What Is Heart Rate Variability (HRV)?

It's now becoming mainstream, with Aura rings, Woop devices, Garmin watches all tracking so many things - but what it is exactly?

HRV short for - Heart Rate Variability Is one measure of the health of our nervous system, and it measures the reserve or depth of our nervous system. 

Our nervous system is composed of two parts  - The central nervous system (CNS) - which is composed of our brain and spinal cord (which are protected by our spine), which house our autonomic system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic divisions. 

The other being the Peripheral nervous system (PNS) which peripheral nerves. 

The Autonomic system (think of the word automatic) handles many different bodily processes. Many of these processes are happening at this very moment without you and I even thinking about it! (Hence - automatic)

These include: my heart is beating and pumping creating a heart rate and a blood pressure, my lungs are moving and exchanging oxygen, creating a respiratory rate, my stomach, gallbladder, liver, and pancreas are all working to digest my earlier meal, and all other organ function is happening while I am not thinking about it. These are automatic processes that we don’t really think about until a symptom, a pain or a dysfunction pops up. 

Heart Rate Variability is going to give us inside clues as to what is happening in the autonomic system - allowing us to look deeper, beyond what we are just feeling. 

What we are looking for:

We are wanting high HRV - that shows good flexibility and adaptability in our system. We want our nervous system to be able to adapt to life circumstances and that begins with good tone in our system. 

Low HRV would indicate low reserves, low resiliency, and lower overall immunity.  

How do we measure:

Using CLA insight technology, we can measure using hand (for adult), finger sleeve for children, and earpiece for infants - this will measure as to where your nervous system is hovering. 

In the picture below, you can see a plotted white dot (which is where this person began care in) notice what we want to see is the green box that would show the nervous system is adapting well and good reserve. In the yellow would signify ‘OK’ reserve, orange would mean ‘Poor’ and dark red is ‘Very Poor’. As we do comparison scans (typically every 12th visit) what were seeing is that the plotted white dot is getting closer to the green box on each subsequent test. This show the nervous system is healing, responding better and we are improving HRV. These changes do not happen over night, they certainly did not happen over night. Healing takes time. And nervous system based chiropractic care is how we begin to heal the nervous system. 

Improved HRV can look like:

• Better digestion 

• Improved immunity 

• Sleeping better 

• Better energy 

• Better mood 

• Less aches and pains 

• More resiliency with day-to-day life 

• Moving beyond pain and into performance 

Testing HRV is just one new test we utilize in the office to take a deeper look into your nervous system. 

We hope to see you in office soon and to assess what your HRV is looking like.