Powermeters are quickly becoming the must have training tool for competitive cyclists. Their high cost however means that the average enthusiast will be sticking with our old friend the heart-rate monitor for at least the immediate future. But even if you need to spend a thousand dollars on a new toy it may be a bit premature to ditch the heart-rate monitor altogether. A review article published in the latest issue of Sports Medicine (Volume 38(8), 2008, pp 633-646) takes a look at the correlation between heart rate and training status. In the article the authors make the case for using heart-rate recovery velocity (Vrecovery or Vr) as a measure of training status. They also describe a novel protocol to measure Vr in a convenient and reliable manner which is adapted here for on the bike use.

On the surface training for endurance sports is incredibly simple. You expose your body to cycles of stress (workouts) followed by periods of recovery (not working out). During the stress phase you push your body to do work that it is not used to. Then during recovery your body pushes back by adapting and growing stronger. Simple, right.

What isn’t simple is figuring out the ideal balance of stress and recovery. Too little stress and you won’t tap into your full potential. Too much and you overwhelm your ability to recover creating a state of overtraining.

To train efficiently, you must be able to gauge your training status, i.e. knowing whether you body is undertrained, adapting at its maximum, or falling behind.

The typical strategy to monitor training status is to observe everything, mood, sleep, appetite, resting heart rate etc. Then you compare your observations to weekly or monthly performance tests. Keeping track of all of these factors however requires a large commitment and rarely provides a clear picture. An ideal strategy on the other hand would use a non-subjective marker of an internal process that was reproducible, easy to evaluate, minimally susceptible to outside influence and that could be used before key workouts without interfering with the workout.

Enter heart-rate recovery velocity (Vr).

So what is Vr?

When you exercise your heart rate increases. When you stop exercising your heart rate slows. Vr is simply how fast hear-rate drops when you stop exercising. For this article it can be defined as the change in heart-rate in beats per minute over one minute following a bout of exercise (HR at the end of bout – HR one minute later = Vr).

How does Vr relate to training status?

As it turns out Vr is faster in trained versus untrained people, becomes faster as untrained people go through a training program, and returns to baseline as people become deconditioned. Also, in trained individuals Vr decreases following intense exercise, presumably decreasing even more with overtraining.

How do you measure Vr?

The authors described a shuttle run protocol that I’ll adapt here as a bike based version.
1. Hop on your bike.
2. Spin for 5 minutes.
3. Check heart-rate (HR) (if your HR monitor has a lap function hit the lap button to capture your end HR).
4. Ride at an endurance pace for two minutes and check HR.
5. Spin for 1 min and check HR.
6. The difference between HR in 4 and 5 is your Vr.
7. Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6 three additional times increasing the pace to a Tempo, then TT, and finaly, Maximun pace with each rep.

How do you use Vr?

The authors don’t give a clear answer. My take is that first you need to just observe Vr through a couple of training cycles. You should perform the Vr test as a warm up before any non-recovery ride. What you should expect to see in a training block is that the Vr increases in weeks 1, 2, and maybe 3 and then comes down back down during the recovery week though not all the way to baseline so that overall it increases over the course of several blocks. An unexpected drop in Vr should indicate that you are at risk for overtraining. Again observing your personal trends is the key to determine if Vr is a useful guide in your own training.

Aside from being unproven, Vr is a good candidate for an ideal marker of training status. It can be measured reliably, appears to correlate with training status, can be performed as part of a warm up before workouts and should be relatively unaffected by outside factors. Besides, if it was a proven strategy everybody would use it and the potential for gaining an advantage would disappear.