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What can your heart rate tell you about your readiness to perform?

Heart rate is a performance indicator which many coaches ask athletes to record every morning. A high resting heart rate is linked with lower physical fitness and higher blood pressure, body weight, and levels of circulating blood fats¹; therefore, a lower resting heart rate is associated with positive physiological benefits. Factors other than training can affect your resting heart rate too. These include your age, past experience of training, temperature, dehydration, stress, genetics, and your mental health – and all these factors don’t just affect heart rate directly, they also interact with each other to affect it indirectly.

It is a helpful measure of performance readiness as a sudden increase in resting heart rate can tip us off that we are overreaching. Athletes who are “overreaching” by running too many miles experience poor race performance, irritableness and fatigue and this principal doesn’t just apply to athletes with increased training loads. Stress works on the body in the same way no matter what inflicted it (For a really good explanation of how training and daily stress cohabitate read this). An increase in your resting heart rate of 2-3 beats per minute can be a sign of overreaching – but it is not definitive. You should use other markers such as mood, food cravings, and fatigue levels to gauge whether the change in heart rate is something to be concerned about.

One more factor to consider is the fact that your heart is not actually a metronome. The heart, in fact, speeds up when you inhale, and slows down when you exhale. The difference is known as heart-rate variability (HRV) and is a great indication of your overall health, stress levels and readiness to train.

 

By knowing your HRV, you can objectively measure your body’s response to stressors. Often this coincides with your feelings or subjective measures, but there will be times when your HRV indicates that you really need to take it easy, or take a rest day. Once you respond to this signal you will find you can train harder or just do more the next day.

Heart rate variability was previously a diagnostic measure used mainly in hospitals, but with the increasing availability of wearable sensors, it is no longer out of our reach.

heart-rate-monitoring-device-1903997_1280

 

A decrease in heart rate variability is associated with physiological changes which are linked to ill health². Simply re-prioritizing rest and recovery may provide a quick solution, but sometimes longer term lifestyle changes are also required.

So rather than just use your wearable device to demonstrate to colleagues that you got NO SLEEP last night, or how many steps you complete after midnight on a Friday – try recording the different heart rate measures alongside your mood and feelings of well or ill-being. You can then use this data to predict when you are likely to experience injury or illness and take a step back before it happens.

If you are repeatedly experiencing a decreased ability to perform – analyse your stressors and make a change!

References

  1. Jensen MT, Suadicani P, Hein HO, et al. Elevated resting heart rate, physical fitness and all-cause mortality: a 16-year follow-up in the Copenhagen Male Study
    Heart 2013;99:882-887.

    http://heart.bmj.com/content/99/12/882.full?sid=90e3623c-1250-4b94-928c-0a8f95c5b36b

  2. THAYER, J. F. and STERNBERG, E. (2006), Beyond Heart Rate Variability. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1088: 361–372. doi:10.1196/annals.1366.014 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1196/annals.1366.014/abstract

Other Reading

 

 

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Research Highlight: Are Pilots Flying Into Depression?

Many of us will have personal experience of making more mistakes when we are tired than when we are well rested – but do you ever question how much sleep your airline pilot is getting? A research team in Dublin City University  (DCU) is doing just that.

Working long duty hours has often been associated with increased risk of incidents and accidents in transport industries. According to Folkard et al.1 the risk of an accident exponentially increases with time on shift. It was found that relative to 8-h shifts, there is a 13% increased risk of an accident on 10-h shifts while 12-h shifts are associated with a 27% increased risk of an accident. This increased risk is now being examined in airline pilots across Europe by a Dublin City University based research team.

In a self-report survey of over 900 airline pilots,  (94.9% of which were male – which is not surprising given the gender balance across the profession) a strong and scientifically significant relationship between duty hours and sleep disturbance, sleep disturbance and fatigue in the cockpit, and fatigue in the cockpit and microsleeps (an involuntary sleep episode lasting 5-10 seconds) in the cockpit were found 2.

Unsurprisingly, these stats have raised concerns about the safety and wellbeing of both pilots and passengers. While the results of the team’s research may be concerning to you if you are heading abroad on your summer holidays soon– fear not. In the aviation industry an incident is not an accident – it is “‘an occurrence, other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft which affects or could affect the safety of operation’ 3

The aim of the research project is to investigate the effects and impact of sleep deprivation and fatigue on commercial airline pilots’ psychological functioning, pilot-specific skills and flying performance. The research team is led by PhD candidate Anna Donnla O’Hagan of the Multisensory Motor Learning Lab. Ms. O’Hagan brings to this project a vast amount of experience in human performance research with a BSc. in Sports Science and Health from DCU and an MSc in Applied Sport & Exercise Psychology from Bangor University, Wales. Following her MSc. she began working as a postgraduate research assistant in the Applied Sports Performance Research Group based in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University investigating chronobiology, fatigue determinants and measures applicable within an aviation environment. Simultaneously, she worked with a variety of individual and team-based athletes across a range of sporting disciplines from Club to International level as a trainee sport psychologist.  The current project is funded by the Irish Research Council through the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme

Though the risk of incidents is of great concern for both those flying and the employers of the pilots – of equal concern may well be the associated risk of depression for those who work extended duty hours4. Results of this research group’s study found pilots who reported typically spending longer hours on duty per week were twice as likely to report feeling depressed or anxious. Pilots’ experiences of job-related sleep disturbance and fatigue may explain why pilots who typically spend long hours on duty each week are more likely to report feeling depressed or anxious. Whilst cross-sectional research such as surveys cannot definitively offer a causal affect, the results suggested further investigation was needed.

The most recent of the DCU team’s work aims to recreate a fatigued working environment for airline pilots and expose them to tasks they would complete in a regular work day. Based on the DCU campus, pilots attend the virtual reality clinic for a period of 24 hours where they complete a range of cognitive, physical and physiological tests. The work of this research team, under the guidance of Ms. O’ Hagan will hopefully contribute to our understanding of human performance under fatigued conditions and allow numerous industries to make informed decisions about duty hours and safe working conditions.

The DCU team are currently recruiting commercial airline pilots to participate in this aspect of the research with full confidentiality guaranteed. If you are interested in participation or finding out more please contact

anna.ohagan3@mail.dcu.ie

  1. Folkard S, Lombardi DA, Tucker PT. Shiftwork: safety, sleepiness and sleep. Ind Health. 2005;43:20–23
  2. O’Hagan, A. D., Issartel, J., Fletcher, R., & Warrington, G. (2016). Duty hours and incidents in flight among commercial airline pilots. International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 22(2), 165–172. http://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2016.1146441
  3. International Civil Aviation Organisation. Aircraft accident and incident investigation – annex 13 9th ed. Montreal: Report of Accident Investigation and Prevention (AIG) Divisional Meeting; 2009; 10.
  4. O’Hagan, A. D., Issartel, J., Nevill, A., & Warrington, G. (2017). Flying Into Depression – Pilot’s Sleep and Fatigue Experiences Can Explain Differences in Perceived Depression and Anxiety. Workplace Health & Safety, 65(3), 109–117. http://doi.org/10.1177/2165079916659506
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What personal goal setting can do for a team: A Performance Panelist Reflection

I’ve been a fan of a competitive sports team that plays in the highest league in Ireland for the last 4 years. Their performance last season was sub-optimal. They were really struggling to find their groove. I quietly waited in the background, ready to pounce at the first sign that there might be a vacancy in the coaching staff. After four years in college studying sport science and two years in to my PhD in sport psychology I was sure I could make a difference.

A few weeks after the final whistle a new Head Coach was appointed and he approached me about working with the team (this wasn’t as serendipitous as it sounds- I was evidently interested in the team). I had worked with this particular Head Coach briefly when he was just a ‘Coach’ and knew he had a fantastic attitude towards ‘help’ – show him how you can make a difference and then go right ahead and do it, and continue to do it for as long as possible.

I was ecstatic. I KNEW I could help. I made a pitch to him about the three changes I would help them implement for the next year. Number one was accountability. I heard the players blaming their coaches after their final game for their performance -“we don’t practice enough” and “the wrong man was on the field” – not one of their comments started with “I”.  I was sure if we could educate them that they had a role in their own athletic performance, the performance would improve.

I aimed to implement this change by scheduling goal setting sessions with the players. I arranged to meet them on a one to one basis for a preliminary 20 minute chat in a coffee shop. I didn’t set my expectations too high. These guys had been playing the way they played for years, goal setting was a new idea to them, and I was the only female coach in a sport that had 5 females involved out of 4000 members. It was a lot of change all at once.

I intentionally set my first meeting with a player I would consider an opinion leader within the team. I knew everyone was curious about me and my involvement following the announcement that I had come on board and that the guys would talk after the meeting.

The scheduled 20 minute meeting lasted two hours.

We talked about everything, the player got a chance to vent his frustration, and I was able to steer the conversation towards possible solutions to the problems he outlined. By the end of the meeting the player had outlined all the same problems that I saw within the team, and had offered up nearly the exact same solutions that I had proposed to the Head Coach (sigh -what a waste of a 4 year degree!). He left the meeting with a set of long, medium and short term goals for his own progression through the pre-season and offered me an assurance that he really believed in the changes we were trying to make within the culture of the team. He understood where his own progression fit in to the global scheme and went back to his teammates and advocated that they make an appointment with the new coach ASAP.

What I learned:

  1. Individual goal setting is about more than the individual
  2. One to one time with players is invaluable
  3. Every conversation is an opportunity for growth
  4. Players can identify and find solutions to their own problems if given the chance
  5. Get opinion leaders within an organisation “onside” (geddit?) at the start of a culture change
  6. The Head Coach is the ultimate opinion leader
  7. Let people help you

p.s. The team are now in their new competitive season and performance has improved across the board – we’ve even won a couple games – but the outcome isn’t the focus anymore – we look at the process.

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