I did 10 weeks of HRV training: Here’s what happened
I followed Dr. Leah Lagos’s protocol doing 20 minutes twice a day of heart resonance breathing and tracked my data. The goal is to improve recovery, stress, and cognition. What if you could permanently raise your baseline state of consciousness? Not just short-term hype from Wimhof or Tony Robbins-type breathing, but if you could recondition your heart and your vagus nerve to think, perform, and sleep better. Well, we’ll find out.
What HRV is and whether it’s actually useful
The problem is that life is stressful. We’ve all heard about HRV and managing your recovery score. But how useful is that in practice? What gets measured gets managed. But are we also just cultivating unnecessary neuroticism to give ourselves an illusion of control?
Why I was in a bad state
I left my job as a medical doctor last year and tried to establish a new routine. I royally messed it up. I went straight from a structured routine into manic catch-up mode, trying to do all of the tasks and projects I was excited about all at once.
My baseline heart rate was around 100. I was sleeping badly. I treated my new freedom like a dare, squeezing every morsel of time into my calendar until it was about to burst.
Over the year, Propane went from just me and Johnny to a team of 18 people. As a result, I ended up living in a very unnatural way: lots of time at home, low step count, low sunlight, training suffering. It was clearly showing on my face, even in comments on ads, people going, “Bro looks exhausted.” Something had to change.
What HRV actually measures
Heart rate variability: your heart naturally speeds up and slows down because of pressure changes in your chest when you breathe in and out. It’s that variation we’re looking to maximize. The size of that variation is a measure of your heart health, specifically how responsive your heart is to autonomic impulses. It’s a good correlate for cardiac health outcomes and heart attack risk.
What affects HRV: your stress, your breathing patterns, and your emotional state. It’s also an okay correlate for training stress. I say okay because it has to be correlated with other signs of overreaching to be clinically useful.
HRV is a lag indicator: the fatigue has already accumulated by the time it shows. To get a 360 view of recovery, look at the previous week as a whole, including:
- Is your technique feeling in the groove at the gym?
- Are you frequently getting colds and illnesses?
- What’s your training performance like?
- How’s your mood and sleep?
- Training volume, calorie intake, and current stressors
Can you actually influence HRV?
Yes, either by changing the machine inputs or tuning up the machine itself. The inputs are things like your emotional state, diet, training, stress, and environment. If you want to tune up the machine, you can either do that through the heart (getting fitter) or through the vagus nerve, which is the doorway to the parasympathetic nervous system.
The great thing is that it’s trainable. Your baseline baroreceptor reflex can be trained through breathing and emotional processing practices.
What resonance breathing actually is
This is high-performance training for your heart rate variability. It’s a specific breathing and vagus nerve tune-up protocol to improve HRV and therefore your cognition, performance, and sleep. Breathing is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that has its own manual override function.
Resonance breathing is designed to re-groove a new baseline state. It tips you from sympathetic over to parasympathetic. The goal is to breathe at a frequency that maximizes your HRV: your resonance frequency. It’s like pushing a child on a swing at the right frequency to maximize the amplitude of those swings. That has been shown to raise the baseline activity of your baroreceptors and shift you into a more parasympathetic-dominant state.
What the research claims it can do
An improved stress response because you’re training an internal, system-wide stress-releasing reflex to kick in without conscious activation. You’re not stopping to do box breathing in the moment; you’re naturally at a calmer baseline.
High heart rate variability is associated with smooth, efficient prefrontal cortex activity. By improving HRV, you can improve your prefrontal lobe activity and therefore your ability to self-regulate emotions, inhibit negative thoughts, make better decisions, and remember what you learn.
You can expect better empathy and connection with other people, because those circuits come back online. When you’re stressed, you become more blinkered and it’s harder to see from someone else’s perspective. It makes you worse at relationships, negotiation, and empathy. Getting out of stress mode opens your peripheral vision and lets you connect more deeply.
What I actually did
I identified my personal resonance frequency using the Udemu app and a chest strap. The app guides you to vary your breathing speed and measures at which point HRV is highest. Mine is 5.45 breaths per minute. I then did resonance breathing with the Elite HRV app for 20 minutes twice a day for 9 weeks.
She specifically says in the book that you’re not allowed to meditate. You have to just sit and do the breathing, which I actually found quite tough to do because it’s just hella boring.
Results: Nothing changed on paper
Short answer: my heart rate variability didn’t really change. Why didn’t it work?
I was resenting the practice. I also have a low VO2 max, which is the lowest-hanging fruit for me. I’m basically out of shape. I was majoring in the minors by doing the breathing stuff without tuning up the instrument itself. I didn’t want to make two changes at once so I could know what did what. I suspect that’s why it didn’t move the needle. I already breathe well, and it was a stressful couple of months: maybe it was just buffering existing stress.
Subjective changes I felt
Subjectively, I did feel different. By week six, I started to find that I was thinking more clearly. I had a better attitude. I was a little more able to communicate. It’s subtle things, and maybe I was imagining it, but that was along the timeline she describes in the book. I felt like there was a bit more space created around stressful events.
There isn’t really much to note in terms of trends or a difference between general starting HRV and towards the end over the testing period.
Sleep score, recovery, deep sleep, and average resting heart rate were all relatively static. No visual trends. My resting heart rate actually went up between December and March.
The bigger point: why you’re probably tracking wrong
There is absolutely enough evidence for this stuff such that my personal experience doesn’t really prove or disprove anything. But it didn’t improve my HRV.
Be very deliberate about why you’re tracking. We already know what works, so only do it if it motivates you and changes your behavior. Otherwise, it’s just extra noise to worry about.
We know that lifting three to four times a week, getting eight hours of sleep, having time to rest, meditating, going outside: these things improve health outcomes and make us happier and more productive. We don’t need a device to tell us that. In my opinion, it’s another thing that takes up your mental bandwidth. What’s better is developing your own intuitive sense of “am I stressed, did I sleep well?” You usually know this subjectively.
The data optimization trap
Tracking devices are trying to track more and more variables because more is better somehow. You’ve got to ask yourself: what’s the point in measuring your cortisol? If you know you’re stressed, you need to develop the interoceptive sense to say “I think I need to take a rest now,” rather than relying on a number influenced by more factors than simply stress.
Do you want higher testosterone and growth hormone, or do you want more muscle and less fat? We’re not interested in jimmying the numbers. We’re interested in the ultimate result. Reset your focus towards that and you’ll get more benefits without raising your cortisol by worrying about your cortisol.
How to actually improve your HRV
HRV optimization overlaps with health and stress optimization. You can’t have a bunch of unhealthy habits and expect to have great HRV. After that, it’s about tuning up the machine and improving the inputs.
The big one, the one I didn’t do for the sake of science, is improving your VO2 max. It’s the most reliable way. Then there are things you can do to improve vagal tone: breathing, meditation, yoga.
Then the inputs to address:
- Sleep
- Training stress: manage training volume, plan for fatigue, account for travel and work stress
- Stop poisoning yourself: alcohol is a big one that damages HRV; minimize BPA exposure from tinned foods and microwaving plastic
And if you want the low-effort hacks:
- Goggling (this reliably improves my HRV)
- Chewing gum
- Potentially useful supplements: inositol, vitamin D, theanine, rhodiola, ashwagandha
What’s next
What’s next for me is improving my VO2 max. It’s the boring basics that nobody wants to do, including me. But that’s the big needle mover.