How To Calculate Your Ideal HRV & 8 Ways To Get Closer To It

What if there was a way to know how prepared your body was to do a tough workout, solve a complex problem, or get through a long workday? Turns out, there is: your heart rate variability (HRV) is a real-time health report that's constantly at your disposal.

While it's tempting to compare your HRV to someone else's, the metric is highly personal and influenced by factors like genetics, age, and even pregnancy or menstruation status. Just because you have a "low" HRV compared to your friend doesn't necessarily mean you are in bad shape or overly stressed.

Your heart doesn't beat at a uniform clip; different amounts of time pass between consecutive heartbeats. Heart rate variability is a measurement of this time variation between heartbeats in milliseconds.

To understand why this nitty-gritty health metric is important, you need to know about the autonomic nervous system (ANS). If your HRV is an orchestra, your ANS is its conductor.

The ANS comprises your parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) and sympathetic (fight-or-flight) networks. These networks constantly send signals that dictate how your body uses resources. When you are fighting off a cold, for example, the sympathetic nervous system overrides the parasympathetic; it sends a loud and clear signal that now is not the time to relax.

The more attuned your HRV is to these signals, the higher it will be. If you have a high HRV, that means that the signals from the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems are well balanced, and your body is responding to them quickly. If your HRV is lower, that's a sign that one system is overriding the other (almost always the sympathetic1) and calling the shots.

"HRV can be an indicator that our bodies are under stress or responding to illness," says Aravind Natarajan, Ph.D., a physicist and staff research scientist at Fitbit.

Your HRV is bound to dip when you get sick, have a poor night of sleep, or finish a tough workout. But over time, you want your general HRV trends to be high. Having a consistently low HRV indicates that your body is under chronic stress, and it could put you at risk for heart attack and stroke2.

When used properly, HRV can be a valuable biofeedback metric that provides clues on how to deepen sleep, optimize athletic performance, improve mental health, and more.

The scientific community's interest in HRV has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and research studies on it have increased by 500% since 2000. An important finding from this research has been that some factors that influence HRV are out of our control, like genetics, age, and sex.

As you can see, HRV measurements decrease most rapidly between the ages of 20 and 40 and then even out. (Separate research has found that those who reach 100 years old tend to experience another rapid dip in HRV4, due mostly to a quick decrease in parasympathetic activity.) This chart also shows that men tend to have a higher HRV than females until the age of 50, after which there are no sex differences. Genetics also play a significant role in your HRV score, as shown by research on twins5. Conditions like cardiac arrhythmia can also affect HRV readings, as can hormonal changes due to menstruation6, pregnancy7, and menopause8.

For these reasons, there is no such thing as a universally "good" or "bad" HRV—it's personal. You could follow an identical health routine as someone else but still have wildly different readings.

"HRV is highly individualized, fluctuating daily and from person to person. What is considered a healthy heart rate variability differs for everyone," Poonam Desai, M.D., an integrative physician focusing on longevity medicine, tells mindbodygreen.

As the lines on the heart rate variability chart show, HRV tends to be higher in the morning than at night. This is because right when you wake up, your body will (hopefully) be fully recovered. As the day goes on, workouts and stressors will tax your nervous system and bring your score down.

This is why most experts recommend taking an HRV reading first thing in the morning (within five minutes of waking) to get a sense of your baseline.

Get in the habit of taking your reading at the same time every day to get a sense of trends over time. Changes in your weekly score can tell you how you're doing in the recovery department that week, while monthly changes give you an idea of how your overall fitness is trending.

The easiest way to take a reading at home is to use an HRV monitor like Fitbit, WHOOP, or Oura ring. These wearables estimate your HRV using pulse readings. While they aren't as accurate as an electrocardiogram (ECG) reading, they make it easy to track your HRV over time and monitor its changes from home.

It's best to wear them during sleep for a more accurate reading, but putting them on first thing in the morning works too.

If your HRV is lower than you'd like, there are plenty of ways to help your ANS recover and regain balance. But since your HRV is partially genetically influenced, you can only raise it so much.

Longevity medicine specialist Peter Attia, M.D., estimates on his podcast, The Drive, that it's reasonable to expect to raise your baseline by about 50%. So, if your average HRV is around 20, lifestyle changes could help you get it up to 30.

As for how long it typically takes to raise HRV scores, Natarajan notes that it depends what's causing your HRV to dip in the first place. "If you are sick, it can be as easy as waiting to recover. If your HRV was low because you had a late night of drinking, then the next night can be an opportunity to recover your HRV," he says. If your body isn't under an additional stressor, it could take a few weeks to work your way to a consistently increased score.

Heart rate variability is a valuable metric for those looking to optimize their recovery and perform at their best. Read: Pretty much all of us! We suggest checking your score each morning to get an idea of how you can show up for the day ahead in a way that works for your body. Since HRV is highly variable, it's best to keep track of how your own score changes over time rather than comparing it to other people's (and we kind of love this personal element of it).

That said, if checking your score is a source of anxiety or every dip causes you to worry, we suggest taking a break from HRV tracking or forgetting about it altogether. After all, if you're stressed about your HRV, it will just continue to bring your score in the wrong direction!