Recovery

Hrv Masters Athletes

Heart-rate variability (HRV) is the beat-to-beat variation in time between heartbeats. A healthy, well-recovered autonomic nervous system tends to produce more variation, not less — counterintuitively, a very steady, metronome-like heartbeat can be a sign of stress or fatigue rather than calm. For masters athletes — broadly, those training seriously past 40 — HRV is one of the more useful recovery signals available, but it behaves differently than it did at 25, and reading it the same way can be misleading.