Matteo Campagna
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Heart rate variability tells you whether the training load is right

1 study

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Nobody has studied it in archers, and the registry's only source, a 2013 narrative review of elite endurance athletes, gives a two-sided answer. In the studies it gathers, both rises and falls in heart rate variability have been linked to poor adaptation to the training load, and in very well-trained athletes variability can drop just as resting heart rate falls with fitness: the same movement in the number lends itself to two opposite readings, so much so that the authors saw no practical way yet of using it with top athletes. Their proposal is to read it as an average over several days, with indices chosen to get round that saturation and against the profile the same athlete builds up over time, and with a few Olympic and world champion athletes they show that, read in this way, it tracks fitness and freshness before a major event. So a single morning's value does not, on its own, say whether the load is right, while the trend over several days did help to follow training status in those athletes. These are case examples within a review of endurance sports, and it remains to be seen whether they hold for archery, which asks far less of the heart.

Also phrased as: "hrv and training load"; "morning hrv tells you how hard to train"; "low hrv means too much load"; "monitoring recovery with hrv"; "heart rate variability and overtraining"

In practice

With rings and watches measuring it every night, it is said that morning heart rate variability shows whether it is a day to push the load or to recover.

Evidence

  • 2013
    Against Other sport Published later

    Narrative review of heart rate variability monitoring in elite endurance athletes. In the few studies of top athletes that the authors gather, both rises and falls in variability have been linked to poor adaptation to training, and signs of positive adaptation, such as better cardiorespiratory fitness, have appeared alongside a fall; in very well-trained athletes variability can drop even as resting heart rate drops, a saturation that complicates the reading. For this reason, they write, a practical way of using it to follow training status in top athletes had yet to be established. It gives no figures of its own that can be cited here, and it does not concern archers.

    Training Adaptation and Heart Rate Variability in Elite Endurance Athletes: Opening the Door to Effective Monitoring · Daniel J. Plews, Paul B. Laursen, Jamie Stanley, Andrew E. Kilding, Martin Buchheit

  • 2013
    For Other sport Published later

    The constructive part of the same review: averages over several days, specific indices that get round saturation, and long-term monitoring that builds each athlete's profile. With examples from Olympic and world champion athletes, the authors show how, read in this way, rises in variability follow gains in fitness and falls follow changes in freshness in the period before a major event. These are case examples within a narrative review, not a test.

    Training Adaptation and Heart Rate Variability in Elite Endurance Athletes: Opening the Door to Effective Monitoring · Daniel J. Plews, Paul B. Laursen, Jamie Stanley, Andrew E. Kilding, Martin Buchheit

Status history

  1. 2013 Transferred The first relevant source arrives, a narrative review of elite endurance athletes, and its answer is two-sided. Both rises and falls in heart rate variability have been linked to poor adaptation, and in very well-trained athletes variability can fall while resting heart rate drops, so a single value is ambiguous. Read as an average over several days, with specific indices and against the individual profile, it does track fitness and freshness in the examples of Olympic and world champion athletes that the authors report. There is nothing on archers, and the claim rests, on those conditions, on another sport: transferred.

Related

Related articles

Research lines

Where there are no studies on archers, every decision starts from a written hypothesis and is checked against the data over time.

See the programme
Cite
APA

Campagna, M. (2026). Heart rate variability tells you whether the training load is right (Version 2). In Evidence Registry. Retrieved 16 October 2026, from https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/physical-training/heart-rate-variability-training-load

BibTeX
@misc{campagna2026_hrvcaricoallenamento,
  author = {Campagna, Matteo},
  title = {Heart rate variability tells you whether the training load is right},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Evidence Registry, matteocampagna.com},
  url = {https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/physical-training/heart-rate-variability-training-load},
  note = {Version 2; accessed 2026-10-16}
}

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