Training isn’t about beating you down. It’s not a punishment. “It’s a way to achieve adaptations little by little. And you are overtraining.” The phrase was repeated to me like a mantra by my coach when I was preparing for marathons and decided on my own and at my risk to run at a pace faster than planned. I would exhaust myself on the asphalt and at night I struggled to sleep because my pulse was racing. Especially when that grind coincided with peaks of stress at work. A few weeks later, the immune system collapsed and I caught a case of laryngitis. Because that stress affects training, sabotages recovery and puts your entire health at risk.
I could have saved myself many disappointments if my watch back then had measured the Heart Rate Variability (HRV). “It’s data that tells us how our autonomic nervous system is doing, especially the balance between the sympathetic system (stress, activation) and the parasympathetic (relaxation, recovery). The more variability, i.e., the bigger the gap between heartbeats, the better your body is recovered and adapted to training,” explains Juan María Jiménez Llorens, a degree holder in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences and a trail and running coach.
Nor would it have hurt if I had also measured stress levels, with cortisol becoming that great energy thief that leaves you drained even without stepping foot in the gym. Fortunately, that is now possible.
What Your Heart Is Telling You
Cardiologist Aurelio Rojas, one of the leading longevity experts who will accompany us at the next edition of WeLife Festival, on October 24 and 25 in Madrid, insists on the usefulness of monitoring this parameter. “A healthy and strong heart has a great capacity to vary the way it contracts, that is, the time between each beat. When this variability is very high it means that our heart has a very good capacity to respond to stimuli because it is very healthy. When the heart ages, variability decreases. The heart becomes stiffer, less flexible. That is why it is another parameter to measure the aging of the heart.”
Having low heart rate variability in a young heart should put us on notice that something isn’t right. “It warns us that the body is under a lot of stress, that there is fatigue accumulated or even possible symptoms of overtraining or illness,” warns Jiménez Llorens.
In identical terms, Xevi Verdaguer, psychoneuroimmunologist, at WeLife Longevity, acknowledged that he intuited he had an infection “because his heart rate at night was too high. And that, when you sleep, which is when your pulse drops the most, isn’t normal.”
The Day’s Stress Trains With You
Elite athletes and their coaches know how important it is to limit stress when preparing for a competition. Before a great event, they go into a quiet retreat, with controlled nutrition and many hours of restorative sleep guaranteed. It’s their way of reducing stress almost to zero. Those of us who juggle the gym with daily life assume elevated stress levels that can condition our training, recovery and even health.
There are no conferences here that count. Amateur athletes juggle between the workday, the kids’ after-school activities, grocery shopping, laundry, and carving out quality time with our partner, friends, and children. If just reading that gives you stress, imagine living it.
To avoid collapsing, Hyrox experts—one of the most demanding disciplines at the moment—recommend ‘training with structure’ which is nothing more than checking how you are at every moment and adjusting the training load to the other day’s loads. “You have to balance training with your daily stress. That’s why it’s so important to know how to dose the effort to achieve adaptations and not burnout,” says Brian Buck, a high-performance coach.
24/7 Devices
Until now smartwatches measured athletic performance: the pace you run at, calories burned, time spent, heart rate… But they overlooked the weight of daily stress, neither during training nor in the subsequent recovery. “When we reached an agreement with Hyrox, we were clear that we had to develop devices that help train with more structure. That means providing more specific data about the athlete’s physical state throughout the day,” explains Jesús Carrero, CEO for EMEA at Zepp Health, the company behind Amazfit.
“People today no longer focus on a single sport. You can run a marathon, do yoga or Pilates, train strength… And then they have their lives,” adds Jimmy Kennedy, product director for hybrid training at Amazfit. “They need structure and to see the evolution of their fitness over the week. The long-term goal is to achieve a balance between training gains, optimized recovery, longevity in sport, and everything that happens in their day-to-day life,” Kennedy notes. “They are 24/7 devices, because everything that happens to you throughout the day counts.”
Your Boss and Family Come Along in the Pack
Talking about longevity in the practice of a sport is naming something we all have in mind: staying in physical shape good enough to keep running, doing spinning or squats for many years without our heart or joints complaining. Or, simply, without reaching burnout, that point of no return where you think “the gym isn’t for me.” “For those of us who aren’t athletes, training with structure means balancing work, family and, above all, a lot of stress that has a dramatic effect on training,” warns Kennedy.
To measure that stress, Amazfit has pioneeringly developed a new parameter: Hybrid Load (Hybrid Charge). This innovative metric, included in its app and easy to consult from Amazfit’s Balance 3 and Balance Ultra watches. “These new devices help athletes better understand how strength, endurance, recovery and daily life influence their performance,” says Wayne Huang, Chief Executive Officer of Zepp Health.
Hybrid load takes into account resting heart rate (if high, you may be overtraining, have an infection, or a lot of pressure at home or at work); heart rate variability; hours of sleep (very vulnerable to stress due to rumination, room temperature or menopause), and all the fatigue and accumulated stress of the day.
“To customize it, we have developed the LifeLoad Register. In other words, the ‘life load’ log where the user manually notes if there are changes in routines, more stress or an illness that could affect physical performance and recovery.”
What Does Life Load Measure?
We train for one hour and live the remaining 23 hours. What happens during that time impacts our body and our mind. That is what the life-load metric voluntarily records and thus the device ‘understands’ exactly how the user is and whether a poor result is due to a possible cold or because there is a lot going on at the office. Through a tabbed menu, the user fills in different fields that reflect their self-perceived physical state in relation to mood or energy. Some of these parameters are ‘difficulty falling asleep’, ‘hard to wake up’, ‘I feel sick’, ‘muscle pain’, ‘fatigue’, ‘I feel stressed’, ‘low mood’ or ‘tension in my relationship’.
Work and the demands of personal life also play an important role. Having ‘many errands’, ‘long hours at work’ or having to devote time to dependent people also add to the overall assessment.
In line with the latest longevity studies, in addition to filling in some values about nutrition and hydration, positive aspects include exposure to sunlight, sauna, or cold treatments (cryotherapy). “If you have jet lag, skipped a meal or argued with the kids before leaving the house… all of that influences your physical form. It makes no sense to train as if it weren’t you. It’s time to modulate the training load,” Kennedy explains.
