CrossFit Health Tip - Using HRV to guide training during pregnancy with Lindsey Mathews, DC PH254

Pursuing Health

Julie Foucher MD, MS

Health & Fitness

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2022

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Heart rate variability (HRV), or the variance in time between the beats of your heart, can provide insight into how your body is responding to the many different stressors in life. This is a valuable tool to help guide women’s training through pregnancy and postpartum. When HRV is low, it opens up a conversation on what other life stressors are going on and indicates a need to reduce training load. When HRV is stable or trending upwards, pregnant and postpartum women can use it as an opportunity to push training a little bit harder within the parameters of what is safe for their pregnancy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, Family Physician and
0:09.0	former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which
0:13.2	was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!
0:15.9	I'm here today with Dr. Lindsay Matthews, the founder and CEO of BirthFit, and she has
0:24.0	been working with women through exercising through pregnancy and postpartum for a long
0:28.6	time, and more recently has been incorporating heart rate variability to help guide their
0:32.2	training. So first of all, can you just define for us what heart rate variability is?
0:36.7	Sure. We like to say heart rate variability is the range of motion of your nervous system.
0:41.7	I love that. Yeah, and your nervous system lets you know like if you're safe, where you
0:45.7	feel safe, what's going on, just kind of the driver of your whole body.
0:49.8	I love it. A matter of that load on your nervous system, where all the different stressors
0:53.2	of life on your nervous system. That's amazing.
0:56.1	So how would you use a marker like HRV to guide women through maybe preconception and
1:01.4	early pregnancy?
1:02.6	Absolutely. As we're talking about prior to this, there's little to no research on HRV
1:10.0	as you follow it through a woman's cycle, like a whole menstrual cycle. I think there's
1:14.0	one study and it's the menstrual cycle, four parts, so we don't know too much. But what
1:19.4	we do know, as Dr. Sean was saying, is when things are trending down, there's other
1:25.1	things happening, negative things, whether it's alcohol, stress, no sleep, you're fighting
1:29.8	off a cold illness, things like that. When things are trending up, it's a great time
1:34.1	to push yourself, go for those PRs, compete in something, crossfit games, anything. So
1:40.4	when trying to conceive in that conception window, that's, we're using those trends,
	...

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