That’s exactly right. That’s what its useful for. Confirming much of what you probably already know. What’s cool (IMO) is that Athletica is doing this relatively seamlessly now in the background and if you’re wearing your watch, its as easy as checking your recovery profile to see how things are tracking. @Andrea has Athletica doing the analysis for you.
Compare that to when we started researching this topic and athletes had to wake in the morning, take 5 min of resting with a Polar heart strap, download the file to give it to the researcher or sport scientist for analysis like this below. Its fun to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.
I train very late during the week (like starting at 9 pm) so I usually don’t have the best sleep afterwards. HR is elevated most of the times. Morning HRV is a far better indicator for me, because there is the recovery phase of sleep between my training and the measurement.
Overall trends of night or morning measurements might point into the same direction. But being “forced” to use night time measurements via Garmin is not my preferred solution. Let alone the fact, that I need to remember to wear the watch… I wear mine only for workouts and not 24/7.
