerned oftentimes with optimizing, meaning
00:07:12.800 | I want to make sure I don't go in the gutter.
00:07:15.080 | I don't want to hit the walls.
00:07:16.480 | So therefore, I'm going to try to improve the accuracy in which I throw the ball.
00:07:21.800 | So I want to make sure that I'm throwing it down the center of the lane more often and
00:07:25.240 | I want to get my standard deviation tighter and tighter so that I don't get anywhere close
00:07:31.600 | to hitting the wall.
00:07:33.040 | However, what they're not realizing is if you do that, the body will start shrinking
00:07:39.120 | the size of the lane because what it basically says is, huh, we haven't had a ball touch
00:07:43.720 | us in years.
00:07:45.040 | We don't need to be this wide.
00:07:46.880 | Let's get smaller and smaller and smaller.
00:07:49.620 | So it's not that you actually are having a reduced ability to recover, but you start
00:07:56.480 | becoming incredibly sensitive to that.
00:08:00.760 | So your two strategies for enhancing recovery are to practice getting closer, throwing that
00:08:05.960 | ball down the middle lane, or to widen, to widen the alley.
00:08:11.120 | And that's exactly what you're referring to and you absolutely should do that.
00:08:15.240 | And so what happens is you don't have to be so precise with what you're doing because
00:08:19.000 | your ability to handle so many things is widened.
00:08:21.520 | So if you're off now by four or five inches to the right, no problem because you've just
00:08:26.040 | tripled the size of your alley.
00:08:28.320 | That's exactly what you want to do.
00:08:30.040 | So paying attention to two things, number one is getting better at accuracy, maybe staying
00:08:35.800 | really tight with your progressions, using nutrition and sleep to optimize your recovery
00:08:41.600 | and push your resilience is what we call this.
00:08:45.200 | In fact, there's actually a biological way to measure resilience.
00:08:47.600 | We do that in all of our folks.
00:08:49.680 | This is scientifically validated stuff.
00:08:51.440 | I didn't just make it up.
00:08:52.800 | You can actually measure resilience.
00:08:53.800 | And there's more and more coming out on this, but that's exactly what that term means.
00:08:57.120 | So how well can you handle and bang things off the threshold?
00:08:59.720 | So when you see a reduction in say 10% of your HRV today, for you that might make you
00:09:07.720 | feel terrible.
00:09:09.000 | For me, I might not feel anything because I'm well adapted to large fluctuations and
00:09:14.840 | therefore I'm okay.
00:09:15.840 | The less and less you do that, the more and more responsive you will be to those slight
00:09:21.160 | deviations.
00:09:22.160 | So that is exactly the target and that's kind of what I allude to when I say you've got
00:09:25.280 | to understand what are we optimizing for.
00:09:27.880 | Are we optimizing for making sure I don't feel any different today or are we optimizing
00:09:31.960 | to make sure when I do feel different, I still am able to perform.
00:09:35.920 | So this is why you want to do things like maybe use some caffeine today and feel great.
00:09:42.040 | But if I have to use it every day, all I'm doing is shrinking my sensitivity there.
00:09:45.520 | So now if I have to go a day without it, I can't train at all.
00:09:50.960 | Caffeine is the easy example because people understand how that whole system works.
00:09:54.160 | But this is really true of everything else.
00:09:55.880 | So yeah, you need to practice this and the way to do that is to give yourself more stress,
00:10:02.360 | to continue to bring in the stress from nutrition, from training, from breath work.
00:10:07.920 | You mentioned earlier about focus.
00:10:10.640 | The exact same thing, right?
00:10:11.640 | It's not just about getting better right now, it's about training a system and you can clearly
00:10:16.000 | train that, right?
00:10:17.560 | We will often say breath work is a practice.
00:10:21.600 | That's exactly what we're talking about, right?
00:10:23.160 | So you're practicing getting better at these things.
00:10:25.520 | You're practicing returning your focus.
00:10:28.120 | You're practicing recovering and quite literally physiologically you can up-regulate whether
00:10:34.040 | we're talking enzymes, whether we're talking about regulators.
00:10:36.720 | These will be up-regulated so then the next time that insult comes in, it's not as damaging.
00:10:42.440 | So yeah, absolutely you can and you should strive for that.
00:10:45.440 | [Music]