Eli5 What is heart rate variability and why is it important??
In: Biology
Just to make things clearer. Heart rate variability is not really a change in heart rate in longer scales. Your heart rate can be 60bpm and stay there for several hours when you are sleeping for example. but there is variability between each heart beat. 60bpm heart rate means that heart beats every 1s on avarage during the time of doing that measuremets but the actual heart beats differ from each other (differences can be like 100ms for healthy persons)
changes in this variability can explain stress/exhaustion/diseases and so on because the variability is important for heart to quickly adapt to different physiological changes. The reasons behind this complex variability are not easy but it has been shown that stress and overtraining can reduce the variability so measuring it can be used to detect stress/overtraining for example.
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